DfHack has a tool called suspend manager that makes building walls easier, if a wall "A" build is one that would block another wall "B" from being built, it stops wall "A" from being built until wall "B" is done Its pretty neat
it also sadly does the same between any order be it buildings, engravings or furniture which caused me to get 3 defaced masterwork engravings alerts lately lol
It kinda work for walls except the ones right to the stairs, so id avdice build every wall except those in 1 tile range from stairs and then build those
i once had a fortress entirely focused on building 'micro fortresses' within the caverns, i went about using burrows to give various groups of dwarves places to settle and it went well (excluding some villages here and there getting wiped out by my own mismamagement) for a while until the circus came to town.
@@arthurbarros5189 I use bridges and stairs up then deconstruct everything when its done. I also allow all the dwarves to build wood bridges so you don't have to wait for the right dwarf to be free.
"Procedurally Generated Weirdos" sounds like a band name. I've found that one of the (relatively) easier ways to handle building multi-level walls is by using bridges as scaffolding. It's an extra step but helps keeps dwarfs from trapping themselves or their materials in the walls.
My favourite way to block off large swathes of cavern is to use natural stone plugs. You work out how many Z-levels you need, add 2 and mine over there that many Z-levels above the ceiling. You place a support somewhere on top of the plug connecting to the ceiling above it and hook it up to a lever a really good distance away. Then you channel down around the plug all the way until you breach the ceiling of the cavern. The only thing connecting the plug should be the support. Forbid the area below the plug, forbid all the areas near the plug, forbid a 50 block radius from the plug. Pull the lever and watch as a giant, shaped to fit, pillar of natural stone crashes mightily into the cavern below, cutting off access from the outside. Then all you need to do is cover the holes in the ceiling left around the edges from hewing it from the roof and you have yourself a natural stone wall. Extra fun, if you've trapped a flightless FB somewhere, is cutting out a 2-3 Z-level plug above it and dropping it on its head. It doesn't always kill them in my experience but they're certainly easier to finish off when 1/3rd of their body is missing and they're bleeding profusely from half of the remaining 2. Dropping a plug into water is also quite the spectacle. All of it a prime opportunity for dorfs to be dorfy and get into all sorts of mortal trouble.
as a person who has built many a cavern wall, and only watched the first 2 minutes and 42 seconds, my best method thus far is to build/carve a wall of up/down stairs first, a scaffold for construction. Then the entire wall can be built without denying access to other segments. You can throw down the blueprints for both at the same time. Dismantling the scaffolding can be tedious as you do 1 layer at a time, but it isn't necessary.
Guys, do yourself a favor and build directly at the edge. Those empty spaces over time fill with animal people invasions and other FPS destroyers. And once you finaly decide to clear these, your dwarfs stand against an army of 200 bat spearmen that accumulated...
prediction: hoodie hair makes a gaint self sufficiant fortress in the cavern, dwarf gain major cave adaptation, the fortress falls and the dwarves spread out, becoming the firstr troglodytes ^^
my preferred way to build multistory walls is to build a floor scaffolding type deal along one edge of it with one row of floor tiles. that way you can build them all at once, and then later deconstruct the scaffolding the slow way if you want. downside is of course the increased materials needed.
One way to help build in height is to use bridge as scaffolding. With a single stair case and two bridge on each level you can easily build up to 41 length of wall (each bridge as a max length of 20 if I remember right), with little micro needed on the wall itself.
@@ben5056 It cost more material then when just microing the wall construction, but it is way faster construction on large project and way less micro. But you can just deconstruction the scaffolds, once you done, to get back the materials.
You can build multi-Z level walls with little micromanagement by designating floors alongside the intended walls. The floors will allow them access to any of the to be constructed walls without difficulties. Takes a few more resources and a bit more time, but is much less frustrating to do.
I usually build a one-tile-wide bridge along the second (and higher) story of the wall, then deconstruct it once the wall is finished. Way less hassle and resources than floors.
