Cavern Safety Guide - Dwarf Fortress Tips

hey there I'm further reading today we're talking about the caverns first a brief explanation about what the Cavaliers are they're treated when heavy Embark and these are open areas filled with fungal growths fungal trees and all manner of strange creatures once you get deep enough you'll also start seeing volcanic walls in bed with gems some of which can have nasty surprises waiting for you first biggest danger with Dino the Cavalier comes from your own dwarfs your own dwarves are very very stupid and they will run into the cabin there if they consider the jobs for them to do out there so you want to try to prevent as many jobs as possible generating by the time you are preaching the cabin there so what I would recommend is when you're on the surface before you unpause the wave a start you're going to go into your labor menu standing orders Siege of them forbidding we're going to forbid used ammo forbid you are dead forbid your Dead items forbid other non-hunted dead forbid other Dead items so basically everything is forbidden that's because when you start immediately there's already gonna be stop fighting in the cavern layers if you wait to set this up when you breach into the layers there's gonna be a bunch of unforbidden items scattered about the place that your dwarves are gonna rush in to pick up you also want to go to automated workshops and turn of automatic web collection that handles most of the jobs but not all one of the first exceptions is vermin killed by a Vermin hunting pets you'll see here we've got a cave spider and over here we have a creepy crawler these are Vermin that will start spawning when you open up the cabin there if you have something like a cat or peregrine falcon that is not pastured they can escape into the caverns and they can stop killing these animals so your dwarves will want to pick them up and take them back in you could just set your dwarves to ignore all refuse but I want them to be taken to my refu stockpiles when they've been killed in my base so I don't have a bunch of vermin corpses all over my base instead all you have to do is make sure that any pets you have that's not Vermin or pastures the second issue is going to be blood and ikor and all the other various liquids that can spread out of a monster when it's being killed in the cabin there this is considered inside Again by your dwarves so they don't want to clean up this blood and this blood is probably in a dangerous area so you know what that happening so you want to limit who can clean your blood the method that I like to do is I like to make my Monster Hunters do it so first of all I'm gonna create a custom labor so I go here to my labor menu uh I do I do work details see down here I've got one already called janitor and for the janitor work detail the only job that it does is cleaning and nothing else then I decided to only select to do this and I'm going to assign this to my Monster Hunters uh Monster Hunters are people that will come and join your fort once you start opening the Cavaliers you can see here the devonated by this Dragon symbol Monster Hunters and other long-term residents will not appear in the labor menu however if you go to their character panel directly and go to the labor tab you can actually sign jobs down here so I'm going to set this guy to only be a janitor and it'll focus only on that job and now he's gonna be running around uh cleaning up messes what's handy with monster Slayers is Monster Slayers are wearing uh armor and they've got weapons and their combat stats you know are fine so it's actually okay for them to be out and about in the cabin there for the most part but regard beasts are where there's a big cabin dweller raid you know maybe you don't want them out there but in terms of dealing with like crocodiles and giant toads and the general monsters that might be about there the most hotels can can handle that fine so that covers the first part which is prevention making sure that your dwarves are generally not getting into the cabin layer and those that are getting in can kind of take care of themselves that's what you already shot in the cabin there while there is a base level of danger all the time now again it becomes more dangerous you'll either get raided by Cavern dwellers or you'll get attacked by a forgotten Beast so you want to make sure that when this happens your dwarves are extra safe and you can use both for that but bows are a bit tricky to get working right Bose seem like they don't make much sense but usually that's because of a misconception what a bow does is it doesn't restrict where a dwarf can go it restricts what jobs a dwarf can get Okay so here in Bow number one because I set this to the count Source goods from outside the bowl that means that anyone who has a job in ball number one can only use Goods that are available inside of bone number one I can only use workshops or inside of bow number one so if I have a stone Mason and he wants to use some of this chart for a job because this chart is not inside of bow one he won't select this chart he'll select something that's inside of his bowl one really important distinction here which makes both very difficult in terms of being used defensively is it only affects future jobs if a dwarf has a job to down requires leaving the bow and you turn the bow on you can see it's on here because this pause icon is not highlighted they will still complete whatever job that they have and then from that point on they will stop going outside the barrel some jobs can be canceled from here in the task menu but not all jobs you can see for example these Smooth Wall jobs can be canceled from here I did actually find the world trying to smooth and and they still order from that again to stop but what you can do to try to catch little as many jobs as possible is make sure that there's only one way your dwarves can get out of your base so here this hatch up here is the only way my dogs can get out if I mark this as forbidden the dwarves can no longer Pat outside and that means that any jobs that they had in the Cavalier will automatically get canceled this I found is the most foolproof way to do it you just lock it then you unpause it for a couple attacks and then you should see a bunch of cancellation messages show up over here and that will let you know that the job has been canceled and everything should be fine you might maybe just want to double check the task menu to make sure just in case there might be someone who's outside at the time but this will handle most of the jobs go next to issue with job canceling is for Dwarven children when their jobs are canceled they'll actually play a bit before starting