DF Part 2. The First Year!

Well to start it's only fair to warn you that the area I've set up in has been no where near as active as I was expecting. Where there are so many biomes joining I seem to mainly be getting visitors from the western grass lands who've mainly been fairly harmless herbivores. So spoiler alert nobody dies in the first year. Boo!

We arrived and set up towards the end of Spring.

Spring 1050!

We arrive and start digging out a entrance. Mining downwards and clearing trees and foliage around the entrance. Not a great deal happens and I keep a close (and so far unneeded) eye on the local fauna. At one point a giant leopard starts getting curious and Sarigs is put on stand by. He soon gets bored and migrates out of the land without trying his luck, though he's followed by a herd of giraffes and then some warthogs.

I stop paying attention to the wildlife and take notice again after one of one of the wardogs milling around the entrance brings down a Honeybadger that charge the entrance trying to get at that lovable scamp Werit (renamed from one of the original miners).

A fledgling butchering industry is set up to take advantage of the sudden boon and our larder swells.

Summer!

Summer is almost entirely uneventful.

8 Hopeful migrants arrive. 4 of them being competent in a smattering of skills and are put to work. One of the more useless ones at least has some basic fighting skills and is recruited to Sarigs' squad of militia although at this stage I'm not bothering to equip and train them till the basics are in place.

Another one, Eral Workedmob, arrives with some basic cross-bowing skills and is set to hunt down the abundant and seemingly tame wildlife to add to the food stocks. As if in celebration of the news Elephants are seen on the horizon.

Note: Hunting is normally dangerous and unreliable and extremely time consuming. A dwarf will stock up on some ammo home in on a near by wild beastie and track them down exhausting their supply of bolts before returning for more and starting over. This leads to some irritating situation where they wing and injure a animal but then forget about it and start hunting a entirely new creature. Not the smartest of fellows. :-/

By the time I've managed to craft some bolts and a crossbow the herds already moved on leaving this fellow chasing a flock of birds about and nothing is brought back successfully. As his aims improves so should the returns. Hopefully.

Autumn!

With Autumn comes the dry season.

The various ponds and lakes around the area start to dry up although the brook continues to flow. One of the main reasons I picked the area.

Below is the same area as above but one level down and a start while later. The water is entirely gone a minute after.

The dogs breed a second generation and another migrant wave arrives. This time seemingly one guy who's dragged along his wife and two kids for the vacation!

Winter!

The food starts to run seriously low and the dwarfs are forced to drink straight from the brook as the last of the booze is used up. I order the miners to dig into a horribly exposed earthen hill at the south east corner of the map so a farm can be set up.

Farmers and gathers will have a long run back and forth through unprotected territory but there's nothing I can do about it right now.

The hunter continues to wing animals and then shuffle off after a completely different one. I'm starting to thing he's a bit of a sadist.

The hunter almost brings down a warthog before buggering off for a lie down.

Slightly concerned about the food situation I sent the militia out to try and put this beastie out of his misery and stock the kitchens but he proceeds to outrun them Benny Hill style from one end of the map to the other. Repeatedly. I give up in disgust after 5 minutes of fruitless chasing.

The same thing happens a short while later and the militia is sent out after a wounded peacock. This time Sarigs catches and frankly brutalises the bird and he's off to the pot.

At least point Eral seems to wake up after being shown up by the army and brings down a couple of warthogs and a large rodent thing in quick succession which tides us over.

Dwarven Merchants arrive and we flood them with cheaply made tatty stone crafts in exchange for food, booze and a couple more axes. They'll be back next year along with hopefully elven and human caravans of goods.

I finally get round to ordering bedrooms to be carved out and beds and doors to be constructed. This is almost always the last thing I get round to doing just ahead of making dining room but it's started now.

One of the migrants is taken by a fey mood and barricades himself into the leatherworks clutching our last piece of leather. He beavers away for a fortnight before presenting his creation to the world:

A single boot. Helpful.

Note: Dwarfs will occasionally be seized by various different moods demanding extravagant ingredients to use in their masterworks. They range from the depressingly useless and simple like Mouthsings here to decent weapons, armour, statues and thrones for display. And everything in between.

