Hello, and welcome to the second part of my rambling bullshit retelling of the story of my very first Fortress, Lensmirrored! Hopefully someone out there finds all my nonsense entertaining (or can at least make sense of it all lol), so here we go...

It's been another 10 years since the last time we talked (and if you've seen that post, some of my notes on the pictures might have been repetitive, so I apologize for that (I didn't include the aquifer stairway mister layer that hasn't changed at all at least lol, no need to thank me), if you haven't seen it I think it's still worth looking at though because it explains some of my reasoning for a lot of the decisions I made, as well as some general background), quite a lot has changed and much is still the same, but the growth of Lensmirrored continues unabated. The dwarfs of Lensmirrored, and Edzul in particular, had a good idea of what they wanted to set up from the start and had the foundations in place well within the first 10 years, so this last decade has mostly been about refining things and finally turning Lensmirrored in to a home truly fit for a real dwarf, where everyone can live in luxury. The only infrastructure project left of any real scale that we've been interested in completing is an underground tree farm so that we can finally close ourselves off from the surface and the hateful sun completely (We already have a floodgate for irrigation at the bottom of the base's well system outflow ready to flood a space, I'm just not sure what scale of a place I'd actually need to dig out, so I'd appreciate any advice on the topic). Oh, and probably a better airlock with two bridges and the trade depot in the middle of them, so we can leave the outer one open for the traders to arrive, then close it behind them to do the trading in safety, but that'll be easy enough. We'd also like to start trying to catch and tame some different cavern creatures, I especially have my eye on a cave dragon, but Edzul's wife, the Duchess Deduk has always had an interest in animal training so that's something we want to do for her either way (and I already have a giant cave spider silk farm built, I just need to finally catch one, plus I watched Blind's video about having a gremlin mayor recently so I'd love to be able to find one of them too, but I digress).

The last year especially has been a haze of constant activity and industry so that the dwarfs could meet the deadline for the 10 year inspection (about a month late, but the first one was a few months early so they figured it all balanced out). One of the major goals, other than developing a glass industry to make bedrooms worthy of the dwarfs of Lensmirrored, has been to get the Brass Balls truly set up to be a world famous inn, now that all of the furniture is encrusted and there is a mist machine and nice private rooms available for rent, as well as massive stockpiles of food and drink, we are about to open it up to all visitors which should be a ton of fun. A few dwarfs have begun to grow upset with the lack of leisure time lately, probably just grumbling about building all of these nice things that they weren't yet allowed to use, but most have still been happy to take on the extra work and there have been no real tantrums thrown in Lensmirrored, and there will definitely be a couple months of leave for everyone now that the inspection is done. We've finally paved and walled all of our living and working spaces (mostly in metals, granite, and marble, with legendary engravings where possible) with all new furniture to match (other than statues and the preexisting filled coffins, we couldn't get rid of those of course), we've begun actual steel production in earnest recently (although we're still only at a couple hundred bars, The World of Hurricanes has been lacking in hematite, severely lacking in magnetite, and I don't think I've found any limonite at all, and I have found literally no coke ores, not a single one, so everything was fueled with charcoal which was incredibly annoying and I've been buying all of the iron and steel I possibly can from the caravans from the start), we've even harassed the power of perpetual motion and the magma sea, all in relative peace and safety, but the dwarfs of Lensmirrored grow restless after 20 years of relative peace and tranquility, all have begun to hear the faint rhythm of the drums of war in the far corners of their minds...