I remember building a great cavern wall system back in ascii. I accidentally built them too close to the border and the forgotten beasts spawned at the top of the wall! Oops
forgotten beasts spawn at the very edge of the settlement border; You should build the wall set a little bit back from the border proper. About 1 - 3 tiles away from the border, like in Hoodie's video. Make sure to build the wall up to the top of the cave to protect against flying beasts!@@ben5056
Its all about scaffolding. You need to put up a wood floor all the way along each layer of wall. Deconstructing that scaffolding? now thats the tricky part. So if you want to be extra canny you can make the scaffolding one space away and then make connecting tissue to wall your building. Then you have the scaffolding under a support thats connected to a leaver. You build the wall all the way once the scaffolding is done. Then when the walls done you deconstruct all those connecting parts that are in-between the wall the walkway. Then you pull the leave and the whole thing collapses into matchsticks. That is if you made the scaffolding with wood. If you made it with stone the impact of the falling stone will come crashing through your basses ceiling. This has happened to me and it was FUN. God i love DF
would it be a good idea to have a tunnel built that extends a bit beyond the wall, with cage traps lining the floor to gather any magnificent and trainable beasts (and of course something to still keep them behind the border of the fortress)?
If you use DFHack and turn on the SuspendManager, dwarves will usually pick the correct wall segment build order so that they're not boxed in. It's not perfect, but it works fairly well.
for multy story walls, i build a second row of floors behind the wall, for the dwarves to walk onto while building can remove it later if desired, and its a lot easier to remove one tile at a time han building one tile at a time can also just build a "stair wall" behind the wall, and demolish it floor by floor afterwards
you know you can just build floors alongside walls everytime you span on another z level so that dwarves can safely mess up the order but still manage to build the wall, it is still tedious but it is much better than just manually building it one tile at a time.
it's very easy to make a scaffolding behind the walls that you take down one you're done. Outside layer is wall or fortification, inside layer is walking surface and stairs. That way you can just que them up and you're only waiting for the foot paths to be laid.
As someone who has used the wall building strategy for caves, a piece of advice: if you build floors, you can designate them to run adjacent to the walls, which will help with issues where the distant walls aren't being built. Just remember, you can only designate LINES of floors attached to a foundation (like a staircase). If you need to extend it or change it, you'll have to re-designate the building spots. Also, as a result, you can build multiple floors at once this way by first making staircases up to whatever Z level you want, then building the floors on each level, and finally putting the walls when they're available to be built. Very cool tip about the trick of flooring over cavern water spots. Never thought about that. Always thought that draining the water was the only way.
Best way to build multi level walls is to first build scaffolding structures, such as floors or stair to allow dwarves to reach every tile of new wall. This requires more material in upstart and a bit more work from dwarves, but it actually shortens build time since all parts of walls can be built in parallel.
The only thing missing is to have a migration corridor going end to end in each cavern that may or may not be filled with deadly traps in order to harvest naturally occurring resources.
Also if you put drawbridge on each wall and separate levers you can control what gets in, so you can trap a herd of tasty elk birds in the caverns for example
I've done this with fortifications built into the second and third Z levels of the walls. My marksdwarf squads would spend days ruthlessly slaughtering waves of molepeople and becoming legendary marksdwarves in the process (along with accumulating massive psychological trauma from the bloodbaths they created)
In my latest fort, I had an issue with rodent people. I had closed off just enough of the cavern for a farm and then ignored the rest cause they just would not stop coming whenever I opened. But this just meant that they were stacking up out in the cavern. Eventually my ~125 dwarves strong fortress was running at a tiny 8fps, dragged down by the masses of rodent people outside the walls in the caverns just waiting to get in, so whats a dwarf to do? My solution was simple: Flood the cavern with magma to burn the rodent menace. I was already pumping magma up to my main floors between cavern 1 and 2, so extending my pump stack another 10 levels was no big deal. But the magma kept flowing out of the cavern at the lower points, leaving rodents on high places free. So I dug tunnels over every single open cavern side, and dropped water in, casting walls ever higher until there were no more access points and all but the highest parts of the cavern was flooded with magma. The few surviving rodent people were driven insane by being trapped in this area of cave and forced into watching everyone they know and love burn to death. More than doubled my fps despite the fps hits incurred by moving that much liquid, 10/10 would create a magma tomb for annoying cavern neighbours again.
One thing I could recommend you do when walling off taverns like this is use something other then wood to block off the entrances. Never know when a forgotten beast that spits fireballs will show up on one end, get into a fight with a different FB, and burn the walls down without meaning to!
