Dwarf fortress

[ObadiahtheSlim]

I had magma pipe set as yes in the site finder, so there "should" be one there. but i suppose its possible to not have one... guess I'll just have to step up my wood chopping then.

Okay if it is a pipe (and not a pool) go down to the bottom layer. Then dig straight lines every 35 squares both horizontally and vertically. You are guaranteed to hit it since it takes most of a 48x48 embark square. Please note that you need to stop once you hit a warm tile. Back up about 15-20 squares and then go straight up. Keep trying to head back towards the warm tile until you hit the top of the pipe and open the chamber there. Otherwise you will likely loose your miner when you breach the magma pipe.

Pools are a lot trickier because they tend to only occupy 2-5 Z levels and can start on any Z-level.


Then again you can always save, use reveal.exe. Once you know where it is use task manager to end dwarf fortress. DO NOT SAVE! reveal.exe will prevent you from using magma facilities because you haven't "discovered" it yet. Once you've closed it through task manager, go up and breach the chamber like normal.

[Celesyne]

Hmmm..... I cant seem to get reveal to work, but I guess in the meantime I'll just finish my bottom level exploratory excavations.

[ObadiahtheSlim]

If you got vista then it is reveal2.exe. I had the same problem.

[Celesyne]

That did the trick, and the magma is on the other end of the map from the obsidian... oh well, long tunnel here we go. Fortunately it also showed me the HFS and I noted that my fort of 30ish dwarves where about to dig right into the bottom of it...... and now that order will be canceled double time...

[ObadiahtheSlim]

Yeah breaking the HFS before you are ready leads to FUN. Even if you are quick to stick a wall there, it will kill you FPS as it keeps trying to path into your fort.

[Celesyne]

I'm just hoping, for my first HFS thats its the easiest demons.... but knowing my luck and the way things tend to run... It will be full of spirits of fire.... and yet another of my fortressess will go up in literal flames.

[ObadiahtheSlim]

Huge row of upright spikes (made of steel so they can't melt) set to a lever on repeat can take out anything. And I do mean anything. Be it goblins, orcs, dragons, bronze colossi, nobles or pets.

[Celesyne]

that is part of my current plan, though iron for steel is something I haven't uncovered yet. A 3 wide path all the way to there with an expendable noble/miner ,whichever, covered in spikes hooked up to a lever on the otherside of some walls built to lock them in. and maybe some back-up ballistae, should the demon poo hit the dwarven fan.

[ObadiahtheSlim]

Make sure they have a path to you or they will just sit there and eat up your FPS as they keep trying to find a path and fail. Walling in the fun stuff isn't fun for your FPS.

[Ilena]

Ya ... my dwarves in my current fort havnt gone very far down at all, only a couple of z levels, im actually going up into my mountainside, i plan to have a magma pool spawn a magma lake :P I would make a magmafall but i havnt gotten any magma prove materials yet ... heres to hoping!

[TheSummoner]

Magmafalls aren't a good idea unless you can keep dwarves away... Watefalls bring happy thoughts, magmafalls bring death

[ObadiahtheSlim]

Magma falls are FUN!

[Artanis]

Magmafalls aren't a good idea unless you can keep dwarves away... Watefalls bring happy thoughts, magmafalls bring death

This only goes to show why magmafalls are a good idea

[TheSummoner]

I see you could care less about your dwarves... carry on then =P

[Celesyne]

Sudden Evil Ingenious Idea... can Ballista fire through fortifications?

[TheSummoner]

Yes, yes they can

[ObadiahtheSlim]

Just remember that they can see through fortifications and since they are nonmilitary they will run when they spot the enemy (9 or so squares away).


Also I'm getting a bit annoyed. I haven't had caravan in over a year. Well I take that back. I've had elves. Last year I didn't get humans or dwarves because of sieges. Sure the sieges didn't last long, but they were occurring when the caravans probably would've tried to get there.

Then this past summer I thought I would be okay when the human caravan showed up. However a siege started not long after they had entered the map and they left when a camel and 3 guards of theirs was killed. So all I got was the meat, fish and cheese that it was carrying. At least I got to speak with their liason though.

I hope the dwarf caravan gets here. I'm nearly out of silk and I need that for strange moods. Plus I need wood. I'm in a savanna that borders a desert. There aren't very many trees so chopping them for lye, beds, etc. means my dwarves have to cover a very large area outside and expose themselves to dangerous ambushes.

I think my next fort will have orcs modded in. Goblins are too boring. They aren't a threat unless they got an elite bow goblin with them. If they bring normal level bows, they can't hit my marksdwarves 3 levels up and behind fortifications. If they don't bring bows, it only takes one of my champion sword dwarves to cut them down. It is kinda annoying because they hack the goblins into 3-4 peices which means lots of stacks of 5 *goblin bone bolts* instead of the standard 30 *goblin bone bolts*

[Ilena]

Well of course i would have the magma safely enclosed behind glass .... of course i would .... :P

[Lord Herman]

Well of course i would have the magma safely enclosed behind glass .... of course i would .... :P

A magmaquarium! Awesome!