The dwarfs' engravings are always incredibly interesting to me, they can really tell you how the game so far looks from their point of view. Two of the most common engravings are an image of rectangular cabochons, which is the symbol of our government The Banners of Tiring, and a group of dwarfs which is the symbol of our civilization The Defended Hall, so my dwarfs are clearly very patriotic. They also love to memorialize appointments to different positions, like the militia captains or our beloved Champion Strorslayer or one of Edzul's many election victories, and the founding of Lensmirrored itself, but there is one image that is repeated, far, far, far more than any other. I use a group of like 8ish legendary engravers, and I really like to try to use specific dwarfs for specific areas to get a read on their thoughts from time to time, like I had the Duke Edzul, who is one of the legendary engraving squad, do all of the engraving in his rooms personally, one of the things he actually just engraved all on his own when I redid his throne room in rose gold was the story of the Olm Spearman fighting the forgotten beast that I mentioned in the first post, which is just so damn cool, I love this game so much for things like that lol, when I wrote that story of a random incident I watched 10 years ago the dwarfs had never mentioned it themselves, apparently we both recognized how cool it was after all though, plus he did all of the symbols of our culture because like I said the dwarfs of Lensmirrored are all very patriotic, but again, just like the rest of the engravers, at least a third of his engravings are about this one particular story...

In early winter of 113, we were attempting to build an enclosed fishing shack on the surface with an underground tunnel entrance so our poor fisherman could stop puking for a second and finally keep a meal down for once on his way to work, when one of the grates being built over the river suddenly collapsed under Asen 'Rimchain' Tiristnicat, a legendary jewelcrafter (who obviously mattered a lot to me, the next highest rank jewelcrafter was like adept at most) who was also one of the seven founders of Lensmirrored, and he was plunged into the raging river, where more than half a dozen of his friends could do nothing but watch him drown slowly. I think his skeleton is even still visible to them from a certain spot in the shack, so they can never truly forget. Plus, I got distracted and it took me a little while to make him a slab, so he actually came back as a ghost for a day or two, which I'm sure didn't help matters. He was clearly a beloved member of the fortress and his loss deeply impacted all of his friends. Sadly, in 117 we were doing some hospital renovations, and somehow Sibrek Astelkeskal fell in the well, so another dozen poor dwarfs watched another friend drown and I'm already seeing engravings about Sibrek pop up now too, although I put a slab down for him right over his unrecoverable body under the hospital right away. Edzul especially seems to be the one engraving about Asen the most, I think he must be blaming himself and feeling guilty about having commissioned the building of that fishing hut, and he also seems to be the one that makes the most engravings about Asen returning as a ghost too.

I find the development of the religion of the dwarfs of Lensmirrored to be pretty fascinating too. There is a pantheon of 6 gods, every one of which has at least 140 worshipers. There are also 7 different organized religions present in the fort, and yet not one of them has more than 6 worshipers (one of them has literally one follower, and it's the Queen that moved here with her bum-ass husband, but she was throwing a hissy fit over not having a dedicated temple, these royals truly are entitled jerks, the three of them (King, Queen, and Outpost Liaison) showed up like 15 years ago with nothing but demands like a bunch of beggars. They had to have their own quarters underneath everyone else so they could show how superior they were (I just assume deeper is higher status for dwarfs) and they've been pretty isolated ever since, probably because of the Queen's constant condescending attempts at "civilizing" the dwarfs of Lensmirrored and proselytizing the Bronze Creed about ).

Although the numbers of worshipers are all pretty close, there are three gods which the dwarfs clearly favor, the first and most important to them based on the sheer number of statues they make of her is As the Golden (with one of the funky A's), the Goddess of Earth. Next is Vucar the Ashen, a female dwarf Goddess of Death, which I find kind of funny considering my dwarfs have experienced a relatively small amount of deaths in their 20 years, although clearly the drownings have been very impactful. The third most common is Otik (our Duke's favored deity), a massive Yak Bull who is the God of Mountains, Volcanos, Fire, the Sun, and Light (what a set of spheres of influence, huh? Yaks are also one of our main ). The others are The Aqua Iron (a dwarf female Goddess of Wealth), Idor Vigorflash (a female dwarf Goddess of Lightning), and Sodel Saveddefense the Healer of Blockading (a female dwarf Goddess of Fortresses). For some reason, other than Otik who isn't even humanoid, all of their gods are female and they have completely eschewed organized religion.