You don't need to build pastures or tree farms in the caverns. You can just crack into the cavern to release the spores, then immediately wall it off. The indoor soil at the upper layers of your fort will then start growing grass and mushroom trees.
Done this a few times. The most ridiculous obstacle I ran into was a tree growing out of the cavern water on the edge of the map. I needed to construct a ballista and shoot the trunk to get rid of it 😂
The only true Dwarf way to conquer caverns is to channel to the lava sea, break out 50+ levels of pumping and flood it all with magma. It's the only way to be sure.
Have you tried building scaffolds? Instead of just one stairs going up accessing all the floors, use a cheap material and treat the stairs like scaffold, building one adjacent to every wall. They're easy to disassemble at the end.
You can use controlled cave ins. You can wall off water like this and ensure dwarfs are never get liine of sight to any scary monsters (the cave in wall will fall through a floor if there is no wall under it). It is a nightmare with aquifers though but fun
So far in my fortress I have now I managed to catch a dragon that came through. So I put him in a walled off pit and make him fight any goblin invaders I get by throwing them in.
I wall my cavern entrances off, then stairwell them down into 3-way-intersection with bridge-barriers filled with cage traps. One way to outside. One way for normies to enter when safe and reload cages. One way to a massive ring road per cave level, and then interconnect the ring road caves, and viola, massive labyrinth that you can trap forgotten beasts and invading armies inside of. To top it off, I will link all bridges from cave to outside to a single lever, and all bridges for trap-reload to a single lever, so I just need to pull two levers to reload all my traps safely.
Ive dealt with multi level walls before numerous times, and i just build stairwalls along every single wall tile to make the process smooth, then deconstruct the stairs one level at a time
Maybe make paths to the center and make an arena for those monsters to put on a fight show for dwarves who are looking at them while partying in the pub from the higher floors 😂
Do you know if your save will carry over to adventure mode ? Would love to see how everything turned out after the fortress was retired. Similar to an older video you made on the free version
Quick question: Cant cavern borders be used for a underground road to other dwarven settlements and invite trade and settlers? This is all theoretical... I never managed to find a cavern? Is that because I dig down to stone (generally no more than 5 levels ) and have been focused on community building rather than digging deeper and deeper and deeper. I just make mud basins and make farms there. Sort of additional thought. I ALWAYS use slopes to dig down. I figure I can at the least use minecarts, i can put roads but... are stairs just plain better? Building one deep stairwell down to a cavern?
You don't need to micromanage wallbuilding if yoi construvt updown stairs along the wall. This way every dwarf has a path in and out. Just build tjem out of excess lightweight material such as wood
you can just make the second level walls one tile offset, like the ones at 2:00 would've been easier if you placed the second layer of wall one block left so they can walk on the previous wall and place the next layer as they please
Not played in a while and rarely ever built multi storey walls, but seems to me like the problem is having only a single staircase. If you put staircases next to every space that needs wall, does that not mean they then have the ability to just build any of the wall segments in any order? Or do they still get stuck somehow?
Doing a lot of wall construction in this game has made DFhack a permanent staple because of the suspend manager making multi level walls and corner walls take no micromanagement
smart but maybe too foolproof? I'm surprised there aren't monsters that occasionally challenge your walls, necessitating at least a quick reaction force
What about the cavern dwellers that invade? Like the ant people? It's been a bit since i've played, but I do recall them just spawning in the caverns and not coming in from the edges.
I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure they just look like they spawn in because they are invisible until spotted by a dwarf. I think they still have to come from the edges.
Just set up a system of mine carts to regularly dump magma from the magma sea over the edge of the wall and into the edge pockets. Dwarven Hot Pockets.
I typically just build stairs up to the top of the walls along the WHOLE wall, but only if it’s small. I think DFHack has a feature for making it be done smartly but that might be considered cheating by some!
