Hoistedworked: Origins
Alright, okay, yeah. Back on the wagon, right here in the woods. It's still plenty remote, cold enough to teach a Dwarf to speak in clicks, and it is actually capable of sustaining life. Sure it's no glacier but the glacier was always a shitty idea. We can at least carve something out here. Like some ideas are actually just bad. Like too bad to manage. This one though is basically fine. We can do this.
See? Look at this shit, it's beautiful. Plants. Trees. Actual solid ground. Since I never introduced the actual decapods before, let's pretend these are all just the same guys, okay? Just for convenience's sake.
Cikuti Worthoars, who likes bobbit worms for their knobs and angles. Oh yeah and suddenly the snow cleared up. Don't ask me, I don't know why.
Cutichi Strengthtown, AWESOME name. He likes to eat seahorse meat and loves two-grain wheat beer.
Chetek Boattrussed, who likes kangaroos for their pouches. 🤔
Cukikuki Townriddle. Big fan of eating giant Brown Recluse spiders, even though she hates cave spiders. I'm not going to ask.
Scukikik Denttongs. Big beak dog fan.
Retuti Livingwheel, groundhog fan and mead drinker. Wonder if we can actually get a bee colony set up here.
And finally Cikuki Prisoncrafts, goat eater. Well, please forgive me if I kind of breeze past the "starter base setup" phase here.
Or, well, I would, but... nobody wants to work. That's not some boomerism, nobody will just pick up the tools to chop wood or dig holes. They gather plants fine, and took apart the wagon without any trouble, but now they're just... gawking...
Reading about it on Reddit, it seems the solution is to just retire the fort and then immediately un-retire it. So we'll try that I guess.
come on... come on... YES!!
We don't even make it all the way down 10 stories before discovering the cavern this time. And before you ask:
yep, fucked up normal grass again. Whatever. It's not as big of a deal this time. One day I really ought to properly ask how that even happens, but for now, I'm just rolling with it.
Up above, all that happened in the two weeks the game makes you wait whenever you start fortress mode again is that the crabs spilled all their prickleberry wine. What a tragedy!
After about a season, we've got a pretty nice setup coming together. All the stockpiles are hidden away under the big main meeting area, the aquifer drains into a cistern, things that rot are kept safely away from the average crab's path, and walls are being built up top to make a more secure entrance. We've eaten a boar and silky sea slug while food stocks were low, and the giant leopard we brought with us "went missing" some time ago - which probably just means it's dead. Giant raccoons have been harrassing us up on the surface, but that's the point of setting up our defenses. It's a much more auspicious start than our first expedition, and with self-sufficiency actually taken care of, we'll be able to get our paper economy and library off the ground sooner than later. We've also found a bit of native platinum quite high up in the earth, but once you start the metal economy, it feels like you just sort of become a metal economy fortress. So we'll hold off on that for now. Also, the giant wolves keep wandering into our meeting hall. Don't worry, they're ours, but they'd probably suit us better outside fending off the raccoons... Oh, and nobody has bedrooms yet. Nobody's too pressed about that, though. One time a really drunk guy came over to my house and when I said "alright that's it for the night" he was like for sure, peace out, slapped my hand, fistbumped me, grabbed his things and walked 5 steps out the front door to fall asleep sitting up on the stairwell of my apartment. So people can do that, people can just sleep on stairs. My roommates found him and were like "what the fuck" and I was also like "what the fuck" because I figured he'd just go home. I think they just let him sleep though. I would've heard it if he fell down the stairs and he didn't. So you can do that.
There's not a lot to say right now. We're not making a ton of money, but we're sustaining ourselves fine.
Defenses are coming together fine, too. Our giant wolves had pups and the pups have the zoomies. It's wonderful.
There's a quantum stockpile now to make woodworking a lot easier. For those not in the know, a "quantum stockpile" is a 1x1 stockpile that gets filled by having a minecart dump into it. The cart races down from the surface, and is just long enough that it doesn't crash at the end, though also just too long to auto-dump - so instead, the solution is to make whoever finishes filling the cart hop in and ride it down so that they can push it the last couple tiles. Or at least, that's the plan; at first crabs just kicked the cart down the ramp, but since I changed it to be ridden instead, everyone's been too busy putting a ceiling over the main "courtyard."
Here's our "administrative wing": counter-clockwise from the top, it houses our expedition leader Worthoars, production supervisor Boattrussed, and sheriff Channeledchain. We've got a hospital set up earlier than we need it for once, but nobody's been appointed chief of medicine yet. I ultimately had to run DFhack drain-aquifer just because the "mist generator" started overflowing, but I've set up "ponds" where any crab with nothing better to do will chuck a bucket of water down from the top of the stairs. The result is the same, so it should cheer everyone up. They'll need it, since...
Roofing the main area has everyone caught in a snowstorm, and though nobody's particularly miserable at all, it's still dragging some crabs down. Oh, and I like this.