In my mind, it also ties in perfectly with what my scholars have been up to, all of their studying is done in the Light of Otik's magma, their writings are about astronomy (a treatise on the Sun and Moon was one of their earliest writings) and medicine (one of my first scholars was the chief medical dwarf Asob, and he's writing books on suturing, casts, and medical herbs the last time I checked) and I also find them pondering Lightning all of the time which fits perfectly with their main pantheon's interests. They're like a whole little bunch of Galileos and Hippocrateses. Even the fact that they have experienced a relatively small amount of casualties makes me think that the way they favor Vulcar is about viewing their goddess of death through a less violent lens than most Gods of Death, their worship could be more about preventing death (through medicine, not necromancy lol) than causing it.

Oh, and the last 4 pictures are just some of my current favorite characters. Edzul and Strorslayer are obvious choices, but I've pretty much just taken a liking to Derek because he was goofy as hell and Led mainly because of his description, they're kind of just mascots I check in with from time to time.

Thanks for coming to my TEDx talk again, hopefully it wasn't too painfully boring this time.

I also just remembered, now that we've been hearing the echoes of the drums of war, I have a question for the experts. Is there a way to change the scheduling for training? Like, instead of 3 month blocks, I want to have it alternate every other month except opposite for some squads, so I can essentially train 50% of the fortress at a time but alternating every month, if that makes sense. Is that possible? Or are we restricted to the 4 options of off duty, staggered, constant and ready? Even if it has to be in 3 month blocks, the main thing I want to do is make it alternate so half are always training but I just can't find that option, assuming it even exists.

Here we discuss a method for adding a second floor to a wall without using scaffolding and without babysitting. There are some tradeoffs. Construction must be limited to one dwarf while the second floor is building, and you will need to do a lot of double clicking as wall squares must be specified one by one (but without babysitting since it can be done while construction is in process).

Here we will show how to construct a second floor on a zig zag wall. Here is the finished product:

The method essentially uses the facts that:

1. the next piece of wall our construction dwarf will choose to build is based on the distance from where they are standing when finishing the current construction job,
2. dwarves will haul items off construction sites in a non-diagonal direction (at least as far as I can tell),
3. we can control the locations of the construction material using a stockpile without bins.

Step 0 - Build the first floor

It doesn't matter how you build the first floor. In this example, for accessing the second floor, we have a single ramp on one end.

Step 1 - Set up a labor specification for construction with only one dwarf

Make a custom labor specification for wall/floor constructions:

Then add one dwarf and specify that only selected can do this labor:

Step 2 - Set up a non-binned stockpile on the second floor

Make a non-binned stock pile on the second floor of the wall (so on top of the first floor) for the construction material. In this example we have chosen pear wood logs. It should be non-binned to make sure that there is only one material per square.

Step 3 - Initialize the construction with just one wall square on the end

Pause the game and erase the one square from the stockpile at the end of the wall. In this example, this square is the on the end opposite to the one with the ramp. This should be the square that the dwarf will build first.

Build a wall square one this endpoint using "closest material."

Unpause the game and check the task menu for when the construction dwarf has accepted the job. Note, the dwarf doesn't need to start building yet, just accept the job.

Pause the game.

Step 4 - Specify the rest of the second floor wall

While the game is still paused, delete the rest of the stockpile.

Specify the rest of the wall, one square at a time, using the "closest material". This will probably involve a lot of double clicking. Specifying one square at a time ensures that the material to build each square will be the material located on that square. As far as I can tell, when specifying a group of squares at once, then which material is selected for each square is not predictable.

Step 5 - Let the dwarf build the second floor wall

Unpause the game and let the dwarf build the wall. The dwarf should continue with their current task which is the endpoint you initially specified. The construction site is actually blocked by the material used to build it and this material is on the same square. So the dwarf will actually first need to haul the material off the square.

It seems that dwarves always haul blocking materials in non-diagonal directions. This is important, because we want to control where the dwarf is standing when they finish their current construction. The next square the dwarf will build is the square where they are standing when they finish the current job. So if they move diagonally, then they will skip a square and make a piece of wall non-constructable.