[TheSummoner]

Ooh catch a magmastingray and put him in there!

[Arachu]

I just got an IDEA!!!! :floatingpinksparkles:

++++++++++++++
+::::::::::::::::::+
+::::::::::::::::::+
+:::========:::+ + is glass wall
+:::========:::+ :: is magma
+:::========:::+ = is an obsidian floor
+:::========:::+
+:::========:::+
+:::========:::+
+::::::::::::::::::+
+::::::::::::::::::+
++++++++++++++

Capture some Imps and release them into the Room.

Make that, drop invaders onto it from above, and watch the Imps BURNTHEIRHERETICFLESH!!!

... Yeah.

I GOT BLISTERS ON ME FINGERS!!!

[TheSummoner]

Would be a nice little sadistic death trap...

So... just earlier today I was teaching a friend of mine how to play Dwarf Fortress. I wascovering all of the basics... Mining, chopping wood, building workshops and constructions, smoothing and engraving... So when I was going over engraving, I had the dwarves smooth 2 walls and engrave one of them...

Know what the first engraving my friend ever got to see was?

Go ahead... guess.

It'll be a fun game...

It was an engraving of a demon. Awesome ^_^.

Hes barely seen anything and he already loves it... come to think of it I left out farming and brewing lessons though...

[Dragonus45]

Can anyone explain to me how the reveal works, i wanted to give it a go and see if it made anything easier but i couldn't seem to work it.

[ObadiahtheSlim]

Basically how it works is that it looks for each 48x48 embark tile checks to see if there is something there except unmined stone/dirt or for a designation. If there is then it reveals that entire 48x48 embark tile and every 48x48 tile above it. Keep in mind this will prevent you from "discovering" underground features so the scripts associated with it will never happen. So that means you can't use magma buildings because you haven't discovered magma yet. It also means you won't get a tree cap farm. Also you won't get any Hidden Fun Stuff even if you breach the Fun Stuff's chamber.

[Celesyne]

Alas, the Fortress of Murderwire has gone under. The extreme delay in locating the magma stymied my smithing efforts and thus limited my armor choices, and in my zeal to find it I forgot to make bowmen and a mechanics shop for traps. And the thrice bedamned goblins hit me with 4 ambushes in the span of about 5 minutes.

[ObadiahtheSlim]

I'd go into your init finder and change the show magma and other underground locations to ALWAYS instead of FINDER. That way you know which 48x48 block to look for your magma in. Of course you could just always reclaim your current fort. That is always "fun"

[Zar Peter]

OK, thank you all for let me discover a brand new time consuming hobby

More if I learned what's actually going on here.
Just one question: In the better graphic mode my cuts four or five lines of the right of the window. I can't read for example the idlers or the elevation. I'm running the game with Vista. Did that happen to anyone of you, too, do you know any quick solutions or do I have to search the whole internets for a few weeks till I fix this? Thank you and happy digging!

[Lord Herman]

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress, Peter!

I think some of the settings in your init.txt file are wrong. You can find it in (dwarf fortress folder)/data/init/ - it's a text file with all your Dwarf Fortress settings. My guess is that the number of horizontal tiles is set too high, so not all the tiles will fit into the specified window size.

Strangely, my init file doesn't seem to have that line at all, so maybe removing the line will set it to some sort of default setting. In any case, it's a good idea to make a backup copy of your init file before fiddling with it.

[Zar Peter]

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress, Peter!

I think some of the settings in your init.txt file are wrong. You can find it in (dwarf fortress folder)/data/init/ - it's a text file with all your Dwarf Fortress settings. My guess is that the number of horizontal tiles is set too high, so not all the tiles will fit into the specified window size.

Strangely, my init file doesn't seem to have that line at all, so maybe removing the line will set it to some sort of default setting. In any case, it's a good idea to make a backup copy of your init file before fiddling with it.

That was it! Thank you very much!

[Lord Herman]

That was it! Thank you very much!

No problem.


In other news: I was happily building my impenetrable walled fortress, making housing areas for my dorfs. I decided to engrave the walls, so my dorfs would be happier. My engravers were already legendary from smoothing large parts of my fortress, so they were making masterpieces by the boatload.

Then capitalism struck. Apart from the privileged few bourgeois dorfs, everyone was evicted from their homes because they couldn't pay the rent of their masterfully engraved rooms. Now, all those housing areas are little more than art galleries, while the proletariat sleeps in the barracks.

It probably won't be long before some dorf called Urist McLenin throws a tantrum and kills all my nobles.