I had a werebeast attack me on year 2 and it resulted in a catastrophic infection that hit me once every month for the next three full moons.
Werepangolin invades. Catches my fisherdwarves and farmers off guard but my soldiers come in and make short work of it before it gets to the front door of the base.
I think everything is OK because I completely forget that werebeasts… like… infect you with wereshit. I just let the hospital handle everything and focus on the caravan that’s just arrived.
Halfway through negotiations with the caravan, the diplomat visiting me dies. Everyone dies. blood all over my crafting and trade depot area. Dead water buffalo and dogs everywhere. Turns out that three of the folks who were in the fight with the pangolin instantly transformed on the next full moon into pangolins themselves. They are killed quickly but a third of the fortress dies because the fight broke out within in the scrum of dwarves that was carrying my one billion mussel shell crafts from the craft station to the trading post. I go from over 60 to around 40 in about three seconds.
Enough visitors survive that I can finish trading. Everyone else goes to the hospital and I immediately bar the door and begin checking them and everyone else for cut wounds. I need to figure out who is infected.
I use burrows to quarantine the infected and separate the healthy. Halfway through checking the medical history and health status of every dwarf in the fortress (there are over 40 of them) I decide to wall up the hospital to minimize chances of someone escaping. All injured dwarves outside the hospital get exiled immediately. I lose about 10 dwarves this way. It takes me almost an hour to do all this
At the next full moon, two of the eight or so dwarves in the hospital transform and kill everyone there. They even fight one another. Only one transformed fisherdwarf is left. Unfortunately, two pangolins transform inside the tavern as well–it turns out that a guest was infected also, and I missed checking him, and wouldn’t have been able to expel him anyway. Almost everyone in the tavern is injured. I immediately expel every citizen who was hurt and destroy the tavern so that they’ll leave.
They don’t all leave. It happens again in here the next month but is very localized to the tavern area where a lot of them are still standing around. Repeat process.
I am on the edge of my seat for the next month hoping that all these injured guests leave my house and in the end they do. I have to reject a bunch of petitions of these possibly-injured guests asking to live in my fortress. In the end all the sickeness is purged. I am left with 20 dwarves.
The next year goes by, everyone recovers, a couple huge waves of migrants get my base working again. I go up to one hundred fucking dwarves in the space of a year, become a barony and a county, etc. Incredible. All my work orders are still intact so the moment I have enough bodies to operate the fortress it’s all running smoothly.
Another fucking pangolin attacks. This time my army of human mercenaries led by one dwarf fucking wrecks it before it can even get to the doorway. I have to then read the fight reports for every participant to make sure that they were not bitten or scratched by the beast. They are all fine–thank god for their armor–and everyone goes on their merry way.
I now have to figure out a way to werebeast-proof my entire fucking operation here. Christ!!!
I’d say a combination of making sure you have a fuckload of crossbows (I always arm most of my army with crossbows) and good fortification practices. Anywhere outside that isn’t required to be open air like a refuse stockpile or a farm plot for outdoors plants should get covered up by stonework and protected by guards probably. Also prepares for goblin invasions.
My current fort is just absolutely exploding with population. After my last post and in the span of a few months I have gone up to 100+. Still trying to figure out what to do with all these goobers.
I had to construct an enormous tomb complex for all the bodies. I’m still finding random corpses around my fortress. Also, animals keep gathering in my temples and guild halls and starving to death which is very funny.
I am excited to be playing this for the first time. My scant experience with Rimworld seems somewhat translatable but I can’t yet get as far in DF as I can in that game. I am experiencing the basic problem of having no idea how to cultivate food! The game says to grow underground using seeds (the tutorial says to use Plump Helmet Spawn that are supposedly in the starting cart, but my fallow fields always say “no seeds”) but I can never find good cavern soil the game encourages me to locate. I only ever have clay and peat and sand to build underground fields in and I never seem to have seeds!
The ideal soil is to flood a room with water to make it “mud” and then plant on it. You can plant on clay/loam in a pinch but you won’t get much yield. If you need seeds, ask the liaison for them.
I’m setting up an anti-vampire wasting zombie squad that’s gonna patrol the dorms continuously and check bedrooms for dead bodies. Maybe I’ll catch the motherfucker in the act…
Thought busting this open would cause my dwarf to drown, but they’re not that dumb. My miner just ran out the room when I let it flow. Sadly, I don’t think this will create enough mud.
I do have a river south of me, I guess I just don’t know how to utilize these things. Am I diverting the river through my fortress? Also, this little guide I read to start me off this time told me to select a starter location that didn’t have an aquifer of any kind, so no. Honestly not sure why it suggested that.
No, the guide is correct to suggest not having an aquifer – they’re an absolute bear to deal with in terms of getting through them and because of the way pressure works in the engine, it’s not something you want to be doing when you don’t have a lot of experience (although as always, there’s a lot of fun to be had there if you do).
Rerouting the river into your fort is the best way to get a water source setup, yes. I’d check out the following wiki page about it:
The best way to get water from a river is to build channels, which will create a trench that the water will run through, that then goes into your fort – the real key is to dig everything out before actually getting water running through it – and the two constructions that are the most important here are doors and floodgates. They both block water flow when closed and allow it when open, doors have the advantage that dwarfs can use them if they’re fleeing a flood, they also have the disadvantage that dwarfs can open them, causing a flood! Floodgates need to be linked to a lever using mechanisms in order to be opened and closed.
Attached is a picture of how a typical farm setup would work, using multiple floodgates and a series of rooms (this also doesn’t show how you would get the actual water down the proper z-level in your fort, although many of the same principles apply):
found my vampire. in hindsight, it should’ve been obvious, since she’s the only dwarf with any knowledge in the whole fortress. also she remembered “reliving the death” of one of the dwarves that died alone. CONVICTED VIA WRONGTHINK.
Finding this person’s tutorial vids useful for introducing you to basic things that dwarfs need and can do, basic knowledge stuff. He isn’t super prescriptive, his fortress is just a demonstration of what a player can do and at least serves as a model for getting started to later on deviate from. Doesn’t feel like I’m learning some meta starter strat that is going to lead to uniformity, which I always worry about when asking for help with games like these.
