f13.net

Prologue: It begins at the beginning.


Since the Great Fortress of Noob turned into the great fortress of engineering mistakes and goblin stomping, I sought out a potentially more challenging (and likely fatal) experience.  Behold the above local shot before embarking.  We've got two tastes of danger: a magma pipe and a glowing pit.  The magma pipe will add a more fatal consequence to my disastrous attempts at engineering and the glowing pit is a potential goldmine, while at the same time being a very real chance at fortress annihilation from the bottom floor up.


Here's the lovely, lightly guarded entrance. No ratmen or goblins yet.  Farming is also present on this floor, but only accessible through the floor below.  The fortress set up so far is pretty standard, so I didn't think it necessitated a tour.  Stocks, barracks (just for bunking at the moment), and meetings halls at the top.  Crafting in the middle.  Appartments far, far below.


Here's our world famous lava pit.  It contains all sorts of fire based nasties that have already claimed lives (not mine).  It's a few z levels down, which should make in convenient for pumping into the fortress.  I should probably find some bauxite. Anyone want to be a magma pump operator?  You get hazard pay.*


And.. a few seasons in and we have some migrants.  A few jobs are already reserved.  Strazos and Lantyssa will be joining the military (milker, brewer and one peasant are likely to be drafted) and Xurtan has requested a dwarf.  Genders are not guaranteed.  Ranger is a great job with hazard pay!* Spend time in the untamed wilderness.  Fight the local goat horde.  Run from bored fire imps!


We already had our first merchant visit and the merchant's guard was the first one to eat a death from the volcano.  This man had training. I'm a bit scared for our future outdoorsmen.

*Hazard pay only available for jobs with 90% mortality rates.

More to come.  Likely projects include: lava moat, lava smelting (and other crafts), some sort of ridiculous glass or obsidian based pyramid, digging into the constipated (with demons) bowels of the earth, and maybe a water park!

Poor, poor Strazos.   :why_so_serious:

At least I died a hearty dwarf's death...? :grin:

Why do you create your apartments so many Z levels below and are cage traps still as OP as they used to be, trapping everything no matter how large with a 100% success rate?

Artifact of learning to play the game through CaptnDuck's tutorials.  I don't want any noise from workshops and I tend to place  workshops near the top of the fortress. Of course, this could be easily corrected by just placing them farther away on the x, y axis.  Plus, it's nice to clear a large amount of space lower in the rock layer.   Future fortresses will likely make better use of x/y over z, but this was just habit/reflex. This layout gives me a lot of layers to work with for creating nobles apartments.

Yes, cage traps are horrendously overpowered.  He's fixing that for the next release I believe.

Strazos, your death was.. *cue yakkety sax*.

Toady's been saying that forever but in a way it's great they are there, they are a buffer that allow you to build your fortress as you please until you're ready to put your troops to the test and they are a great way to fill your arena with whatever wildlife that stumbles into your entrances.
I used to build cage rooms at every entrance and release the contents to my troops in the arena for practise and gear until I could form a decent army.

Episode 1: Yegolev, the mighty ranger.


Meet Yegolev, our intrepid ranger.  He keeps VDL supplied with fresh mountain goat and groundhog corpses, so our dwarfs can eat something that wasn't grown in cave shit. He's quite the goat killer, although he was chased off once by a rather surly groundhog.


Ut oh. Now oddly enough Yego keeps trying to pick up his loose quarrels and drag the goat home. I quickly had to give the order for all non military dwarfs to stay indoors.


RUUUUUUN. The imp continually belches fire as Yego books it to the fortress as fast as his stumpy legs can take him.  Some of the fire connects, but Yego is determined to make it back.


He finally makes it back and promptly crashes in the barracks.  He has what looks to be a minor head injury.


This almost got hilariously tragic.  No one could give Yego any water, and thus Yego started to get thirsty while recovering from his wounds.  Not surprisingly, the command for all to stay indoors was still on.  :awesome_for_real:  Yego managed to recover shortly after rectifying this mistake.