The hunter is just showing off now and brings down a giraffe with a well placed shot to the spine.

Elephants are seen once again and Eral brings one down before scaring the rest away swelling the stores of meat to bursting.

The end of winter finally draws to a near as the spring and the wet season approach again.

Just before that though a wave of 27 migrants show up as news of Masterlancer, home of the....boot spreads.

(God I hate sorting migrant waves out when they arrive!)

Here's a snap shot of Masterlancer's population!

I'll try and condense info and time for the next update hopefully someone will die .:-)

Mission DF. Part 1. Strike the earth!

So as promised part one begins.

I've started by generating a fairly standard world though I've upped the savage areas a bit to hopefully make things a bit more interesting.

The world is called Ilusnir - "The Everseeing Land". Here it is in all it's majestic glory.

The gray swathes are mountain ranges. There is glacial field at the northern pole and desert wastelands to the south. I've decided to set up towards the south hopefully. You can see where I've tried to pick it out.

And the here's spot I've chosen to call home.

4 different biomes meet here, savage woodlands to the east, untamed wild grasslands to the east and a river and terrifying mountain range run roughly north to south through the centre. Setting up without a river or a brook is generally a bad idea and will lead to your fortress dying from thirst if anything interrupts your moonshine industry whether it be you brewing getting killed off or just some fool dwarfs eating the last of your plump helmets (brewable mushrooms)! Which will happen.

We should hopefully see a nice mix of wild vicious animals, undead monstrosities and evil creatures venturing across our territory to set things off nicely!

Our fortress home will be named: Konkivish. Dwarvish for Masterlancer. Sometimes the random name generator excels itself.

Home to 7 plucky dwarfs. I give you our starting cast:

Sarigs Boltedhatchets. (Yep you can name the dwarfs). He prefers to be along and talks to inanimate objects when thinking. He is very weak. Which is unfortunate as he is our wood chopper and only person capable of swinging a axe to defend the fort.

Eral Confusehelms. One of our two miners, he also does a secondary trade in crafting trade goods from spare wood. He finds helping others rewarding but is unaffected by the suffering of others. He also bites his nails. Odd.

Kivish Paddledrasped. Our second miner. She has no second skills. She likes eating sugar, is nervous and clumsy, has no spatial sense, no willpower and fails in social relationships...hence why she's banished to the mining pits.

Sodel Pickmoons. Our only doctor and seconds as a trader/book keeper to keep her busy. Hopefully we wont be needing her much. She likes helping others to, has a iron will and no patience. Just what you want in a doctor.

Tulon Boltpartners. A bone carver with a smattering of cooking/brewing skills. Clumsy with very bad intuition. Likely why she though joining the expedition was a good idea.

Eral Opencanyons. Well focused but prone to disease this chap is our architect and mason, he's also a stone crafter. He likes stone.

Shem Violetoiles. Our last lucky lass, this is our carpenter and mechanic. Also a very basic cook and brewery to help out. She is flimsy and overindulges.

In keeping with the established traditions of Dwarf Fortress stories if anyone wants to claim a dwarf for naming should out in the comments along with the skills you want them trained in and I'll rename one for you.

Selecting supplies, I've stocked up on plenty of food and drink along with picks and a axe, some bags, theads and ropes. Two breeding pairs of wardogs as I think I'll be needing them and some chickens. They'll supply eggs, meat and they're easy to breed should I need to shut myself off under ground.

So we're all set and it's time to Embark!

The floor has eyes....hundreds and hundreds of eyes. They won't stop staring. After a quick panic I've discovered them to be harmless and just part of the flavour of the region. And freaking creepy.

Having a quick scout around the map we find the area to be luckily empty of any immediate dangers which'll give us a chance to set up before getting mauled by any thing but not so lucky in that it is completely flat (other then a sandy hill in the south east corner) which means I'll have to dig down rather then being able to sink into a rock face which is more defensible and better looking. :-/

Priorities will be getting under ground, setting up some bedrooms and a hospital. Establishing some kind of defensive perimeter and making some goods to trade for when the caravan arrives. There's a brook (a shallow river that you can just walk across) just to the north of where the screen shot ends that trails down to west and then to the south so I may try and dig some kind of moat. Also some kind of narrative once I've come up with a story and had a poke around the worlds history!

