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40d:Spirit of fire
(If looking for "river spirits", an alcoholic drink, see alcohol)
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This article contains massive spoilers. If you do not wish to have your game experience spoiled, do not scroll down! |
Spirits of Fire are one of the possible creatures that will attack your dwarves if you discover glowing pits in Fortress Mode.
These creatures are the greatest of the three lesser demons. They will burn or boil everything that they come in contact with except adamantine, and throw giant fireballs at dwarves. Spirits of fire cannot feel pain or bleed to death, and like all demons they are immune to traps. Their one weakness is that their limbs sever instead of breaking. Spirits of Fire are immune to fire, so magma traps won't save your Fortress. Drowning chambers are completely ineffective due to the spirits' innate heat boiling water away from several tiles away. Moats remain effective despite the spirits' ability to fly due to pathfinding quirks. When they die, they leave a pile of ash behind, that can be used to make lye or potash.
Spirits will rapidly move toward any dorf they can reach, and chances are that the dorf that opens a glowing pit will never live to wall it back up again. (Unless you've sought it on purpose knowing what to expect, the odds are, none of your dorfs...) A partially completed wall will be destroyed with the message "Wall toppled by Spirit of Fire", but this is a misdirection - a completed wall, fortification or other construction is the only thing that can stop the Spirits from spreading out and rapidly destroying the fortress. So surviving with the Spirits involves first avoiding the lowermost levels until adamantine is spotted, then carefully locating the veins and tracing their pattern to its center to locate the chamber, then using a disposable dorf to wall himself up and dig down into the chamber. Note that a downward stairway is an open invitation to entry for any Spirit in any adjacent square, even if there is solid rock beneath the downward stairway. After the first dorf is dead, the battle can begin in earnest by using some "picador" to breach the chamber from a large chamber you've prepared lined with fortifications and archers and partially filled with water (about 2/7) with an up-ramp to a place with a diagonal passage so that a wall can be built without ambiguity about which side the dorf will be left standing on. You can choose either a picador skilled in mining and masonry to have some versatility and possibly survive one round of attack while the archers open fire, or else use one you won't miss. The Spirits rarely (if ever) manage to get an attack through a row of fortifications no matter how close they are to them, and once revealed they make easy prey for archers.
Combat is complicated by the problem that the Spirits are ambushers that cannot be attacked until they attack a dwarf or animal (directly or by fireball). The spirits can effectively be detected by partially flooding a chamber and watching where steam rises. Only some sacrifice can reveal them, such as pets or other animals (cats work nicely). Animals can be placed in cages which the Spirits may break on occasion, but it is just as likely that they will die from the heat without revealing the creature. Babies that crawl out through fortifications when their mothers conscientiously by dorfen custom bring them to the firing line work particularly well, since the Spirits seem to show surprisingly little interest in claiming them for the underworld but will pause to cripple them with desultory attacks while following some other dorf you'd prefer to keep.
Once the Spirits have thinned out enough so that you can enter the glowing pit it is important not to confuse them with an even more fearsome enemy, lumps of glowing charcoal. Dorfs that will abort any job to avoid shallow water won't hesitate to stride across these insidious enemies, and as soon as one burns its little finger it will cancel whatever job brought it there and stand on the spot moaning until its masterwork armor is burning atop a pile of its bones. Spirits of fire catch the charcoal on fire as they move toward your dorfs, so it's important to forbid everything that ends up in the pit (and the mommy of the baby above will still run in if allowed to find her infant on the pile, on duty or not). The charcoal can be put out with water, but you don't want the water to reach the precious magma you're claiming for your reward. If left alone it actually will burn out by itself eventually (to ashes), after first going through an X!!charcoal!!X and XX!!charcoal!!XX stage, but don't hold your breath.