I suppose I could give him some real wrestling, hammering (crossbow counts as a hammer when you run out of bolts), and archery practice, but this sort of interaction is much more fun.

Strazos had significantly worse day.


It started well enough as Strazos becomes the fortress's first Champion.


During the Yegolev-imp incident, Strazos and Slayerik were dispatched.  Not pictured is Yego about 100' away.  I set their orders to pursue dangerous creatures.  That proved to be... unfortunate.


It all happened too fast to capture it.  I adjusted to their patrol closer to the volcano to make sure they taught the imp a lesson.  As soon as he got within range of the imp, Strazos launched himself at it.  The imp retreated to volcano but Strazos was still moving at full speed and didn't even pause before tumbling into the fiery pit of death. It was over in a split second.  The arrow there is pointing to some smoke, which is all that remains of Strazos, elite wrestler and champion.  

Life goes on in the fortress. There will be no funeral.  Strazos was as efficient in death as he was in life. Congratulations on your promotion, Slay.


And.. migrants!  We can now support a useless layabout (sheriff).  They started tearing through the booze in short order.  Barrel and booze production had to be significantly ratcheted up.  Notice the thievery.  What the hell is going on here?


Goddamned monkeys! They made off with a decent amount of armor, although I don't really remember any of my characters owning the gear they absconded with.  THERE WILL BE MONKEY DEATH.  (They got away.)

All sorts of positions available.  If you want to be in the fortress, just let me know what you want to be.  I can't guarantee your life will be interesting.

Soooo....Reincarnation? :awesome_for_real:

Ooh, ooh, me, me. Something that will lead to a fiery death preferably.

Something Pit of Doom related.  :drill:

I want in! preferably a noble with a cushy job and a courtesan.

That would be a baron/baroness.  Won't hit that until later as I'll need several more waves of migrants.  Sheriff is open; they don't do shit.   :awesome_for_real:

Works for me.

My dwarf moved into that position last time after sustaining a life threatening stubbed toe.  My dwarf might be the only Ranger to ever exceed their normal life expectancy.

Enjoy your slacking.

I seem to remember giving birth last time.

So, no name for me please.

 :why_so_serious:

I re-request Hammerdwarf/Blacksmith. Maybe I'll make a masterpiece lever, or something else completely useless!

If you need a spare brewer at any point, well, that'd be the life for me.

Job updates:

FatuousTwat - metalsmith
CmdrSlack - brewer
Lantyssa - marksdwarf
Threash - sheriff
Ingmar - military (will make sure you're frontline v. demons)
Prospero - pump operator for the screwpump at the volcano
Ironwood - peasant
Straz I still have to reincarnate.

Can I be a cat breeder?

Feeling a little frisky?  :drillf:

They're quite good at that without any assistance.  I'll let you train the dogs.

Can I be someone who will surely die quickly and horribly?

I think hunting sounds like a great challenge.

Ras, can I humbly suggest that you put the images (or maybe each entire post with images) in spoiler tags?  FF keeps jumping me back to old posts as I'm trying to read the new ones and it makes me stabby.

Sure. 

I'm dithering back and forth between "I really want to play this again!" and "I don't want to go through re-learning everything again because it's been so long since I last played.".

I want in, you can pick the job.

This next update is going to be epic.  4 people just burned to death and that's really not the worst of it.

Tease.  :heartbreak:

New Three Panel Soul (http://www.threepanelsoul.com/) on DF

(http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/40396/df-3ps.png)

Episode 2:  Death and misery


Construction of the lava screw pump begins and is promptly disrupted by the local fire imps.  Once some time had passed and the imps had gone down below, I instructed Yoru to give it another shot.


It did not go well and the imp immolated him in short order.


Rest in peace, brave soul.  You gave your life for dwarven progress.