Efficiency be damned, I wanted a cool bedroom setup, and looking down into the great hall right when you wake up seems pretty cool to me.
An agitated giant raccoon attacks, but it's put down pretty quickly by the giant wolves. The bigger threat is our own lack of forethought.
I wanted to put grates up above the farm plot there, because I'm not actually sure whether you still need outdoor plants to get sunlight and rain or whatever, or if a tile that was directly exposed to the sun at any point just counts as "outdoors" forever. I honestly think it's the latter but you know what they say about eggs and baskets and all that type of shit.
The problem is that crabs kept trying to put floors down on these tiles, which was possible because they could walk over the grates to reach them, but didn't register to the game as structurally sound, so the floor just instantly collapsed every time they tried to do it. Well, at least nobody died.
Except for just now. I tried to make the quantum stockpile also include rocks, and it worked! But people keep walking out in front of it and getting hit. Somehow, a shrimp survived just fine, but this metalsmith fucking died. It seems obvious to like, not walk on minecart tracks, especially if they're set to the "no" traffic setting, but it's apparently not. A bit of judicious wall use seems to fix it, though. We also make probably the ugliest fucking graveyard I've EVER set up.
Right off to the side of our main noble quarters for whenever we either get a mayor, get elevated to a barony, or whatever else, I just made... I don't know. This spaghetti nightmare. I don't care. If crabs were dying in battle, then you know, I'd take it serious, I'd make a big whole thing out of it or at least plop down the quickfort windmills. But what am I supposed to feel about a guy bashing himself with the fucking minecart? Like... you get what you paid for. And now the next poor saps to die in this fortress get what you paid for too.
Our first artifact is created! Its name translates to "Slippants." Ok. It just has an image of a decapod in it. Not even any particular kind of decapod in specific. But it instantly makes Hailcloistered, or jesus christ how am I supposed to remember this, Ricikikikitikik into a legendary armorsmith. Which is, you know, cool. Yeah, we could probably get some armor going. I neglected to mention I set up a metalsmithing business; I didn't want to, but there are so many metalsmiths in this fortress that they started a guild, and I always wanted to try actually placing workshops in a guild-relevant area instead of just having all the workshops in one place and guild halls somewhere else, so it's a little inefficient, but it looks cool, so who cares.
...and that right there is the last thing I wrote before I stopped playing for 8 months.
I feel like the reveal was always coming: "I was just doing this as a weird cry for help cloaked dick-deep in 69 layers of irony." Like on the surface it looks like it is just a person freaking out but then one layer lower it's actually just a guy fucking around but one more layer it's freaking out again and on and on and on. I don't know what to say besides that. I'm in the first really healthy relationship of my life and trying not to mess it up. I'm still soul-crushingly poor with no real skills or job prospects. I do still play the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress, though much more rarely - I often boot it up with big ambitions to make some Content for The Tube, actually, but I'm simply too good at the game, so nothing interesting happens in my forts, and I end up with twenty gigabytes of footage and ten pages scribbled in a notebook covering six years of fortress management where the most interesting thing that happens is like, I set up a milling industry.
I'm not really interested in Daarunbay Detevay anymore, I'm sorry. It's not like I've deleted it, I keep pretty extensive backups of all my worlds and saves for the greatest simulation game of all time Dwarf Fortress, even though I rarely actually use them, so it's not really going anywhere. If there's any interest I could probably like, put the world folder on pixeldrain or mediafire or whatever and try to compile a mod list, but I'm not making any promises and I doubt anyone really wants that very bad anyway.
...and that right there is the last thing I wrote before I forgot about this draft for 2 months.
In that time, the Adventure Mode beta appeared. I stayed up all night waiting for it to come out, but it was still rough enough that I didn't dive all the way in just yet. However, I realized something after playing as a cockatiel man who got viciously killed for starting random fights with innocent dwarves in my own half-abandoned fortress which went to hell because apparently the AI lets all of the animals out of cages and unlocks all the doors when you retire a fort. There might still be much more to do in Daarunbay Detevay. Rat World may be doomed but there's no reason we couldn't make a party of Rat Bandits. Better yet we could embark from Rushsly on the mission of a lifetime: to kill Vakeek Malignreasons.
So I don't know. Maybe we're going to do that. Maybe I will actually make some YouTube Content and I'll never reveal there that I was the Kobblefort guy but you could see a video and recognize my loquacious schizotypal affect, and you'd be like "dude, aren't you the guy who did Kobblefort?" and I wouldn't respond or maybe I'd be like "what is that" but you'd know. You'd know it was me. But just for the record please don't go around asking Dwarf Fortress YouTubers if they're the Kobblefort guy. Because either they don't know and you have exposed a YouTube person (much more normal than Tumblr people, on the whole) to Kobblefort or you have put me on the spot. So yeah, just forget you ever read any of this, except for during the time where you're reading it. I'm trying to do the exact opposite of "death of the author" here. This is "death of the reader." No that sounds fucked up. This is "life of the author." Sure. See you soon