EoFF: Dwarf Fortress - Spoonproblems. Also, goblin problems.

[Iceglow]

First things first!

So first up, we've got a couple of issues here in Spoonproblems, issues what can cause problems, problems can cause deaths, deaths cause tantrums and tantrums well, tantrums aint good generally speaking they end in the entire fortress beating each other to death like some drug fueled nightmare! See Lonny BoB and Pike decided it'd be awesome to start digging the super fun happy slide in the middle of a murky pool that had frozen over, this is fine in the winter when the entire thing is made of solid ice along with the river but it's not a good thing later on when the rivers and pools de-freeze and flood the hall with water not to mention the trapping us inside part! To this end we're going to dig out all the ice and replace the ice slopes with ones made from rocksalt. I immediately began tasking the Dwarves to the process.

I also decided to take advantage of this situation to provide the fortress with a cistern of clean clear water which hopefully shouldn't be freezing solid every winter for 6 months, whilst healthy Dwarves never touch the stuff, sick Dwarves and the animals all need water to live! So I used the hole created by the dug out murky pool to begin a passageway north and east to just south of the river.

Of Cisterns and Idiocy.



Ok so you'd think digging a cistern out is going to be easy right? Wrong! See, too big, the space is wasted, too small and the Dwarves end up drowning as the river floods the entire fortress! Now we don't want to drown the fortress so I've devised a brilliant plan. If I dig a 3 tier cistern I can have enough time to sort this out properly. Ok so the first tier room is quite large, being it's going to be the place to provide the Dwarves with water it's a good idea to have it quite big so multiple wells can be built. Enough said if we end up at war with the Goblins there will be wounded to take care of, also Lonny BoB likes digging everywhere, eventually he's likely to cause a cave-in. The second tier room is actually smaller than the top, it needs to merely funnel the water down and provide me with a good place to ensure I have what I need. The bottom tier is where it is at, it's the biggest tier, being it's the actual resevoir for the fortress it needs to hold a fair bit of water, last thing we wanna do is run low mid-winter or when there is a siege going on. Now filling a cistern is where we get the difficulties. First up we need to build a pathway leading towards the river, this will be connected by a channel, to stop the fish and any other nasties swimming in to our safe water supply we will build a fortification in front of a flood gate. Now, for some reason the Dwarves kept trapping themselves on the wrong side of the fortification and I couldn't remember how to forbid the pathway there. Silly me. Still I managed to free the Dwarf with a nice stairwell rescue, the stairway is capped with a hatch which I've since locked.

The floodgate in place there I need to place 2 more floodgates, first: I need one in the bottom resevoir chamber, it's connected to a drain chanel, this is a safety precaution, it's very easy to overflow the cistern during filling. If there is an overflow, the 3rd floodgate will prevent the fortress from flooding but there is no chance to drain the cistern slightly unless you open the 2nd floodgate (1st one lets water in) Therefore by digging to the edge of the map I have created a narrow drainage channel, it's not going to be fast but it should fingers crossed work.

Cistern Level 1 (top):


Cistern Level 2 (middle):


Cistern Level 3 (bottom):


As I said, the 3rd floodgate prevents the fortress from flooding, there is 3 levers in a row, lever on the left is for the 1st floodgate, the 2nd floodgate being the bottom has the middle lever, 3rd floodgate granting access to the cistern is the right hand lever, for the love of all things Dwarven, only operate floodgate 1 if floodgate 3 is closed!

I cannot stress this above paragraph enough, it's vital since the river is limitless and will basically drown anything below it, it's above the hospital where the fort connects to the cistern.

At the same time, as I was building this, the water in the area defrosted, thankfully Psychotic's ramps had been dug out as had the frozen ice walls. Unfortunately for Værn, his mechanics workshop was built on top of a small murky pool by someone. Thankfully for Spoonproblems, Værn was on a break at the time! That was a close call, I was only aware of the mistake when I saw the mechanisms at the bottom of the pool and Værn cancelled a job related to the cisterns. We have a ton of mechanisms at the bottom of a lake.


(note the image here shows the new rocksalt entrance ramp)


(note, image taken on 1st day of summer in game calendar so shows completed trade depot made of stone, new mechanics shop built, bull moose tame brought from elves, hunks of killed enemies/cat)

Also our Trade Depot and Still both de-frosted with the water! I've built 2 stone Stills seen below:



I also built a rock Trade Depot (see above image showing the top level) for us to use instead in the same location as the ice sculpted one was.

I also tagged an extra line in to the craftsdwarf workshop to make rock pots. Pots are great, they can be used for storing certain foods and for storing drink.



This means between our new wave of migrants which gave us an extra wood worker (who is now building a second carpentry workshop) we should never run out of food storage solutions and thus can brew indefinitely.



So far, things seem to be going well... all of this taken care of by the 23rd of Slate 256! What will late spring hold for Spoonproblems?

Edit: Ironically, the ice plug holding the bottom of the moat? Thats fine.