Let's Play Dwarf Fortress, Part IX

 It is difficult to maintain a dwarf fortress in the midst of so many new updates.  I have succumbed to the allure of the new software versions and had to start a new fortress.  I made a few modifications before starting this time.  For one, I added the Plantfix mod.  This makes all appropriate plant products useable.  I also added a custom world generation block which was designed to make a world with large amounts of Good and Evil land.  This world is the product of that.  Elves and Humans are extinct in this world.  There are thousands and thousands of goblins, and the dwarves are reduced to a tiny civilization consisting of my fort and a migrant band of merchants (one of whom is the king).  I selected the end of a valley to make my fortress.  In the picture below, I have carved out a main road leading across a moat deep within the mountain to the trading depot just inside.  There is a roofed wooden entrance hall leading outside the mountain which can be closed with a raising bridge.  To the south of the entrance is a walled-off garden area where we have a thriving crop of cabbage, fisher berries, and sun berries.  The last two are unique to dwarf fortress and can be cooked or brewed into alcohol.  Sun Berries are only found on Good land, and their resulting beverage, Sunshine, is highly prized by dwarves.  In the upper area, there is an enclosed animal paddock where I have my sheep.  I hope one day to figure out how to make the dwarves sheer them so that my clothing industry (top) can start.

Fortress Entrance

Roasts

My chef is highly-skilled and regularly makes masterpiece dinners.  Let's take a look.  Dwarf Fortress calls any and all food preparation "minced."  Feather trees are another uniquely Good thing.  They are trees with remarkably light pale wood whose leaves are feathers and which grow eggs as fruit.  Gross.



Good regions are a bit weird.  The local vermin animal is not the rat but the "Fluffy Wambler," a creature that if ever caught and viewed can be seen to consist entirely of "fluff" and "pudge."  Some of the grass here is Bubble Grass, and pixies can be seen.  I was hoping for unicorns, but none have appeared.

Another Roast

All dwarf food with this many ingredients is known as a "roast."

The Dining Layer

Deep within the ground is the heart of the fortress.  The large lower circle is a stone-carven dining hall.  One of the tables is a legendary Artifact, and the two other fortress Artifacts are on display here in Viewing Cases.  More about these later.  The circles above house the fortress's poultry, one ring per type.  We have peacocks, guineas, turkeys, ducks, chickens, and swans.  I let all the female birds hatch one clutch, and now we are waiting for all the chicks to grow up.  I will then slaughter most of them and keep new birds to start the next generation.  There are a LOT of chicks running around.  They are generally too small to produce meat or even leather when slaughtered, so I will have to wait for them to grow up.  To the left are the bedrooms.  The fortress has a lot of metal, but all of it is gold, so many of the peasantry have golden furniture.  To the right is the food prep area and the Lever Room, where I hope to eventually construct machinary to operate the various retractable and raising bridges above.  As of now, the fortress has no working defenses, and that is not good in such a violent world.

The artifact table.

Golden rooms.  Gold is useless in fortress defense.  You cannot make weapons, armor, or traps out of it.

Another artifact.

Our final Artifact to date.  Why did this dwarf make a doll version of another dwarf?

Immortalized in Art

Here is the dwarf that was forever captured in artifact form.  For starters, he and the creator of the Artifact do not know each other even slightly.  Looking at Asmel's description, I like to think that Adil (the artifact creator) saw Asmel walking by and said, "There goes the common man!"  He simply had to have him model for him, and then made an image of him tending the soil, as embodied in the Plump Helmet Man (plump helmets are edible mushrooms, and plump helmet men are sentient mushrooms...I actually didn't know plump helmet men existed in Dwarf Fortress).

A Legendary Dwarf

Here is another fortress resident, Creator of the single boot artifact above.  The line at the top of the screen is intended to be the dwarf's personal motto.  Notice that she dreamed of creating an artifact, and "her dream was realized."


Next on the fortress agenda is defenses.  I was able to buy a number of metal items from the travelling caravan.  I'm hoping to melt them down for armor.  I also need to get the bridges working and increase the height of the walls around the outdoor areas.  I haven't seen any goblins yet, but this world is crammed with them.  Since my dwarves are the last of their kind on the world, I would hate for them to be slaughtered by goblins...we'll see...