40d:Stupid dwarf trick

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A stupid dwarf trick is any project that that requires a large amount time and effort, for little or no practical benefit. They exist only as a challenge for experienced players.

Monumental Statue

Difficulty: Depends on how big you want the statue to be. If you are feeling really masochistic, cast it out of obsidian using magma and water.

Usefulness: None.

Artificial Waterfall

To keep the waterfall going, you need a pump stack, preferably powered by a windmill or water wheel.

Difficulty: Moderate.

Usefulness: Dwarves love waterfalls. Putting a waterfall in your meeting hall will give your dwarves good thoughts, although it can significantly lower framerate.

Execution Tower

Just a tall tower to chuck your captives to their deaths.

Difficulty: Easy.

Usefulness: Lets you dispose of prisoners, and claim expensive silk, meltable iron, and (eventually) useful bones. Also highly amusing.

Bridge-a-pult

A bridge that opens outwards, to fling enemies away. Ideally, they land in a very nasty place.

Difficulty: The hard part is the nasty place they get flung to.

Usefulness: There are a far more effective ways to defend a fortress, but few are as entertaining.

Dam

Build a wall across a riverbed to stop the flow of water. Floodgates optional.

Difficulty: On a map that freezes in the winter, this is easy. Otherwise, very difficult. (See Moses effect, below, or simply drop ridiculous amounts of stone in with orchestrated cave-ins.)

Usefulness: Dubious.

Tower-cap Farm

You absolutely need to break into an underground river or lake. Make some muddy floors over a big area and wait.

Difficulty: Moderate.

Usefulness: Yes, if it's big enough.

Magma Pumping

It's a lot like pumping water, only more dangerous, and requires the pumps to use magma-proof pipes and screws in their construction.

Difficulty: The difficult part is making all those iron or steel pumps and bauxite floodgates. Very high risk.

Usefulness: Magma is fun, but impractical.

Booze Bomb

If you set barrels of booze on fire they explode. The resulting explosion isn't fire, but steam. Can possibly be used as a complex trap. About the only way to start a fire on demand is magma. Possibly caged fire imps, magma men, or fire snakes.

Difficulty: High.

Usefulness: There are many easier ways to kill goblins, but so very few that also set them on fire. This has numerous beneficial effects, including the annihilation of any non-metal items the goblins are carrying, although this can lead to the destruction of significant monetary sums in narrow giant cave spider silk clothes.

Greenhouse

A greenhouse is just a farm with the the ceiling channeled out from above. This lets you grow outdoor plants without venturing above ground. For the maximum style, build a glass roof to keep your farmers safe.

Difficulty: Low.

Usefulness: Surface plants are not so much more useful than underground crops. Rope reed can be grown year round.

Gladiator Arena

Station some soldiers at the bottom of a shallow pit and dump your captives in. You can also use dangerous animals instead of soldiers.

Difficulty: Moderate, but time consuming. Some danger depending on the relative skill of your soldiers and the danger of the captive.

Usefulness: The most difficult way to dispose of prisoners. It does give your soldiers a little bit of experience.

Self Destruct Lever

A mechanism that, for example, could flood your fort with magma, or release a trapped megabeast. For bonus points, build the whole fort on a single support.

Difficulty: Very high. Extremely dangerous.

Usefulness: None. By definition.

Flood the World

Difficulty: High danger. Will kill your frame rate.

Usefulness: Will prevent any sieges, at least. Or anything else, save for the occasional invasion of sociopathic Carp.

Ballista Battery

Overlap a few ballistas to completely cover a narrow corridor. There is an unavoidable risk of your operators wandering into the line of fire.

Difficulty: Low. If you insist on highly-trained operators with high-quality ballistas, it gets harder.

Usefulness: A complicated and dangerous way to defend a single corridor. Ultimately extremely effective. Sometimes.

Swimming pool

It's a reservoir that fills to 4/7 exactly. Station soldiers inside, lock them in, and fill. This way they gain swimming skill.

Difficulty: Low. It's just a pair of reservoirs.

Usefulness: The swimming skill is only slightly useful. This is most useful if the entrance to your fort has narrow walkways/moats surrounded by water, and you station your soldiers there.

Ice tower

Building a huge tower is easy. To make things more fun, make one out of some exotic material, like glass, ice, gold, or soap.

Difficulty: Low. You need to be on a freezing map to pull off an ice tower.

Usefulness: None.

Obsidian factory

You need one reservoir of water, and one of magma. Mix, cool and mine.

Difficulty: Medium.

Usefulness: High.

Drowning Chamber

Difficulty: Moderate.

Usefulness: You can kill prisoners, useless peasants, irate nobles, hammerers, untrainable animals, or anything else.

Magma Chamber

Difficulty: Dangerous as any magma project.

Usefulness: It's like a drowning chamber, but you can't recover most of the victim's stuff.

Labyrinth

A maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Traps and dangerous animals are essential. You can have a retracting bridge drop invaders in, or just have a labyrinth as a back door.

Difficulty: It's a lot of mining. Having a bridge drop invaders inside is more difficult, but more useful.

Usefulness: It makes a nice element of fortress defense, and you can dump your prisoners inside it.

Adventure Mode Fortress

Build a fortress specifically for exploring in adventure mode. You can either make a nasty monster-filled challenge, or a smorgasborg of masterpiece steel weapons and armor. Possibly both. A chasm, underground river, or hidden fun stuff can ensure the fortress is occupied.

Difficulty: The sky's the limit.

Usefulness: Not applicable.

Vomitorium

Prevents cave adaption. It's like the greenhouse, only instead of a farm, it's meeting hall or barracks. Since you can't build tables or beds outside, build the room and channel down to it, or build a bridge or two over the top.

Difficulty: Low.