Here you can see the pump, channel and cistern system for the lava extraction.  The construction of this would prove to be problematic.  Folks, sink your shafts a few z levels down if you attempt this in the future.  


Good to know our sheriff still finds time for gem cutting.  The sheriff's lack of martial prowess doesn't help in the conflict to come.


I wanted to start the pumping operation but there was a pesky fire man in the area.  No problem, I'll dispatch some marksmen to deal with it.  Most,  so if he retreats they'll manage to not jump into the cauldron.  How tough could he be?


Uhh, use bolts guys.  

Ran out of bolts?

Somehow I don't think the butt end of a crossbow is going to phase this guy.


And squash goes the marksmen crew.  Beaten and burned to death by an angry fire man.  


Newly minted Yoru II is pummeled retrieving the corpse.  :facepalm:


Four sudden deaths have started to upset the balance of the fortress.  Way goes bonkers.   He does this for the rest of the update.  Tantrum and then calm.  Usually there's a beating or two in between.



So, the pumping. It did not go well.  There's a few things that possibly went wrong here.  

a) Part of the pump being over the lava caused something in the mechanism to burn and flood, thus spilling gallons of magma over poor Prospero.  

Screw pump going left to right should look somewhat like this:

s p p s
lLg g s

s = open space   p = pump   L = lava

my design was

s p p s
L L g s

b) What likely happened is that the channel for the pumped lava was only one z level deep.  Due to magma acting somewhat like a solid and a liquid, the channel filled up too fast and backfilled onto Prospero.  He realized this shortly before he became a puff of smoke.


This further upset Way.  Pictured you see the corpse of Threash, OUR SHERIFF, after Way beat him to death.  Shortly afterwards Xurtan was promoted to sheriff and promptly decided to take a nap.


Graveyard is becoming a popular place.


Way also managed to cripple Ironwood and leave him alive.


WUA is not happy.  In his distress, he ends up triggering a stonefall trap.  BONK.


Random unnamed peasent gets gang banged by a goblin ambush while all of this was going on.  Not the best time, goblins.  


Military spings to action and starts taking names.  Pictured is Merusk and I believe Hoax.


More dwarves hop about the tantrum train.  Xurtan is still SLEEPING.


Slayerik ends up getting trying to solo about 6 goblins with crossbows and succumbs to the onslaught of bolts.   Merusk and Hoax arrive too late to assist him but manage to maul some goblins.  


Under a flood of dwarven crankiness, FatuousTwat constructs an artifact copper warhammer.  That was quite cool.

Murgos, on the other hand, is the first dwarf to go insane due to extreme unhappiness. Yay.


Hey, sheriff, make some goddamn arrests.


Fabricated gets roasted picking up a corpse I think.  Can't be sure.


Viin gets cooked by an imp.


Now this is a rather funny situation.  During all of this chaos, we get a new set of migrants.  One is a hunter, so Furiously takes the job and sets off after the imps.

He casually walks up to one of the imps and drops it in a second.  WAAAAAAAGH. Here he is dragging an imp (i) carcass back in the same frame as now dead Viin (enjoying his viking funeral).  

So, lets recap the mayhem.

-3 dwarves killed by a fire man.  2 by fire, 1 by fists.
-3 dwarves killed by fire imps.  
-2 dwarves killed by goblins including our only remaining champion, Slayerik.
-1 dwarf (THE SHERIFF) beaten to death by our furnace operator, Way.
-1 dwarf driven completely insane from grief.  
-1 dwarf takes a lava bath due to faulty pump design.  

Time to rebuild the miltary and the overal happiness of the dwarven community.  Maybe when I'm feeling brave enough, I'll go back to some engineering.

/high5 Lan  :drill:

 I died in the name of science. :heart:

I love how everyone is going insane from grief, and I just shrug my shoulders and make a fucking artifact weapon.  :why_so_serious:

*Sniff*

I'll really miss those guys.

/pours 40oz

You just died of thirst.  Probably should have drank some of that 40.