Personally, I actually dislike the cavers because of this kind of stuff I of course understand that you make your own Fun in dorf fort, but caverns just by how they work kind of put you in a situation where you either cheese it by blocking the entrances, nullifying the entire challenge of the "biome", or you accept that you'll lose dwarves all the time as your dwarves stumble in there and flee in the opposite direction of safety, or stand and fight (and die, because at best they have an axe against a poorly armored, but armored, fish man horde) There's just no easy way to manage the cavers to have that sense of challenge and danger, without all your dwarves dying in droves, and tearing the fortress apart as everyone's moods drop to 0 from having their whole family torn apart by neanderthals or whatever else. Not to mention the speed corpses build up at, and all the miasma that comes with it
Kitting everyone out with an axe is a bit of a bandaid, but I really wish you could designate a zone, kind of like a burrow, except in this zone there is a rule: dwarves may only enter if they have a currently active-duty military escort. Let me have my dwarves enter the untamed caverns, but on the condition they bring a guy with a warhammer and armor with them, because it is dangerous out there
You can build on the map edge in the caverns to prevent the spawns rather than trapping them. Your poor frame rate. I paused a bit less than half way in to type that. I made your mistake years ago, opening a wall that had been hiding 500 cavern invaders takes 9 fps to 9 spf.
If you want to build your walls quicker, you build/carve a line of stairs going to the ceiling first. Then your dwarves will be able to prioritize walls on their own. Then you can deconstruct the stairs when the wall is built
I don't get it, why no (popular) comments mention a possibility to just build slanted walls, like L - wall, 0 - nothing 00L 0L L Why would I care for straight walls somewhere far away where I don't even see them? No need to even make and then remove scaffolds, just use n-level wall as a scaffold for n+1. Also strange how I never played with immediately digging down to caverns, always doing it only when I have a decent full squad ready
You forgot the most important use for conquered caverns: building a massive z-level spanning cavern tavern.
Would be cool if we could run a 10.000 dwarf fortress
@@pooshpoosh9232What does that mean?
@@EternamDoovguessing they mean "it would be cool to have a 10,000 dwarf strong fortress." naturally, this would lag out even the most powerful cpus
DfHack has a tool called suspend manager that makes building walls easier, if a wall "A" build is one that would block another wall "B" from being built, it stops wall "A" from being built until wall "B" is done
Its pretty neat
I knew there had to be a DFHack command I was missing! Thank you!
it also sadly does the same between any order be it buildings, engravings or furniture which caused me to get 3 defaced masterwork engravings alerts lately lol
@@hoodiehairyou can also embark directly in the caverns using a dfhack plugin (deep-embark, I think)
It kinda work for walls except the ones right to the stairs, so id avdice build every wall except those in 1 tile range from stairs and then build those
No torture? Needless death? No actual crimes against dorfdom? You're slacking off.
You haven’t posted in 13 years so whose really slacking off?
The lack of death and disaster is so bad they had to break their silence
i once had a fortress entirely focused on building 'micro fortresses' within the caverns, i went about using burrows to give various groups of dwarves places to settle and it went well (excluding some villages here and there getting wiped out by my own mismamagement) for a while until the circus came to town.
Classic FUN loving circus
Send in the clooooowns
I tend to just make floors on a side of each level when building multi story walls. It feels faster and seems neat to me, basically scaffolding.
yeah I usually do the same, I was just burning through wood and stone as fast as I could get it with the walls alone
I use bridges. You can build and desconstruct bigger floors faster this way.
@@arthurbarros5189 oh true, will give them a go next time!
@@arthurbarros5189 I use bridges and stairs up then deconstruct everything when its done. I also allow all the dwarves to build wood bridges so you don't have to wait for the right dwarf to be free.
@@hoodiehairMake your logs and boulders into blocks! Absolutely necessary with building projects
"Procedurally Generated Weirdos" sounds like a band name.
I've found that one of the (relatively) easier ways to handle building multi-level walls is by using bridges as scaffolding. It's an extra step but helps keeps dwarfs from trapping themselves or their materials in the walls.
You're insane for building a massive floor over the giant lake instead of just building a wall at the water's edge. But I love it.
My favourite way to block off large swathes of cavern is to use natural stone plugs.
You work out how many Z-levels you need, add 2 and mine over there that many Z-levels above the ceiling. You place a support somewhere on top of the plug connecting to the ceiling above it and hook it up to a lever a really good distance away. Then you channel down around the plug all the way until you breach the ceiling of the cavern. The only thing connecting the plug should be the support.
Forbid the area below the plug, forbid all the areas near the plug, forbid a 50 block radius from the plug.