The dwarf should construct the second floor wall in the appropriate order, no more micro managing or babysitting necessary.

There is one catch. Of course this process will be messed up if the dwarf decides to go get a drink or do some other job. Maybe a burrow can be used to prevent this.

Example showing that hauling material off construction squares is necessary

What happens if we don't use a stockpile on the second floor and just use the initialization? Then the dwarf won't take advantage of of the predictability that comes with hauling materials off construction squares. Here is an example. When we initialize the construction appropriately, the dwarf starts at the endpoint:

However, as the dwarf builds the rest of the wall, then they will sometimes move diagonally and cause us to skip squares. This makes it impossible to complete the second floor wall (recall that a construction square will need a nondiagonal neighboring free square):

After ten years with no migrants having to employ human performers and waiting for their citizenship I finished my humble project and I'm quite happy with it :> The statue is a steel statue of a pickaxe. The yellow boxes are my catapults an ballistas - I guess they haven't implemented the model yet

Caught this sucker when he was eating one of my woodcutters, so now he will live in library since he is the only mathematician in the fort.

Child made this after we had killed. All the coyotes around the fort

I thought I was going crazy. I uninstalled and reinstalled the game fully several times, tried several different past versions and betas of the game. No matter what I tried, the game would immediately crash whenever I clicked the button to select what civilization my character would be from.

Searching the internet for this bug found me various posts of other folks getting similar crashes but they all seemed to be able to at least play the game for a little bit before it died on them. No error message, nothing in the error log, nothing in the local files describing what happened. Just the first two screens of selecting your difficulty and race, then I could go no further.

Finally, for whatever reason, after like 20 tries of a couple variations, I decided that I didn't need to have a youtube video playing on one quarter of my monitor and I set the game to fullscreen for my final attempt. It worked. No freeze, no crash. Adventure mode ran perfectly.

So, if you're the kind of person who only has one monitor but likes to multi-content, let this be your sign that you're not going insane, adventure mode just really wants to be the only thing filling up your field of view.

In the year 7141, the goblins of the Disloyalty of Climates besieged Southspoke. Having their duchess killed in the last parlay, this time the dwarves refused to negotiate.

The defences were updated since the last siege but had not been completed. It would be a bloody siege. The army of goblins, beak dogs and trolls (about 170 in total) were funneled through a long and winding tunnel, filled with nine cage traps and twelve highly lethal weapon traps consisting of large, iron serrated disks and spears. After the army had exhausted and severly injured itself on these traps, it was up to the dwarves themselves to finish the job.

Many goblins had managed to dodge the traps, some of which were experienced fighters. A pincer movement was started by opening the northern most iron bridge which led directly into the tunnel. Two professional squads of legendary fighters (consisting of only ten dwarves) and twenty militia dwarves started an attack from both the upper and lower part of the tunnel, killing all and every enemy in between them.

The killing was slow and brutal. During the fighting, about fifteen dwarves lost their lives. Six of them had been legendary fighters. Blood soaked the narrow tunnel, limbs were scattered everywhere and the blood and gore was unimaginable. Finally, when the two dwarven armies reached eachother in the bottom left corridor of the tunnel, silence returned once more.

A great miasma now appeared, the stench of death and war. Then began the great cleaning. The suturing, the crying, the drinking, the comforting... The commemoration of the lost heroes.

Next time, their tunnel would be filled to the brim with traps.

Episode 3 of noclip's Dwarf Fortress documentary series, with the 4th on their Patreon right now if you're interested.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't tear up watching Tarn play the theme just checking out a new guitar.

Thank you yet again noclip.

The garden on top was made with DFHack, I also used build-now towards the end for the last interior floors as my sanity was running low. Besides that every block was hand cutted and placed by hard working dwarves.

The fortress is currently housing 200 dwarves, of which 160 are part of the military. It could potentially house 500+ military dwarves across the 5 lower floors but it would require tremendous imports of drinks and food as the non-cavern soils right below can't produce enough for a literal army, making any long siege a death sentence.