Usefulness: Low. Can be a problem when goblin archers get involved.

Pit o' Doom

Combine with an Execution Tower for maximum z-level executions! Spike traps are a must.

Difficulty: Low. You want it nice and deep though.

Usefulness: Dispose of prisoners, execute nobles, gruesome fatal injuries, laugh maniacally.

Underground Perpetual Motion Power Plant

Combine with a use for the power and you either have an awesome setup, or a ticking time bomb.

Difficulty: High. Maintaining the correct water level is annoying difficult at times.

Usefulness: Depends on size of plant and what it's connected to. Also useful as a puzzle for adventurers.

Dwarfputer Complex

A big mess of fluid and/or machine logic full of hatches, floodgates, gears, pumps, etc. and powered by waterwheels, windmills, or useless idle dwarves. Hook it up to doors, bridges, and traps.

Difficulty: Medium to high, depending on what you want to build. You'll want to build for very high water flow if you have more than a few fluid gates.

Usefulness: Your mechanics and architects will level up very fast. Manual pumps give something for your haulers to do and makes them stronger. Try and make a clock to trigger different mechanisms in different seasons. See if enemies actually blunder into your intricate traps. Watch all hell break loose as water freezes.

Alarm Clock

Are your soldiers all sound asleep while blood soaks the walls? No need to deconstruct their beds one by one, if you bought the Dwarf Wakey 3000! Simply a solitary floor tile balanced on a support, one or more can be toppled with the pull of a lever to produce an earth-shaking racket that'll have them leaping for their axes!

Difficulty: Low.

Usefulness: Low.

Hammer of Armok

A gigantic hammer made out of pure steel and/or valuables looming over your fortress entrance ready to smite those foolish enough to lay a siege on you. Also, gives you a psychological advantage over the traders who unload their goods under it. Attach to a lever-linked support for quicksmiting, or any other single-tile collapse mechanism. BONUS: Cover it with blood.

Difficulty: Low. Depends on size, materials and magma's existence, though. Make it a gold hammer menacing with adamantine spikes, if you're going for high quality.

Usefulness: Low-medium. 10x10 size is minimum for practical effectiveness. 30x30 hammer extending handles lenght from your entrance actually works against sieges.

Mega/Water Drowning Trap-Thing

This is basically a channel above some pressurised water with a short tunnel leading to a door. The door needs to be connected to a lever somwhere in a safe part of the fortress. Position the door facing the main stairs into your fortress (for multiple stairs use multiple traps). When enemies come down the stairs, pull the lever and make them drown. (It helps to seal off the rooms).

Difficulty: Medium. Needs flowing water under pressure and levers.

Usefulness: Medium. Depends on the size of your fortress/defences/amount of attackers. Works well with fire demons to create a sauna.

Glass Ceiling

Sick of having your dorfs vomit all the time when they go out to retrieve loot or lumber? Despair no more! Build an almost-infinitely tall tower, and then put a glass floor on the highest level, spanning the entire map. For extra kicks, make a mechanism that will crash the entire thing upon the heads of the one goblin horde that manages to get through all your other deathtraps.

Difficulty: Medium. Very grueling.

Usefulness: Low.

Magma Cannon

It can be done! It uses a row of pumps to pressurize the magma in a chamber with only one exit. When the floodgate opens, the magma flies out a short distance.

Difficulty: Very high. You need iron and bauxite screw pumps to make it work, plus a big above-ground construction.

Usefulness: Marginal. But very cool.

Moses Effect

With enough pumps, you can pull water out of a square faster than it flows in. This can create a reverse waterfall, or a dry spot in the middle of a flowing river. The effect is like Moses parting the Red Sea.

Difficulty: Surprisingly easy.

Usefulness: You can use this trick to create a waterfall or drowning chamber. It is also important if you want to pass through an Aquifer, although that is far more difficult.

Doberman Launcher

Whenever a dog or cat gives birth, stuff all the kittens and puppies in one cage in your entryway. Link this cage to a pressure plate beside it. Should your last lines of defense be breached, goblins will step on it and in the next instant be torn apart by dozens of goblin-seeking hostiles and distracted by dozens of surplus targets. The trap actually going off will probably be very bad for your framerate. Bonus: Train all dogs inside as wardogs when they mature. Super bonus: Make it a Bear Trap. MEGADWARF bonus: Combine with a drowning chamber and carp trap

Difficulty: Low.

Usefulness: Medium, potentially fortress-saving

Dwarven Apartment Complex

Essentially, one of the many possible mega constructions dedicated to providing dwarves with rooms so high above the ground they get vertigo. Every floor must have plenty of rooms of at least 2x3 squares, with walls and a door surrounding this. Oh, and it has to go up as many Z-levels as possible. For extra credit, decide on what the top storey will be (i.e. as many levels up as you deem possible, minus one so you can build a roof) and turn this into a Royal bedroom for a noble, complete with gem windows, artifact/masterwork components, and untold numbers of armour stands and weapon racks. And then build some shorter but wider apartment buildings nearby to turn your fortress into essentially a giant fist with extended middle finger.

Difficulty: Low, although the walls around the rooms can be a bit fiddly due to the impossibility of building walls on constructed floors (yes, an extra credit challenge is to do this without using Remove Construction).

Usefulness: Limited, because you could just dig the things underground and save yourself the hassle.

"I dinna say we wurren't crazy!"

Build a huge room with nothing in it except rock pillars, then dig channels on the levels above and below it until you have a ridiculously huge room ten Z-levels in height. Inspired by Irregular Webcomic.

Difficulty: Mainly in putting up with the incessant channelling, and avoiding dropping large chunks of ceiling onto the floor from five levels up.

Usefulness: Negative, due to the insane amounts of space it takes up.