Pull the lever and watch as a giant, shaped to fit, pillar of natural stone crashes mightily into the cavern below, cutting off access from the outside. Then all you need to do is cover the holes in the ceiling left around the edges from hewing it from the roof and you have yourself a natural stone wall.
Extra fun, if you've trapped a flightless FB somewhere, is cutting out a 2-3 Z-level plug above it and dropping it on its head. It doesn't always kill them in my experience but they're certainly easier to finish off when 1/3rd of their body is missing and they're bleeding profusely from half of the remaining 2.
Dropping a plug into water is also quite the spectacle.
All of it a prime opportunity for dorfs to be dorfy and get into all sorts of mortal trouble.
as a person who has built many a cavern wall, and only watched the first 2 minutes and 42 seconds, my best method thus far is to build/carve a wall of up/down stairs first, a scaffold for construction. Then the entire wall can be built without denying access to other segments. You can throw down the blueprints for both at the same time. Dismantling the scaffolding can be tedious as you do 1 layer at a time, but it isn't necessary.
2:30 when I build multi-level walls I always make a row of floors next to my walls.
i use bridges the same way, they are more easy to deconstruct later on
@@artserg2169 I was looking for this comment, bridges as scaffolding for the win!
@@artserg2169me too.
Now in steam version you can make longer than 10 tiles bridges.
@@artserg2169 genius!
scaffolding is always the most important part of construction :)
Easiest way to build multi story wall is to build a multi story staircase then the wall next to it.
Guys, do yourself a favor and build directly at the edge. Those empty spaces over time fill with animal people invasions and other FPS destroyers. And once you finaly decide to clear these, your dwarfs stand against an army of 200 bat spearmen that accumulated...
prediction: hoodie hair makes a gaint self sufficiant fortress in the cavern, dwarf gain major cave adaptation, the fortress falls and the dwarves spread out, becoming the firstr troglodytes ^^
omg hoodiehair uploaded ! !
my preferred way to build multistory walls is to build a floor scaffolding type deal along one edge of it with one row of floor tiles. that way you can build them all at once, and then later deconstruct the scaffolding the slow way if you want. downside is of course the increased materials needed.
Or just leave the scaffold and build really thick, hollow walls for style points.
One way to help build in height is to use bridge as scaffolding.
With a single stair case and two bridge on each level you can easily build up to 41 length of wall (each bridge as a max length of 20 if I remember right), with little micro needed on the wall itself.
The advantage of bridges is lower material cost and faster build time, right? Neat
@@ben5056 It cost more material then when just microing the wall construction, but it is way faster construction on large project and way less micro. But you can just deconstruction the scaffolds, once you done, to get back the materials.
@iniudan thank for the extra info. I'll try that out next time I need a tall wall
You can build multi-Z level walls with little micromanagement by designating floors alongside the intended walls. The floors will allow them access to any of the to be constructed walls without difficulties.
Takes a few more resources and a bit more time, but is much less frustrating to do.
I usually build a one-tile-wide bridge along the second (and higher) story of the wall, then deconstruct it once the wall is finished. Way less hassle and resources than floors.
Note: a quick way to get walls done is using a bridge for scaffolding! Minimal resources & the entire thing just needs 1 dwarf when deconstructed.
I remember building a great cavern wall system back in ascii. I accidentally built them too close to the border and the forgotten beasts spawned at the top of the wall! Oops
How many tiles away should they be?
forgotten beasts spawn at the very edge of the settlement border; You should build the wall set a little bit back from the border proper. About 1 - 3 tiles away from the border, like in Hoodie's video. Make sure to build the wall up to the top of the cave to protect against flying beasts!@@ben5056
@@ben5056 Same amount as in the video, 4-7 to be safe
@@MasterChief-ie2xu thank you!
Its all about scaffolding.
You need to put up a wood floor all the way along each layer of wall. Deconstructing that scaffolding? now thats the tricky part.
So if you want to be extra canny you can make the scaffolding one space away and then make connecting tissue to wall your building. Then you have the scaffolding under a support thats connected to a leaver. You build the wall all the way once the scaffolding is done. Then when the walls done you deconstruct all those connecting parts that are in-between the wall the walkway. Then you pull the leave and the whole thing collapses into matchsticks. That is if you made the scaffolding with wood. If you made it with stone the impact of the falling stone will come crashing through your basses ceiling. This has happened to me and it was FUN.