Just like Doldrey from Berserk the fortress was made to be the ultimate defense against invasions, isolated in an empty wasteland on the border between the northern goblin-ridden cold mountains and the more temperate climate south housing dwarves, elves and humans. Problem is that the main threat of this location wasn't goblins but giant flying birds who surprisingly have no problems going over my walls to get inside the fortress. Slightly (very) bothering but I did manage to capture a couple of Rocs. Two dragons also came along and despite making it inside before the gates got closed, they never made it past the third wall before being struck down by the realm's most elite troups. Gold statues of the beasts were placed at the 3rd door to remind everyone that not even fire-breathing creatures from mythic tales can breach our wall.

The noble floor was meant to house, well nobles but unfortunately I have no baron only a mayor, and I've been stuck in a loop of being promoted to a county -> nothing happens, every year for over a decade. I had a whole throne room and luxurious quarters ready for a king that will never come, even had some Secrets of Life and Death for nice bedtime readings while petting the Rocs, his loss.

Takeaways:

-Cave adaptation is a thing, there is more vomit than you can imagine under those gabbro floors

-Not caring for your dwarves isn't a good idea when half of them are legendary axe lords and one single fight can turn into 20+ death

-Dwarves won't care about your dining hall and tavern if they aren't properly placed

-This took way too fking long

Elf eating leaves

Currently genociding the goblin entertainer troupe in my fort

In a fortress I started the other day I broke into a cavern pretty quickly and wasn't able to take control of it before several rutherers and elkbirds slipped past my trap line and out into the sunlands. Luckily none of my dwarves seemed to really care and the animals were keeping their distance, though it was annyoing to see them constantly probing my front entrance to see if they could slip back into the darkness. I managed to dispatch most of them after forming a miliita, but the rutherers had enough time to birth an entire writhing litter of children. Sometime later after a batch of chaos, a group of eight or so troglodytes managed to blitz my trap line again and found themselves running out the front door where they spotted the one remaining baby rutherer that I had been unable to catch. The trogs have spent the last year chasing the rutherer around in a giant circle around my fortress. It's actually been quite beneficial, because all of them are too distracted by the chase to even think about trying to get back underground.

I also kind of wonder if the fact that they all still exist on the map is stalling the event timer somehow? Since the chase started, the cavern that they all came out of has been extremely quiet.

I wish things could be like this forever, but I know this perpetual motion machine is bound to fail someday. Two of the trogs have already been dispatched by a werebadger (who they then killed after he turned back into a human), and I know the rest are not long for the world once I get invaded or some other disaster comes my way. But it's been one of the most entertaining interactions I've ever seen in this game.

Had this one eye monster fly around the caverns for about a day before getting itself stuck beneath my water fall. Hope the dwarves like their mist mixed with a little miasma.

My cook has made a masterwork llama liver roast x760. On average it is worth 6352 per roast!

Seems like llama meat is back on the menu for the coming future.

So basically, for the challenge has these restrictions:

- No stockpiles

- No burrows (who cares lol)

- No work orders

- You can't elect nobles, except for the militia capitain, and the baron, which is the goal of the run.

- [FUN MODE] No zones, including bedrooms/quarters

- [EXTRA FUN MODE] Worst embark(arctic island with terrifying biome, surrounded by goblins/megabeast lairs) and a dead/dying civ

- [BONUS FUN MODE] No usage of the "Labor" menu

- [ULTRA FUN MODE] No military/squads

- [ARMOK MODE] Every month, you have to atom-smash an intelligent creature, bonus if it's a dwarf

As i said, the game is crippled to the point where anything past barony status would be purely reliant on RNG, and most likely impossible. Though capital status with no zones would be extremely fun, because zones, or at least burrows, are required to keep moods at least semi-decent, unless you want to mist your entire fortress, and unless the fortress is at least moderately happy, the monarch won't come. And just atom-smashing the unhappy dwarves won't work, as the fort needs at least 50 citizens for the monarch to arrive

While researching legends I learned that mummies take bribes. I don't know why they need it.