Lol i so love this game.

Holy shit.. Gecastorshar Lolor Zar? Can I get a description on that?

Edit: I don't think my dwarves have ever made any cool artifacts... I always get screwpumps and chairs.

(http://files.getdropbox.com/u/82533/dfvolcano/part3/artifact_warhammer.JPG)

You really need to review the Screw Pump (http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Screw_pump) article. If you're trying to hoover up magma into a channel a level above, you'll probably want to tunnel a channel one square inside the rock wall and create the same pump stack that's on the page and that I used in my orig fortress. You'll need it enclosed on all sides (which was your main issue). Don't use wood though, it'll take heat damage from being ajacent and then eventually your pump will fail.

Don't futz with the open air, once everything's constructed create a tunnel directly into the side of the magma column (not into the open air, one level below that). If you want to get fancy, put a floor grate on the first pump level or in the tunnel and monsters won't be able to climb up through it.

Sweet, I yet live. Probably retarded from my head injury, but at least no lava fell on me.  :awesome_for_real:

I think if I would have adequately allowed for some build up by sinking the shaft a bit deeper I could have controlled it.. but who knows.  Really, all I'm trying to do there is just suck it up and throw it down a shaft and let it flow.  I'll definitely work on some sort of no spill option next time.   

Doesn't what you propose sacrifice a miner? 

Magma doesn't travel as fast as water. Just get your miner to do it, he moves fast enough. If you have a leveled miner, he can even outrun water. I'd do something like this:

(L=lava,  D=door, _ = channel,  > and X = stairs)

Tell your miner to dig that last piece and then once he's on his way designate something somewhere else to dig, he'll mine that last and run up through the door and up the stairs before the lava reaches him. Lava will fill that lower area, which you can then pump up. Make sure to forbid the doors once the thing is in operation, bored dwarves and especially pets will open the really warm door to see what's on the other side.

One level above:

One level above:

That _ is a channel, plus a floor grate. The deepest pump will draw from north to south, through the channel into the empty square. If you want it to draw from south to north, fine, but make sure you put the door one level down - it's critical the door is not adjacent to the standing lava (lava will eat sideways and into the stairwell if the door is not magma safe). Reverse the channel and pump direction and stack them on top of each other as per the web page instructions, alternate the above. You MIGHT have to clear the surrounding rock if your stupid dwarves get trapped (they like to channel themselves into a corner). This is OK, you can just rebuild the wall with any old stone.

Can I be redorfed?  I want to see if I can master the intricacies of imbibing fluids in my next life, sort of like a Buddhist reincarnation 'until you get it right', thing.

I'd like to volunteer.  Something with a low life expectancy.  Scout?  Experimental magma shaft tester?

Headshoots (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3125076&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1).  Quite possibly the best LPDF since Boatmurdered.

Do you recommend having the pump powered or hand operated?

For what you're doing, manual is fine. You only need to fill a small pool below your smelters right? You will need one pump operator for each floor (and you need to be careful that the magma can not flow sideways into the stairwell).

Magma will only evaporate if the tile is a depth of 1/7 so once you fill it you shouldn't have to touch it again.

Of course I'm not sure why you're pumping it up at all when it's just easier to go down a few more flights and have the smelter at the same z-level as the top of the magma (or one below) - then you can jsut create a channel or tunnel, no pumping required.

What can I say? I like pumps.  Yah, a direct tap will likely prove easier.

Is it true that magma creatures can come through channels and/or tunnels?

Yes.  This is why you need to make sure you stick grates over the top of any channel that directly opens into a lava tube.  You can also stick a horizontal grate for the lava to flow through, but it has to be made of a magma proof material, which is hard to get early on.

One thing I use to do is carve a fortification for it all to flow through, before I broke the last wall.  Fortification allowed liquid through, but not monsters, and didn't melt.  Not sure if this still works though.

Oh yeah, dwarf me.