God i love DF
would it be a good idea to have a tunnel built that extends a bit beyond the wall, with cage traps lining the floor to gather any magnificent and trainable beasts (and of course something to still keep them behind the border of the fortress)?
Neat, this is also what I did with my first proper fortress
oh thank you, this an amazing idea
If you use DFHack and turn on the SuspendManager, dwarves will usually pick the correct wall segment build order so that they're not boxed in. It's not perfect, but it works fairly well.
Build one vertical stair every 3 tiles inside the wall first then you can build each layer fully with minimal management
Or just use dfhack
for multy story walls, i build a second row of floors behind the wall, for the dwarves to walk onto while building
can remove it later if desired, and its a lot easier to remove one tile at a time han building one tile at a time
can also just build a "stair wall" behind the wall, and demolish it floor by floor afterwards
you know you can just build floors alongside walls everytime you span on another z level so that dwarves can safely mess up the order but still manage to build the wall, it is still tedious but it is much better than just manually building it one tile at a time.
That's usually how I build walls but I was burning through wood and stone so fast I decided to embrace the tedium lol
@@hoodiehair dear god ...
@@hoodiehair are you an elf? just cut more trees
it's very easy to make a scaffolding behind the walls that you take down one you're done. Outside layer is wall or fortification, inside layer is walking surface and stairs. That way you can just que them up and you're only waiting for the foot paths to be laid.
Build stairs every 4th block on the inside up to the top of wall, and you can then designage all building without much fear of dorfs messing it up.
As someone who has used the wall building strategy for caves, a piece of advice: if you build floors, you can designate them to run adjacent to the walls, which will help with issues where the distant walls aren't being built. Just remember, you can only designate LINES of floors attached to a foundation (like a staircase). If you need to extend it or change it, you'll have to re-designate the building spots.
Also, as a result, you can build multiple floors at once this way by first making staircases up to whatever Z level you want, then building the floors on each level, and finally putting the walls when they're available to be built.
Very cool tip about the trick of flooring over cavern water spots. Never thought about that. Always thought that draining the water was the only way.
Best way to build multi level walls is to first build scaffolding structures, such as floors or stair to allow dwarves to reach every tile of new wall. This requires more material in upstart and a bit more work from dwarves, but it actually shortens build time since all parts of walls can be built in parallel.
You can make scaffolding for building walls out of drawbridges and stairs, pretty easily
The only thing missing is to have a migration corridor going end to end in each cavern that may or may not be filled with deadly traps in order to harvest naturally occurring resources.
Also if you put drawbridge on each wall and separate levers you can control what gets in, so you can trap a herd of tasty elk birds in the caverns for example
I've done this with fortifications built into the second and third Z levels of the walls. My marksdwarf squads would spend days ruthlessly slaughtering waves of molepeople and becoming legendary marksdwarves in the process (along with accumulating massive psychological trauma from the bloodbaths they created)
By the way, some forgotten beasts are made out of flame. So, use rock blocks and doors for your walls whenever possible.
In my latest fort, I had an issue with rodent people. I had closed off just enough of the cavern for a farm and then ignored the rest cause they just would not stop coming whenever I opened. But this just meant that they were stacking up out in the cavern. Eventually my ~125 dwarves strong fortress was running at a tiny 8fps, dragged down by the masses of rodent people outside the walls in the caverns just waiting to get in, so whats a dwarf to do?
My solution was simple: Flood the cavern with magma to burn the rodent menace. I was already pumping magma up to my main floors between cavern 1 and 2, so extending my pump stack another 10 levels was no big deal. But the magma kept flowing out of the cavern at the lower points, leaving rodents on high places free. So I dug tunnels over every single open cavern side, and dropped water in, casting walls ever higher until there were no more access points and all but the highest parts of the cavern was flooded with magma.
The few surviving rodent people were driven insane by being trapped in this area of cave and forced into watching everyone they know and love burn to death.
More than doubled my fps despite the fps hits incurred by moving that much liquid, 10/10 would create a magma tomb for annoying cavern neighbours again.
Idk, that mushroom wood is pretty fire
I use bridges as scafolding when building walls. Can be built before any of the wall, and is cheap.
