User:Retro/Fortresses

Unfinished write-up of all my long-term DF forts. The older stuff is farther back. I really need to take screenshots or go dredge up some old ones but for now this'll do.

Undergrotto

-still pending-

The Castle Mightygrips

The most recent DFMA map is here.

My story-based community fort that I started in late December 2009, both to improve my writing skills as well as to give myself the occasional break from the rigorous amount of work I was doing on Undergrotto. I stopped updating it regularly in February to try and get Undergrotto done before the new version, but spent much of March/April busy with studies. I'm hoping to continue updating it in May when I stop having to write 3-4 essays a week.

The idea of a large castle - and not just a structure alone, but a castle keeping as historically accurate as I could to medieval Europe (anachronisms aside) was borne from an engineering-focused history class. I wanted large walls, parapets, a proper moat, hovels, a large keep, knights rather than soldiers, etc. etc. etc. I gave horses the [TRAINABLE] tag and had hoped to assign them to champion swordsdwarves but found out that by then it was too late. I'd done my best to prepare as medieval a feel as possible to the fort, making the military mostly sword-users (with the more religious dwarves wielding maces), gave almost everyone a custom job title more thematically apropriate, that sort of thing.

It took me almost two weeks to find the perfect site for Mightygrips. I wanted half the map to be flatland and the other half mountains (I like having one big flat z-level for the fort to be based in as well as many to work with height-wise), a bottomless pit with a giant cave spider, a magma pipe, and an underground river, all on an evil biome. I also tried out the Orc mod for the first time, having never focused on my military before. I'd hoped for lots of assaults from skeletal creatures, but all I really got was really, really slow zombie mountain goats. Also, the orcs brought a giant wolf spider each in their sieges, so sieges were particularly hard to deal with in contrast.

Did a lot of cool things with this, and it's definitely helped improve my writing thus far. I'm looking forwards to getting back into it, but I won't quite yet. One more month or so.

Spiralwaters

The DFMA map.

I only uploaded two levels of Spiralwaters, to highlight its namesake. This was my second fort after Diamondseizures and was geared primarily towards science; the 14 z-levels underground that I didn't bother to upload contained my research into a whole bunch of stuff - nothing revolutionary, but the usual things that DF players have to do for themselves the first time without wiki help, plus a bunch of trap-design stuff.

Diamondseizures

The DFMA map.

My very first fortress that I worked on from early June 2009 to probably late July or early August. It's easily the closest thing I've done to a 'normal' fort where there are lots of random side tunnels and whatnot, but I was a conservative and over-safe player from the start so I created a temp fort while starting my main one despite having never done a fort at all prior.

This fort taught me a whole damn lot, and is still both the best embark I've ever had (black sand (my favourite kind), amazing landscape with a plethora of resources including an undiscovered UG river I never knew about) as well as the best named fortress I've ever had. It was actually the first randomly generated name I ever did as well, and I've been using its dwarven translation of Dorenasol as my fake dwarven last name for that reason :P

The most interesting feature of the fort was the Goblin Run, an overly-elaborate gauntlet for my 150+ caged gobbo prisoners to toil through on their path to freedom. It's heavily outlines in the DFMA POIs. I never finished it because it required an obscene amount of lever-linking and pressure plate linking and blah blah blah, and as I was tying the hundreds of bridges and spike traps involved to three different repeaters, it was hard to tell which at all I was supposed to be linking in the first place. But I did once give it a try - here's how I described it back when I first used it, in one of the many Bay12 threads about how DF makes us into bad people:

"As many first fortresses do, my defense consisted largely of traps. In this case, I had set up lines of cage traps between archer towers, forming a lovely perimeter. This led to, over the years, about a hundred and sixty-odd goblins being kept in storage, including all the local leaders. Eventually I decided to do something with them. This led to the Goblin Games room.

Upon release, goblin POWs pathed as best they could towards the exit. This took them into a 5z level labyrinth, about 25xy wide. Rather than simply going up, it went up and down and all around a few times. Rather than simply running in a straight line, I channeled out holes covered by bridges and set up three different repeaters to attach them to. Pathfinding would not have a good day here.

The second room was a simply path over a magma pit. However, archers were stationed on both sides of the pit, starting from a good distance away and finishing within a tile from the running goblins. Avoiding the boltfire was close to impossible.

The goblins were then herded into the arena. At this point I would lock the exit door, and all the goblins who made it through would run into it, realize they couldn't escape, and stand around idly. After a fair few were through, I released the Giant Eagles. The elves brought me a breeding pair, you see.

The survivors, rare as they were, got to run through another bane-of-pathfinding room. Ten thin but long platforms were littered with spike traps, each platform being connected by three seperate bridges to the next. All the spikes and bridges were connected to different repeaters, forcing the goblins to take different paths and run over the suddenly-protruding spikes. Those who fell simply limped back under the platforms to the entrance of the room and tried it again.

Few made it through those four rooms. However, I did have some local leaders, and I like the number five, so I thought a fifth room would be nice. The one or two goblins that made it through the hell I laid out for them found themselves in a nice, tall, cone-shaped room. The wide circular base tapered as it continued 15z up, with a thin path following along the walls all the way to the exit. Upon escaping the cone, if they could contend with the single giant eagle waiting at the exit, the goblins would be free to go. However, to begin the ascent, they had to step on a pressure plate.

Next to the cone was a resevoir containing 3000 blocks of 7/7 water.

Think Wind Waker, just before the Helmaroc boss. The goblins ran from the water, which rose insanely fast, while an eagle persued them around the room. Even if the eagle didn't shred them apart, they were likely to drown.

I mentioned earlier that I didn't manage to complete this hell. The labyrinth, marksdwarf passage, arena, and flooding cone were all done except for the bridge room, since I tired of assigning spike traps and bridges to connect to the repeaters after the first ten or so. This didn't mean I didn't get to test it. It took the gobbos about five minutes for the first few to get out of the labyrinth, after which a surprising amount made it through the marksdwarf passage (they were just recruited peasants; I figured enough bolts would be in the air that it wouldn't matter), with one memorable gob falling off the pathway into the magma pit. The arena went pretty well with both giant eagles killing about eighteen goblins together before being ripped apart, and the few spike traps I had working actually managed to hurt some of the survivors. The last five goblins made it into the flooding cone (the pressure plate locks the door behind them, sealing the other survivors in the spike room), which I was the most excited about. As they ran/swam for their lives, the two slowest ones drowned, the eagle killed one and tossed another down into the center before drowning itself, and the fifth - a local leader Axelord who was Unbelievably Agile - actually made it out.

As he hobbled towards the exit, wounded and traumatized (some yellow wounds and a missing hand), I wondered what kind of life he would go back to in his home tower. He had been missing for nearly a decade. Would his family have moved? Died? What kind of life could a goblin lead bearing the guilt of being the sole survivor of such sadistic carnage? Surely the poor fellow would be traumatized for years to come. Only the sight of sweet, sweet edge-of-the-map freedom was keeping him going now.

As he got five squares away from the map's edge, I sicced the other ten giant eagles on him.

And that, my friends, is how Dwarf Fortress has made me a bad person."

It only got better from there.