Master engineer, of course. :popcorn:

Ahh, you're already a champion, but next time I get a mechanic, I'll switch up. 

I've been without a mechanic or mason for a long time and assigning someone to that job does nothing.

Whichever :) I'd rather be active, but I do oh so like building things!

Oh, I meant to tell you about rightload (http://rightload.org/) if you didn't already know about it. Get the tinypic plugin, in the options set images to max 800x600 or whatever, you can even add img tags. It's awesome.

Haha. I just figured out why no one would take the mantle of mechanic.  No mechanics workshop.  

I have to assume someone destroyed it during one of the tantrums.  

Xurtan and Sjofn appear to be in comas.

edit: Sjofn woke up and was put in prison for assaulting Sam.  Sam has been unconscious for a long time.

I look forward to becoming an integral part of newly rebuilt military, can I stay on Goblin duty instead of going near the fire?  I'm not a huge fan of fire as a general rule.

If you need someone to die in a fruitless yet comedic way, I'm happy to volunteer.

Learn to tank already! :-P

We'll get him next time.

(http://files.getdropbox.com/u/82533/dfvolcano/adamantite.JPG)

dooooooooooooooooooooom

So, intricate killing strategy or last stand of the 300?

The Headshoots play through I posted earlier managed to live through admantium. Barely, but apparently it's no longer guaranteed doom.

Explain for us noobs.  Does discovering adamantium trigger massive invasions by other races who want it?

Adamantine is found in the outer walls of the "glowing pit".  Glowing pit is full of demons.  So, in order to mine a decent amount of adamantine, you have to open up the nastiness.

Ohh, and the demons throw fireballs.  And are immune to traps.  And don't bleed.

I think you should attempt to conquer Hell and install me as its new ruler.

Lan the Second would like to be a Ranger.  It's soon to be safer outside than in the fortress. ;D

So would champion spear-dwarves be the best vs demons? Or do they ignore the organ damage?

I think axe-dwarves or sword-dwarves, since apparently demons can be dismembered.

I've had the best luck with extremely lucky marksdwarves.

On the plus side maybe you can get some fancy adamantite armor for your guys before you actually break through to the demons.

Is HFS always on the bottom z-level?

I've discovered mine several z-levels above bottom.  Funny enough, it's pretty close to my nobles/future king apartments.  It may extend down to the bottom level, I don't know yet. 

Getting a series of floodgates installed takes a while.  :awesome_for_real:

Once you clear out the HFS, you can move your nobles in there... The engraved adamantite floors/walls will make them happy.

Sam called dibs.  :oh_i_see:

I got kind of lucky where I dug out my king's chambers.  Native gold detailed floors.  Right now everyone seems to like taking their lunch break in his cavernous dining room.

 :tantrum:

No imps are gonna kill my cousins & get away with it!

The only fitting way for dwarfs to die is during a drunken brawl over the last keg of Swamp Whiskey.    :grin:


If you'll have me, my hammer & thick, empty cranium are at your service.

I've been playing off and on and while a lot of time has passed, not too much has happened in the prosperous fortress.  The next two updates will focus on getting us caught up before we decide to have fun with the demons.



What, they don't love hot, burning death?  The migrant flow during this time fluctuated between "too scared to try" and "flood of useless puds".  Compounding the nervousness was the dwarf body count going up due to killing traitorous dwarved allied with the goblins.  Apparently if you kill them, you'll also inhume them, which makes me believe they add to the overall dwarved body count for the area.  

So, how do you rebuild civilization? Public works and babies.


Here's schild going to dig out the last bit of obsidian wall in order to fill a magma cistern for magma forging.  It took a while, but the 3 z-level deep cistern filled and magma forging has been going strong.  A second attempt at a magma resevoir was botched and did not go as well.  I think the key here is to not make the level do too much x/y turns and to possibly go for channels instead of largish pools.  Still, magma never behaves when you want it to.  