WE LOVE YOU HOODIE HAIR
One thing I could recommend you do when walling off taverns like this is use something other then wood to block off the entrances. Never know when a forgotten beast that spits fireballs will show up on one end, get into a fight with a different FB, and burn the walls down without meaning to!
Great video hoddiehair!
You don't need to build pastures or tree farms in the caverns. You can just crack into the cavern to release the spores, then immediately wall it off. The indoor soil at the upper layers of your fort will then start growing grass and mushroom trees.
Done this a few times. The most ridiculous obstacle I ran into was a tree growing out of the cavern water on the edge of the map. I needed to construct a ballista and shoot the trunk to get rid of it 😂
Its beautiful
Ive always just built wooden scaffolding along the wall.
what is the beast climbing or flying over if the level above is covered by rock/floor?
now to conquer the surface
The only true Dwarf way to conquer caverns is to channel to the lava sea, break out 50+ levels of pumping and flood it all with magma.
It's the only way to be sure.
Have you tried building scaffolds? Instead of just one stairs going up accessing all the floors, use a cheap material and treat the stairs like scaffold, building one adjacent to every wall. They're easy to disassemble at the end.
You can use controlled cave ins. You can wall off water like this and ensure dwarfs are never get liine of sight to any scary monsters (the cave in wall will fall through a floor if there is no wall under it). It is a nightmare with aquifers though but fun
2:44 I just put a layer of flooring down next to every layer of wall, takes more resources but drives me much less insane.
phasing monsters: "hold my beer"
j/k I assume they don't exist.
not yet at least.
Build a floor adjacent to the walls on upper levels and the dwarfs can access the whole wall and you can designate all at once.
Great advice! I'm shocked D:
So far in my fortress I have now I managed to catch a dragon that came through. So I put him in a walled off pit and make him fight any goblin invaders I get by throwing them in.
you can use the mod DF hack to have your dwarfs micro managed by itself.
DF hack is a must...as its an oversight by the dev, i dont see it as a hack.
A tip for making multi z level wall, I just build staircases pararel to the walls that makes sure dwarfs dont screw it up building
My preferred way to set up multy-story walls is to build floors next to them as scaffolding first.
Really, it's the only way to do it where you don't have to micromanage the entire process.
You are exactly what this community needs. A very popular streamer has become so jaded, DF has lost all enjoyment. LOVE YOUR VIDEOS
DFhack makes them build logically
Build stairswall then wall side by side then draws can build wall easy
I wall my cavern entrances off, then stairwell them down into 3-way-intersection with bridge-barriers filled with cage traps. One way to outside. One way for normies to enter when safe and reload cages. One way to a massive ring road per cave level, and then interconnect the ring road caves, and viola, massive labyrinth that you can trap forgotten beasts and invading armies inside of.
To top it off, I will link all bridges from cave to outside to a single lever, and all bridges for trap-reload to a single lever, so I just need to pull two levers to reload all my traps safely.
Ive dealt with multi level walls before numerous times, and i just build stairwalls along every single wall tile to make the process smooth, then deconstruct the stairs one level at a time
*stairwells
Maybe make paths to the center and make an arena for those monsters to put on a fight show for dwarves who are looking at them while partying in the pub from the higher floors 😂
Do you know if your save will carry over to adventure mode ? Would love to see how everything turned out after the fortress was retired. Similar to an older video you made on the free version
This video is also why you shouldn't miss out watching when notified by youtube
Quick question: Cant cavern borders be used for a underground road to other dwarven settlements and invite trade and settlers?
This is all theoretical... I never managed to find a cavern? Is that because I dig down to stone (generally no more than 5 levels ) and have been focused on community building rather than digging deeper and deeper and deeper. I just make mud basins and make farms there.
Sort of additional thought. I ALWAYS use slopes to dig down. I figure I can at the least use minecarts, i can put roads but... are stairs just plain better? Building one deep stairwell down to a cavern?
