Well it's a bit quiet at the moment. I had some giant monsters attack my fortress (among which a bronze colossus), but they were all put down pretty easily by my elite warriors. Even the colossus was decapitated in a matter of minutes. While I obviously am pleased at doing well, I'm not getting much of a challenge out of it either. There are no goblin civilizations, and the humans and elves are friendly. So I may just piss them off.

My main 5 elite guys are all clad in nothing but adamantine already, and I'm working on the other squad (of 10). And I'll still have spare adamantine....wonder what I'll do with it.

I still want to pump up magma from below but that's gonna be one hell of a job since it's around 96 levels below ground, so it'll need 95 pumps. :-/ I got a half a mind to start over in a much harsher region to see how long I hold out.

There's always the option of trying to dig into hell (or accidentally doing so), but that would be hard even for my elite dudes to counter.

So....with my fortress running on more than self-sufficiency (food stocks are pouring over) and a now virtually fully adamantine-clad 15-man standing army of highly trained dwarves, I'm in a cosy spot and decided to start work in a big project. The idea still is to build a giant golden tower with magma pouring from it, but for that I need to pump magma up from almost 100 levels into the earth, which

- requires a system of 100-ish pumps to be built that runs in one long line from the bottom to the top, taking into account caverns and other "fun stuff"
- these pumps must all be built from [urlhttp://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Magma-safe]magma safe[/url] materials, ie materials that have a melting point that is higher than than heat of regular magma. Since a pump is made from 3 components (a block, a pipe and a giant corkscrew) this is quite the task.
- it also requires energy. I can have dwarves operate each pump by hand technically speaking, but for a 100 pumps that is a titanic task (not to mention that you can't trust dwarves for shit, they may get a sudden craving for cave lobster and leave your entire operation in the dust. ). So I will resort to other energy sources.

So, first thing I had to do was to start up a production line of parts for these pumps. For this I started smelting all my now (with the adamantine) useless iron and steel armor and weapons into base materials and build a range of magma-fueld smelters and blacksmith workshops deep in the bowels of the earth.

I also started planning the power provisions. Since the river near me isn't deep enough for water wheels, I resorted to a windmill park. I now have about 12 windmills on the surface, which are all connected to the same power 'net' through gear assemblies and producing a nice amount of power. And then...I made a retarded mistake that would set me back quite a while.

Basically, I digged out and constructed a long, loooong shaft of vertical axles and gear assemblies to transport my power deep into the earth, towards the first pumps (I wanted to run a preliminary test). The test ran fine btw, but then I realised: I DIDN'T NEED A SEPARATE (power-sapping) SUPPLY LINE TO THE BOTTOM! I can just link each pump to the one above it (which is easy as they're all close to each other by design) and then LINK ONE PUMP TOPSIDE TO THE POWER GRID AAAARRGGGH. So basically I just built an elaborate and extremely pointless power line a 100 levels down. I ended up disconnecting it from the grid to save power. It's now completely defunct. :-/ But who knows, maybe I can still find a use for it later on?

So now I am constructing a seemingly endless row of pumps to the surface...I started at -96, at around -63 now and about to work my way around a cavern (I hope). In the meantime my hard as nails militia has slain a slew of Forgotten Beasts and a Colossus that came knocking down the front door/hung around in the caverns. I made some nice leather backpacks from one of the Forgotten Beasts' hide, which I will symbolically bestow on the militia commander. I may even have it embroidered, in the hope that the craftsdwarf puts an image of one of my dwarves dealing the killing blow to a forgotten beast on it.

Good stuff to read, didnt really dig the game myself so i deleted it. I'm trying to avoid games with no end.

Spent most of yesterday trying to raise enough power from windmills and waterwheels but it just isn't enough. I have managed to raise about a 1000 power so far but I need at least 1600 to get my massive pump system working. Ugghhh. I'm gonna try and see if I can harvest the river for more power. Maybe I'll dig out a 'detour' running through a lot of connected water wheels.

Problem is I am running low on wood. Building water wheels, windmills and axles is extremely wood intensive and for some reason caravans stopped bringing me shitloads of wood (they used to in the past). I have to resort to the slow-ish proces of cutting nearby trees for my wood resources. This probably means that I'll get attacked by the Elves in the near future, but I'll probably cut down those pansy treehuggers in a microsecond anyway. The only thing I'm afraid of is that they might damage my windmill park.

Suffered some work accidents too....a miner stuck in the river, a mason walling himself in, etc. I usually would try and save them but the fortress can do with a little whittling down of numbers.

The grand plan has changed from a single golden tower to a golden dome spanning over the entrance of the fotress. The dome will hold magma.

The entrance of the fortress is tucked away in a dent in the mountain, like this:

MMM
E
MMM

With E being entrance and M standing for Mountain. So, if I build an arc grounded in the two mountains on each side it shouldn't be too hard.

Problem!

I have been making so many energy sources for my massive magma pump system, and just as I was about to finish the last one the gam crashed. It had already crashed before but I figured it was a random crash. Looks like they may be connected. In that case...it may be game over.

The game is already chugging along as it is, with too much going on on the map. 260 dwarves and animals moving around + moving windmill park + water physics from my countless water wheels is taking its toll. Not sure if it's related to the bug (memory overload or something) but it sure is annoying.

Maybe it'd be for the better if it ended there - I dunno. I sunk so much time into DF the last month, it's ridiculous. And the surface of my fortress site looks like Morder. Chopped almost empty for wood, with mechanical gears and axles running everywhere. And blood and vomit, and bones.

The inside of the fortress looks a lot nicer, I swear.