A slightly less successful magma project:


I was creating an obsidian farm here.  Couple of things went wrong.  I didn't make it splashproof.  It was burning-death proof, but not really splash proof.  Also, water will cool about 2 levels of magma, but not a third.  It just wasn't big enough, etc etc etc.  Lets move on from this minor disaster.  The pumped water canal worked excellently, however.


One of the new favorite places for my dwarves to hang out.  Gold, aluminum and cobalite statues on a multicolored floor (doesn't show up quite as well here).


For the construction of the ill-designed canal/obsidian farm, I built a large stone stockpile outside the fortress.  Here, the cave adapted dwarves merrily puke their way back and forth from the site. Anytime I dispatch the military, it's a comedy of vomit and death.  I really should build skylights in from the start, but the puking is really too funny.

Zetlef makes me proud and produces a rocking weapon.


If you see me killing muskox and puppies by the score, it's because of crap like this:


And this:


Here's Trippy with his cat army.  Every time he enters and leave the fortress, time grinds to a halt.

With all of the dead dwarves, society had to start rebuilding the way it knows best.  And it seems like everyone was catching the baby bug.  


Oh, and who is the proud papa?


 :ye_gods:  Check out the family tree there. I named (the ones that had names) before I knew of the their lineage.  

Also contributing to the baby boom was Lorekeep, Falconeer, Strazos II and K9.  K9 also got hitched.


Strazos' situation is different than the others considering he(she) is in the military.  Always stopping her sparring sections to go take care of her kid.

To cut down on the picture load, I'll describe the mayoral scene.  Quinton became the first elected mayor, sending me back to town management, mining and other duties.  Next in line was tazelbain, followed shortly by Ironwood, who I believe held onto the post for a while.  Our newest mayor: grunk.

The goblin population hasn't been much trouble.  Infact they've been mostly a joke.

Here they are failing to gang-bang Fordel.



Furiously II (previous model ambushed) also comes under fire while out ranging.  


And his squad of hunting dogs come to the rescue!  And not pictured is the dogs getting beaten to death.  Most suffocate after being left for dead.  This sends Furiously II into a revolving tatrum, which ends with him:


Clocking and crippling Reg.  Reg is still bed ridden to this day (in the Baroness' room) and Furiously II did some time in jail.

Next up (shorty) is will be the final set up episode before (likely) bad things happen.  Or I could just skip the middle and hope my dwarves finish the killing ground set up.

I haven't played mine in a while, it got boring. 6 champion marksdwarves in a tower that can't be breached seem to keep the gobbos away too well. I'm gonna have to start a war with the elves or something after I get bored with M&B.

I made a wooden road that spelled "ELVES" in front of my fortress.  Bastards didn't even blink.

Add SUCK to the bottom!

I haven't tried it, but I guess building your trade depot out of wood makes them mad...

So does offering them wooden totems decorated with dog skulls.

So, I'm trying to get into this game.

Toady's neckbeard must be sentient and burrowing into his brain or something, the horribly dysfunctional UI and (modded) tileset is just driving me fucking insane.  Any advice aside from graphics mods?

Have you gone through Captn Duck's youtube tutorials?  Link. (http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=5A3D7682BDD48FC2)

Those helped me tremendously.  Also, I assume you know about the wiki (http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Main_Page).

Basically all you need.  The few threads in the PC Gaming forum here are somewhat helpful also.

Bring on the pit.


Yay!  Adamantine is basically the best material in the game.  It's strong and it's light.  Unfortunately it also takes pretty long to process.  First you have to extract the strands from the ore, which takes a skill that's very difficult to raise and no one in your fortress is going to have.  From there you have to smelt it into wafers. On top of that, anything made from the wafers takes 3 times as many wafers as bars and take a rather long time to forge.

The ore is also magma safe if you can set up a craft station to take advantage of that.


