Whipclutch - 312 Early Spring by Phlamethrower

Map Description:

Progress has been slow the last couple of years, mainly due to the game crawling along at ~6fps while the tower-cap farm was irrigated, and the dwarves spending a lot of time hauling stone to be dumped.

However the good news is that the throne room and king's quarters are now complete (except I'm still waiting for the king to turn up), and the entrance pit/magma shower is now in full working order.

Point of Interest: Completed magma shower

( 312 Early Spring → onwards )

As I suspected, the magma does splash around a bit when poured from the hatches in the ceiling. Because of this I've redesigned the area a bit to contain more floor bars. There's also an iron bridge (built ontop of the floor) which can be raised and lowered to get rid of any magma that falls to the right of the hatches. The intention is that shortly after the shower has been used the path can be made clear again to allow trade caravans (or the next wave of invaders) to enter.

At the moment the only bit that may remain covered in magma will be the pressure plates. Each pressure plate is made with bauxite mechanisms and operates the appropriate ceiling hatch. (The 6th hatch, which sticks out from the rest, is a manual drainage hatch that was used to test the system, and to drain it for maintenance - i.e. connecting up the other hatches).

After finishing construction of the shower I now have no bauxite mechanisms left, and since the last dwarven caravan was turned away by the undead camels it could be some time until I get a new supply. - Phlamethrower

There are 11 comments for this map series, last post 2008-11-20

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Comments

Submitted by: sneakeypete - 2008-10-26 to 302 Early Spring

tips: for the magma, there might be a pipe as well as the pool you've got. Unless you had the icons on the embark map visible.

For the river: Zoom to corpses.

Submitted by: Phlamethrower - 2008-10-29 to 304 Early Spring

Yeah, I think the pool isn't in the original area that the site finder found for me (I searched for the features I wanted, then made the map a bit bigger to encompass some more interesting terrain). So there should be a magma pipe hidden around somewhere.

As to finding the river, none of the bones or corpses from the dead animals ever showed up in the stocks screen, so I haven't been able to find it that way. It looks like all the named creatures are in the bottomless pit, so it may simply be that all the corpses have fallen into the pit and been destroyed.

In any case I should soon have the main mine shaft sorted out, so I'll be able to start doing some exploratory mining to look for the missing features.

However... I have just used the stocks screen to locate a load of hidden cave spider webs. Guess I'll be starting off by sending my miners in that direction.

[Message edited on 2008/10/29 at 07:09 by Phlamethrower]

Submitted by: sneakeypete - 2008-11-01 to 306 Early Spring

The cave river will (magically) spawn, go about its business and then fall off into its own mini chasm in the entire space of your map. It doesn't enter via the side.

Submitted by: Phlamethrower - 2008-11-02 to 306 Early Spring

Bah!

Oh well, good job I'm not looking around the edge of the map anymore :)

Submitted by: sneakeypete - 2008-11-04 to 308 Early Spring

What sort of FPS/computer specs do you have so that you can play this to year 7 without going insane?

Submitted by: Phlamethrower - 2008-11-04 to 308 Early Spring

I'm getting about 18FPS at the moment - although it did worryingly drop down to 6-7 when the cave river was being diverted. For reference, I was getting about 50FPS when I started the fort.

I'm playing on a quad-core Intel Q9450 @ 2.66GHz, with 2GB of RAM. I wasn't exactly intending to use this computer just to play dwarf fortress, but it seems to work quite well. Of course 18FPS is still a bit slow, which is why I've started playing two forts at once (yay! quad-core).

You may have spotted that the yearly Blockaderhyiming updates come at around the same time as the bi-yearly Whipclutch updates - so you can guess how much slower Blockaderhyming is running, despite being a much smaller map. Between the two of them there's usually something that needs attending to at any point in time, so I haven't been stricken by melancholy just yet.

Submitted by: Dakira - 2008-11-05 to 308 Early Spring

I like that your fortress is divided by the chasm, any plans to let the dwarves actually see out into it with windows?

Submitted by: Phlamethrower - 2008-11-05 to 308 Early Spring

Yeah, at some point I think I'll be adding windows to the bedrooms. It's just a shame I didn't put any of the nobles quarters along the chasm edge so they could have windows too. I could always move them onto another floor, but I like how everything is layed out on one layer in this fort.

Submitted by: Drone - 2008-11-17 to 312 Early Spring

I love it how you are worried about the demons being slaughtered by camels :v

Submitted by: Phlamethrower - 2008-11-17 to 312 Early Spring

Seriously! You don't know what these camels are like.
The king and a load of migrants arrived, so I sent out my entire military to take care of a herd of camels that were loitering with intent near the fort entrance. Some of the dwarves, obviously under some kind of camel-based spell, wandered the wilderness aimlessly, completely oblivious to the two champion marksdwarves that were being pummeled into the ground by the herd of camels. (The champions, although they managed to find the herd of camels, were obviously under some kind of spell as well since they only seemed to have brought one crossbow bolt between them both)
Eventually help arrived and the hell-camels were destroyed, but it was too late for the two champions.
Now I've got one marksdwarf in jail after he tantrumed and destroyed a cage trap, and another marksdwarf splattered across the dining room floor after he went berserk and tore the lungs out of a war dog.
The camels, man... they're the ones that should be trapped at the bottom of this mountain!

Submitted by: Charrat - 2008-11-20 to 310 Early Spring

Building bedrooms with windows facing into the chasm is a fantastic idea!

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