I'll sign off here for the moment. If I've any readers left let me know you thoughts and if you've played DF before suggestions always welcome. I'm a mediocre player to best. I'll try and updates regularly.

Dwarf Fortress....Losing is fun.

Right well in a attempt to appease Blaq over at Don't Mention Ze War (and not fade quietly into the mist) I've decided to see if I can run a successful Dwarf Fortress fort and bring the wonders of the game to you guys through the medium of interpretive dance! Or blogs...I'm not 100% decided here yet.

For those who don't know Dwarf Fortress if a free to play management sim it includes....well pretty much everything. It generates a random persistent word tracking each individual persons action while generating. It runs through normally 1050 years of warring civilisations (Dwarf, Elf, Human and Goblin in the vanilla version) rampaging Mega-beast (Dragons, Hydras, Bronze Colosii, Rocs & Various randomly generated titans) and semi-mega (giants, Cyclops, all many of demons, night beasts & minotaurs) and then throws you in the deep end.

The game itself has two main modes, Fortress & Adventurer. Adventure sees you control a plucky lad or lass who sets out to see the word to find fame and fortune, you trapesing from town to town righting wrongs & slaying foes and trying not to get caught out at night out of towns. You get jumped frequently and will die a lot. In nasty ways. Adventure mode makes the most of the game's excessively detailed combat system which allows you to flail away trying to chop off a foes 3rd toe on their right foot, or gouge out eyes or just strangle someone till sweet death carries brings them peace. It's fairly throwaway and I've never got too much into it TBH, more then likely because I suck at it!

The meat and potatoes as it were though is the Fortress mode this basically allows you too drop 7 plucky dwarfs anywhere in the world with a few base provisions and try to scratch out a living. As time passes migrant waves will bring new dwarfs which is balance by how the fortress is doing, they will shun"death-trap" fortresses and flock to wealthy prospering ones. They will annoy the hell out of you when they turn up with absolutely wanky random skills, sit around and eat all your food while you desperately try to shore up your defenses. When your fortress reaches a certain point the goblins will deign to notice you and will send ambushing squads, kidnapping and finally sieges to break you fortress. Semi & Mega beasts will discover the area and bring the pain.

To gather resources and metal ores you must delve deep below the surface breaking into underground caverns missed with monsters, giant spiders, various animal-men and most worryingly, Forgotten Beasts, generated monsters that stalk the deeps. To give you a example I bring you a couple of ones generated in the few world I'll be using:

Zagith Boilpukes: Zagith Boilpukes was a forgotten beast. It was the only one of its kind. A gigantic hairy earthworm. It has thin wings of stretched skin and it has a bloated body. Its ivory hair is short and even. Beware its poisonous gas! Zagith was associated with depravity and caverns.

Isa: Isa was a forgotten beast. It was the only one of its kind. An enormous one-eyed oriole. It has large mandibles and it belches and croaks . Beware its noxious secretions! Isa was associated with caverns and blight.

Because it's randomly generated some of these are ridiculously easy (a giant blob made from water) and some crazy hard (huge flying birds or flies made from diamond). Your fortress will crumble sooner or later as one of these over comes your defenses or your champion warrior goes postal after losing one more comrade then he can bear and starts scything through you population kicking off tantrum spirals until no one is left.

And because it's all one persistent world the dragon that ends your beloved fortress can be tracked down in adventurer mode for some vengence. Likewise the commanders of enemy army's have their own history and in a third game mode entitled "Legends" you can poke through your game worlds history. You can also go back to a failed fortress to reclaim it or as a adventurer to have a poke around.

Well I think I've set this up enough. Dwarf Fortress. Where losing is fun.

If your interest in trying it out you can download it here...but I wouldn't. The base game is build using a ASCII interface and will make your brain bleed.

If you're a wuss like m,e a much easier-on-the-eyes version with a graphic interface (there's a few but this is the one I favour) can be found here done by a guy called Mike Mayday.

I really cannot over state the awesome and the shear death of this game.

More to come. Dun-dun-duuuun!

...Oh one more thing. Don't try it without have a look at this tutorial. You'll need it. Seriously.