As some of the folks I am more friendly with on Giant Bomb know, somewhere in the span of the next month I will be gone from the cyber-realm, and cast into a grueling life schedule, in the frigid Northern Maine area. This means no internet, no video games, and no Giant Bomb especially.
My heart grieves, but I am not a man without purpose!
So, over the next however-long-I-am-here, I am going to introduce you folks to some intermediate level play of Dwarf Fortress! I figure if I am going to go out, I am going to go out with a bang and a puff of smoke.
You can expect detailed recounts, screenshots, enthusiasm, depression, and the cutest goddamn tileset you've ever seen. You'll probably see a half dozen Dwarven Fortresses crumble, whether from general mismanagement on my part, being swallowed by a volcano, or any other manner of FUN in the world of Dwarf Fortress.
I'm by no means an expert of Dwarf Fortress, like many people I still find myself struggling with the military system, but I think outside of that, we can all have a pretty good time. In order to generate some hype, I will leave you with a screenshot and some accompanying explanation of what is happening, and you can expect a full, new Fortress to be started and reported on later this evening.
This is my current fortress, which is in desperate need of some FUN, or otherwise abandonment. More on that in a bit. Let's cover these helpful depictions first!
1: This is the front gate of my Dwarven Fortress. You can see I built walls extending outwards from the side of the mountain, and placed a door that can be locked in case of siege from enemies. This necessitates that I place my Trade Depot outside of the Fortress, which is risky, but preferable to being molested for the first couple years of your Fortress. The bits of the wall that are red are because a cougar descended the mountain earlier, and my Ranger Dwarf decided it was time to play Robin Hood. So... those are walls coated in Mountain Lion blood.
Welcome to Dwarf Fortress.
2: This is my underground farm, this is basically the backbone of my entire civilization. If not for this mushroom farm, my entire population of 60 dwarfs would probably begin to starve to death and kill each other after they lost their minds. This and my brewery are the two most important areas of the entire fort. Dwarfs need only food and booze to survive, although they appreciate a good many other things, they're unnecessary in the strictest sense of survival. Nearby you'll see a red X with a blue number 7 behind it, allow me to explain that, because it's neat.
That Red X is a floodgate, operated by an offscreen lever. That blue 7 is a tile of water, with 7 tiles of water in it. Anything over 4 will drawn a dwarf. You can imagine a 7 tile of water as a 5ft x 5ft x 5ft area of water. There are no underground lakes or streams in my area, this is actually an aquifer. What that is is a level of soil that has some fort of groundwater, that is an unlimited supply of trickling water.
Anyway, when you pull that level, the water spills out and begins to fill the room. Since Aquifers have no real water pressure under normal circumstances, I was able to use this to slowly flood the room just enough so I could then close the floodgate, and leave only enough water to quickly evaporate and leave behind muddy soil - perfect for growing Plump Helmet mushrooms. Farm Get!
3. This is my Dwarven Dormitory. If each of your dwarfs have their own bedroom, they're as happy as anything. In theory, I could just make rooms 2 wide and long tall, but that looks like prison cells. I prefer this fallopian tube style style, since it is both space efficient and attractive. You'll notice some of the rooms are without doors, this is simply because my Mason Dwarf decided he wanted to make the most amazing piece of stoneworking known to man, except he didn't have the necessary ingredients. He eventually went mad with need to make this thing, and tried to kill one of my other dwarfs, when my Hammerer (think of this as the capital punishment dwarf) decided enough was enough, and smacked him in the head with a large mallet.
I am still without a mason, since I never got around to assigning another.
4. This is the pride and joy of this Fortress, and one of the neater things I have ever made in Dwarf Fortress. Basically, if you remember what I said about Aquifers, that is what is happening towards the top of the image, with all of those blue 7's. This is water that is slowly trickling out, and filling this long corridor. Water will always try to be equal across all tiles, so eventually it all becomes those blue 7 water tiles, and becomes highly pressurized. That's where that floodgate comes into play. When I pull a level, both the front door and the door to the inner sanctum of my Fort lock, and that first room begins to flood rapidly. Any invaders inside are either drown, or in case of larger enemies, barely have their heads above water. Then I pull another level that opens a trapdoor in the middle (You can see it if you look closely between the two yellow dwarfs in the middle) and all of that water rushes to get to the series of colossal chambers I dug out below. Anything stuck in that large water room at that time is pulled down with the generated current, and either is already dead or lies down there, with broken bones and crushed organs, among other decayed corpses of past enemies.
Then I just pull those two levers again, seal the bottom hatch (which would otherwise allow Miasma, which is basically fumes from rotting meat and the ilk, from coming up), and close that floodgate again, and the trap slowly re-primes itself. The doors are unlocked again automatically when I seal that floodgate.
Basically, it is really fucking cool, and I am way proud of it. The only real issue with it is that since it is only an Aquifer, it can take upwards of a real life hour for it to re-prime itself fully, and that could mean having to seal my fortress off for a long, extended time. I wish I had had a river nearby, which would have made this amazingly fast and easy, but in Dwarf Fortress, you rarely get what you would like. It's pretty common knowledge that in Dwarf Fortress, you always lose, eventually.
5. This is just a stockroom. All of those barrels you see are full of food or booze, or seeds. There's not much else to it.
I hope some people enjoy this series of swan song's, and I'll update you folks more this evening.
My name is Endog.... Mmmslash.
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