Increasingly More Horrifying

So these dwarves have it pretty tough.

Remember that Minotaur? That Minotaur was no problem. They took it down without a single casualty! What they didn't notice, however, was the goblin making off with one of the children. Oops!

Some time later, a forgotten beast appeared, some sort of giant worm-like monstrosity that gave off clouds of fiery ash. I thought, "No problem! It'll have to cross the Bridge of Death to get anywhere near my dwarves!"

But of course, it could fly, so it just flew around and killed about thirty dwarves. What followed after it was miraculously slain was what's known as a "tantrum spiral" where depression and misery create a vicious cycle and dwarves are driven to suicide. It's gotten far worse than I've ever seen it, where one dwarf really lost his marbles, killed another dwarf, and then made a cage from his bones.

Razorpartners

Before this particular fortress falls, I should probably blog about it.

The idea behind this fortress is inspired by a megaproject you can find in the Bay12 forums here.

My first goal was to play around with machinery a lot more than I usually do, and what I ended up creating was a sort of vertical moat. A three-storey shaft that I can flood and drain at a moment's notice, hopefully to deter invaders and keep the fort relatively clean.

The Vertical Shaft

Here's the entrance floor. It starts with two water-wheels pumping power down into a series of gear assemblies buried in the ground. The water that gets drained into the shaft is pumped out one level above this one back into the river.

Now, one level below that, we have where the water enters from. The floodgate controls whether or not we're going to be pouring any water inside. We can also see part of the vertical axle transferring power down to an even lower level and the pump stack to the north just waiting for water.

The grates surrounding the stairs is to ensure the water really fills the entire shaft. If it was just stairs, it would take longer to drain, but at present it drains in an instant.

The next level down is where I transfer the power from the gear assemblies to the pump stack. As you can see, there are long horizontal axles and a gear assembly connecting the whole mess. Gear assemblies are necessary to control the flow of power and take a bit of power themselves, so it's always best to be as conservative as possible with them.

It's open in the image, but there's a gate that closes the shaft off to prevent undue flooding. As it's the only entrance to the fortress, I keep it open most of the time.

And finally, the bottom floor. Without removing any grates or constructed floors, this floor is inaccessible except to the water. When the shaft fills up, this is the bottom and the access point to the pump stack. This way, it ensures that the stairs will not remain wet for very long once the pumps are accessed. There's a currently-open gate that blocks the water from being pumped out immediately.

As you can see, the mud has caused fungus to start growing.

This is the floor above the entrance, showing the very top of the pump stack and the drainage pipe that dumps everything back into the river.

So far, this piece of working machinery has been utterly useless, but it works just as I intended it to. The floodgate to let water in, the gate to enter the rest of the fortress, and the gate to let the water out are all controlled from the temporary fortress. Once the main fortress can have dorfs living in it, a more permanent solution to controlling these gates will be devised.

The Bridge

I want this fortress to be hard to access by invading armies, and the vertical drain shaft is not meant to be the main line of defense. I am building a giant underground bridge that will contain three means of defense: first, the massive walkway will have a retractable bridge on either end, so I can trap invading gobbos as they march across. Second, the western wall across the gap with have fortifications carved into it, on the other side of which will be ballistas. Finally, above the bridge will be a reservoir with ten hatches that will release water onto the invaders and hopefully wash them over the edge.

Here is the reservoir directly above the bridge, currently empty but all hooked up and just waiting to be filled with liquid:

Mishaps And Toil

So far, the construction of the fortress has gone with relative ease. The population has done nothing but climb, and I can count only two real misfortunes: one was a baby that was kidnapped by a goblin before I could get any cages up, and the second was a wild horse that broke into the temporary fortress and killed our Animal Caretaker.

The reason I decided to suddenly record our unfinished progress is because of this:

A minotaur has appeared!

Our military is 19 strong, which is decent, but they are all extremely green. I recruited only migrants with some military training, but we are sorely lacking in arms and equipment. The only other combat they've seen was that horse and a goblin thief, who broke a dorf's ankle with a whip and then ran away.

So just in case this minotaur is the end of Razorpartners, this is a record of what's happened so far.

The date is 7th Malachite, 253, Mid-summer.