I've taken a little time away from Dwarf Fortress but have been feeling an urge to return, so today I started looking through my library of fortresses that I quit playing. I was looking for an old save file to resurrect, so fittingly I chose Crowfeast - the death cult fortress.
Crowfeast was started as a mission-based fort. I tried to generate a young world where the secrets of life & death were not commonly known, buy necromancers are around. The goal was to establish a militarized death cult in the desert and try to seize control over the secrets of life and death.
It looks like I made Crowfeast over a weekend in April, but I don't remember much about the process. I remember making the magma pump stack, and that's about it. In an effort to re-familiarize myself with this fortress, I figured I'd do that by documenting it here!
So what do I find when I open up Crowfeast? At the surface I find an unremarkable desert, with a ramp carved down into an underground passage. The in-game date is 127-07-04, making this fort two years and seven months old.
I haven't really done anything at ground level yet. Not sure what would be worth my time...
Below that, hidden above the ramp from the surface, was the small area where the dwarves lived while they built their sanctum deep in the rock.
The old tavern now sits abandoned...
Aquifer-fed cistern pipes water to down the the fort.
That passage spirals down 93 z-levels to the head of the fortress, right above the third cavern layer. The spiral involves a central staircase that seems to be a shortcut, and two wider hallways that spiral around the central staircase in a double-helix. One hallway appears to be for trade and security, while the other has a minecart track.
This was ill-advised...
The trade/security spiral terminates at a trade depot that has drowning apparatus and a drainage system that doubles as a mushroom tree farm. The shortcut staircase and rail cart system terminates at a dwarven bath that seems to the nice entrance.
Two layer view of the head of the fort, where trading and drowning happen.
Moving further down the z-levels I find two columnar areas. The leftmost column appears to be the housing and tavern area, with baths on the entrances and bedrooms that surround open areas. The rightmost column seems to be primarily the manufacturing center, sat atop an artificial lava lake and leveraging verticality for storage. The housing column has a mister running through the middle and a little food production area below.
I hate this part. What was I thinking? However, I did not notice until creating this gif that I took the time to do some plumbing for the hospital, so they have their own private well on premises.
Atop the living area it looks like I put a hospital and a small area for nobles' offices, all overlooking what I intended to be a temple complex. This part is all still pretty under-developed. It looks like I started producing a little food down here, but it's probably inadequate and I think I was relying on trade for sustenance.
Below here is just some more drainage and the magma pump stack.
This fort has a lot of big problems; there's no military right now, and no temples. I think I just didn't get around to rebuilding them once I moved the dwarves down into the main fort. The industry is all jammed up because I was trying to feed it all through a poorly realized gem cutting & setting operation. The fort works but is also quite lacking in a lot of areas, which I'm guessing is because of all the effort put into plumbing and magma pumping.
I see evidence that I cheated a bit in putting together this fortress. I can tell that I abused autodump to move all the rock excavated for the fortress, and I'm guessing I used gui/liquids to stop my baths and lava lake from sloshing around and eating some framerate.
The three major priorities I'll have are to get the temples built, get the military working and get some trap hallways coming off've the spiral.
As for the goal of the fort, I don't really know how I'm going to approach that. I'm going to try and get as many intelligent undead as I can, and try to ensure that deities & religions based on death are very well represented. Right now my only real plan is to attack any site that is using the secrets of life and death without my permission.
My goal is to get to year 5 by the end of the weekend. Wish me luck everyone!
![My Gladiator this year, [Redacted], the Kobold!](https://preview.redd.it/pdcedxum11971.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=7e7323246d9fb277ad7e0084feddad033a8a55f1 "My Gladiator this year, [Redacted], the Kobold!")
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![[link]](https://i.redd.it/pdcedxum11971.png){kind=link}
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