King of the caverns = King under the Mountain
You don't need to micromanage wallbuilding if yoi construvt updown stairs along the wall. This way every dwarf has a path in and out. Just build tjem out of excess lightweight material such as wood
you can just make the second level walls one tile offset, like the ones at 2:00 would've been easier if you placed the second layer of wall one block left so they can walk on the previous wall and place the next layer as they please
Not played in a while and rarely ever built multi storey walls, but seems to me like the problem is having only a single staircase. If you put staircases next to every space that needs wall, does that not mean they then have the ability to just build any of the wall segments in any order? Or do they still get stuck somehow?
Problem? Walls.
Spoken like a truu Urist McWallBuilder
Something is wrong here...
Is this an episode where no dwarf met a gruesome end?
perhaps that giant olm hit a dwarf off-screen, exploding his head in gore
Doing a lot of wall construction in this game has made DFhack a permanent staple because of the suspend manager making multi level walls and corner walls take no micromanagement
i.. didnt even know there were caverns.
smart but maybe too foolproof? I'm surprised there aren't monsters that occasionally challenge your walls, necessitating at least a quick reaction force
What about the cavern dwellers that invade? Like the ant people? It's been a bit since i've played, but I do recall them just spawning in the caverns and not coming in from the edges.
I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure they just look like they spawn in because they are invisible until spotted by a dwarf. I think they still have to come from the edges.
Can you not build stairs and floors to act as scaffold to build walls?
its just matter of time 100s of cavern guys stack up and cause fps drop
the issue I had with this cavern approach was that cavern dweller armies would just spawn in the edge pockets and sit there dragging down my FPS.
Just set up a system of mine carts to regularly dump magma from the magma sea over the edge of the wall and into the edge pockets.
Dwarven Hot Pockets.
Weird, I do this on every fortress, I thought that's what everyone did! I feel like I wasted so much time!
i hhave no idea what this game is but i enjoy this video, cheers
How about that creeper that explodes wall?
I typically just build stairs up to the top of the walls along the WHOLE wall, but only if it’s small. I think DFHack has a feature for making it be done smartly but that might be considered cheating by some!
Yeeahh, wall construction in and by itself is why DF hack now lives forever on my DF playthroughs just to prevent that particular derp.
Cant you use bridges to wall of?
Bridges, when raised, count as 1 level high. Should work for single floor sections of the cavern, though.
Drawbridge :)
deditated wam
✅
Please install dfhack it has builtin tools for most of the vanilla annoyances like construction and they are automatic
Personally, I actually dislike the cavers because of this kind of stuff
I of course understand that you make your own Fun in dorf fort, but caverns just by how they work kind of put you in a situation where you either cheese it by blocking the entrances, nullifying the entire challenge of the "biome", or you accept that you'll lose dwarves all the time as your dwarves stumble in there and flee in the opposite direction of safety, or stand and fight (and die, because at best they have an axe against a poorly armored, but armored, fish man horde)
There's just no easy way to manage the cavers to have that sense of challenge and danger, without all your dwarves dying in droves, and tearing the fortress apart as everyone's moods drop to 0 from having their whole family torn apart by neanderthals or whatever else.
Not to mention the speed corpses build up at, and all the miasma that comes with it
Kitting everyone out with an axe is a bit of a bandaid, but I really wish you could designate a zone, kind of like a burrow, except in this zone there is a rule: dwarves may only enter if they have a currently active-duty military escort.
Let me have my dwarves enter the untamed caverns, but on the condition they bring a guy with a warhammer and armor with them, because it is dangerous out there
You can build on the map edge in the caverns to prevent the spawns rather than trapping them. Your poor frame rate.
I paused a bit less than half way in to type that. I made your mistake years ago, opening a wall that had been hiding 500 cavern invaders takes 9 fps to 9 spf.
Just use DFhack auto designation so you wont have to fiddle with that wallshit
If you want to build your walls quicker, you build/carve a line of stairs going to the ceiling first. Then your dwarves will be able to prioritize walls on their own. Then you can deconstruct the stairs when the wall is built
when you're making a two story wall like that try just making floors adjacent to the second story so dwarfs can build them in any order they want
I don't get it, why no (popular) comments mention a possibility to just build slanted walls, like L - wall, 0 - nothing
00L
0L
L
Why would I care for straight walls somewhere far away where I don't even see them? No need to even make and then remove scaffolds, just use n-level wall as a scaffold for n+1.
Also strange how I never played with immediately digging down to caverns, always doing it only when I have a decent full squad ready