their next job and they'll they won't care about the bow designation when they start this play task or whatever so they're going to stay here in this super dangerous area outside of the world just playing and if I'm lucky they'll stop playing and head home if I'm unlucky or they'll get corned in this Corridor and get eaten by ant people but the note of that man let's talk about cabin dwellers so I imagine there were two kinds of enemies that are big traps the Forgotten beasts and the cavern dwellers the cavern dwellers each Lair has its own type in this case you've got Ant-Man our ANTM men are pretty cool they carry three Shields so that's actually a great source of metal but also they're highly defensible so your low skill military dwarf the level will have difficult time actually hitting them because of all the shields you can also get Flyers such as Batman or cave swallow man and you can get water-based ones such as amphibian men or cave fishmen the Flyers can be annoying because uh most of the covered layers are actually multiple Z levels high so the Flyers can be up in the air with blow guns shooting or dwarves the water-based Carver dwellers also quite annoying because they seem to get into these watery areas and they just stay there these guys hang out here you know having time with their life and they want to attack you like the land-based or the flying based Ones Will and what will happen as well is sometimes if a dwarf sees them they'll come into attack in fact this skeleton here was a marksdorf and he was standing here and you looked in the water and you saw an amphibian man is all like I could I could take that guy I could take him and you know what he was right he did take him he ran he jumped into the water and he beat him to death with his crossbow and he won but then you know he was in the water and he couldn't swim and he drowned at that that was the uh the story of Olin metal quest for Olin if you populate the future I'll show you how he dealt with this um I actually drained the lake so I created a a hole here using the same trick for my magma Preach video to create a drain for the lake so once the water was drained they attacked I was lucky because this Lake wasn't connected to the edges so I was able to do that you'll see this this area down here is connected to an edge so I can't drain that as easily what I'll need to do is get some magma down here to create some obsidian and then I can drain it on that note what you can also do instead of draining it is you can just pour a magma on top of it it's gonna turn out to obsidian and it's going to kill everything that is in the lake as well but basically they won't leave the lake voluntarily they need to either you need to either destroy the lake or drain the lake another issue with Kevin dwellers is that when they show up on the map they actually show up in the Ambush mode and when they get closer you'll get this notification once they be seen so initially what will happen is whilst these guys start getting caught in the cake shops I'll get notifications and I would want to attack but then they're like right here at my Gates and in addition this generated load cage trap jobs for my dwarves so I dwells running out it was it was a big thing it was a lot of drama so you want to get some early notification and the best way to do that is to create little guard posts the caverns are full of these pillars there's pillars the static bites and the static type so what I like doing is hollowing them out and putting stray animals on chains next to some fortifications so they could see true if you're fighting enemies with range attacks then they might be able to shoot in true depending on what skill they have but it's possible for ranged enemies to maybe shoot through in addition specifically I have to use Strays I don't use prisoners for this so you could in theory have like a Garlock or a goblin or whatever on the Chain instead but they won't tell you when they've seen an enemy so the reason I could see all of these ants here is because the rat is telling me about the the ants as strange as it sounds apparently this rat chained up in this room it can't talk to me and can tell me what he sees you know do a fortress things what are you gonna do finally let's talk about the garden beasts the other big chat in the cavern layer these will spawn from time to time these are positionally generated animals that will have some sort of special ability usually so you'll see he's blasting all his poisonous gas there that is gonna cause afflictions to enemies that are caught in it there are various types of effects some of them worse than others the most dangerous would be the webs or what a web does is it basically incapacitates any dwarf continent and the vagina Beast will slaughter them pretty much instantly that's definitely a fortress killer that one the dust as well is worth calling out because subtypes with the dust it can cause some bad infections to your dwarves the worst I've seen is their flesh will literally rot off a good way to handle them generally is to just make sure that you don't fight them in merely I've got some tips for using Mark stoves in another video but basically sell something like this which is an area that the Beast will get into and we'll be able to leave uh and your dwarfs could just fill them full of bolts note that right now forgotten be sub bugged and they won't blow up hatches or doors this will will be fixed in a future patch and they will go back to being able to blow these up another way to do this would be something like I have here where we've got a door and and a bridge behind the door so with the creature goes and tries to attack the door by the time they get to the door I should be able to get the lever pulled and the bridge put in place and that should allow you to freely kill the Beast without too much trouble some creatures like web shooters might be able to shoot two to four vacations but usually they want to be pretty close to actually do that and they don't seem to naturally pass that close so you should be able to just shoot them freely as they run around in the circles panicking once they're trapped and that's it that was a general guide to using the caverns safely I hope you found this guy useful and if you did feel free to like And subscribe if you want to watch more content like this you can check out any of the videos on screen right now you can find me on Twitch where I streamed off Fortress pretty regularly hopefully I'll see you soon

Channel: FurtherReading

Views: 14,001

Keywords: dwarf fortress steam, dwarf fortress premium, undead

Id: sTtyiv4HfLY

Length: 12min 29sec (749 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 06 2023