Of course, along with adamantine comes the possibility that you're going to open the glowing pit.  The second image shows my miners (as question marks) flipping out the second they break into the pit.  I got very lucky in that I broke into the the area that leads down to the pit and mostly just contains open space.  No demons came through and if I they did, the walls I put up wouldn't have stopped them from rampaging through the king's quarter's (where they broke through).


Here's a nice look at where the demons hang out. You've got your upright spears.  Bones of all varieties.  Caged and starving human peasants, dwarves, and elves.  Pools of blood. Mutant fish.  The usual.


Coinciding with the discovery of the adamantine, the Queen arrives along with a bevvy of uninteresting nobles.


The fortress springs into action in order to prepare the nobility's living quarters.


Here's a look at the current status of the fortress with the arrival of the new denizens.


And of course, within a year our Queen drops dead of old age.  Miners go back to eating dinner in a room built for a king.


With the Queen dead, I figured we might as well crack open the pit and face the demons.  

Here you can see two ballista, safely behind carved fortifications, set up to tear through the demons at the time of breach.  I started them firing as soon as  Rasix (pictured left side) opened up the pit.  

On standby here is a bit over half of military minus the royal and fortress guards.  Some folks wandered off for a nap or drink while I was setting up.  :facepalm:


The pit is breached and the ballistas spring into action. Although the demons were not at the time visible, you can see their sheared limbs (represented by the bones) littering the approach.  


And they're through.   Murgos stops his break while our siege operators promptly bugger off.


And the battle is in full swing. The marksmen having already ran out of bolts decide to bludgeon the demons instead of getting more bolts from the stockpile that was RIGHT THERE.


The opening casualties are a lot of pets and Unsub.  The marksmen having scoffed at wearing armor most of their time training, did not fare well in close quarter combat.


Lots of dead demons and dwarves swarming in to loot.  I really need to change my forbid settings to put a stop to that before the battle, but neglected to.  

Lantyssa joins the ranks of the twice dead.  Murgos wasn't doing so hot either.  


Here's Paelos getting absolutely trashed towards the end of the battle.  No one got to him in time sadly.  That demon was hard to track down, but eventually was caught and killed making a break for the stairs.


One of the peasants thought the pit was empty and got surprised by a hidden frog demon.  It took a while to get military to path down there and unfortunately Cyrrex arrived just a bit too late.  


And now, demons corpses (the "&") litter my refuse pile.  3 marksmen, 1 peasant, and a handful of pets were all that was lost.  Murgos is in pretty rough shape, but should survive.

So there's your pit.  A pretty easy one and I was lucky all I got were frog demons.  Anything tougher and I'm afraid the scales could have tipped.  


BTW, Hoax was an absolute monster for this military.  He must have 20 kills more than any surviving soldier.  Most of those frog demon kills came with him having just picked up axes (his skill was probably around average at best).

I'm not sure if I'm going to continue with the fortress or try something new. I've got the elves near war with me, but that doesn't sound very fun.  I could do some water works or magma projects, but that might be more interesting in a less hilly area and for a less developed fortress.  

Still, this wasn't a bad attempt for my first time playing with magma and the perils of adamantine harvesting.

Did you get the hordes of crazed humanoids out of the pit or was it just the frog demons?It appears only the frog demons but wasn't sure if you just skipped the crazed part since they mow down pretty quick.

Since I had opened the pit from a lower and inaccessible level by accident earlier, the humanoids were all dead by the time I opened it up to kill the demons.

Frog demons, omgah. I need to play that game into the deeper levels. I once built a fortress around a chasm, with all kinds of bridges everywhere. There were lots of weird things living around the chasm. I didn't get to see much of them because we ran into the inevitable temper storm.

Mini-necro here: If you're looking for more of a challenge, you ought to try the Orcs mod from the official mod forums.  They're pretty much bigger, nastier goblins that ignore pain, avoid traps (although you can still pour magma on them if you want), and can start seiging you as soon as the first winter.  It's a good challenge once you've mastered staying alive.