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In my fortress, there aren’t many barrels because I have to make them out of copper instead of wood. It takes about 6 times the work to make a barrel out of pure copper.

So I don’t have many barrels to go around.

Now, over time, the few dozen barrels I have are increasingly being used by my dwarves to store FOOD instead of BOOZE. And without any water on the map, my dwarves need booze to stay alive.

Even though my dwarves are perpetually brewing alcohol, the supply of barrels in which they can put that alcohol has suddenly vanished. Every single barrel in the fortress, once full of delicious alcohol, is now full of either food or seeds. And my dwarves start to get thirsty.

I order a second forge built, and have both forges to produce as many copper barrels as possible.

But there’s still food lying around on the farms and in the kitchens! So instead of using the barrels for booze production, my dwarves fill the new barrels with MORE FOOD. They get thirstier.

And then I run out of copper. And I’ve mined out every vein of copper I’ve found. Desperately, I order barrels to be made of the only material left to me: silver. What a waste.

But I have too many farms and too much food lying around. The silver barrels ALSO get filled to the brim with food. I scream at the dwarves, “You idiots! What use is food when you’re going to die of thirst!?”

And then I realize what I have to do.

I order the dwarves to dump the contents of more than a dozen food barrels onto the  floor. Biscuits, stew, berries, mushrooms, everything.

Finally, with empty barrels now available, the dwarves are able to brew much-needed alcohol and have a drink for the first time in a long time.

While my dwarves are happily guzzling down alcohol, the dwarven caravan arrives. I open the drawbridge and the first thing that happens is a goblin ambush. The traps make short work of them.

Meanwhile, unknown to me, the food begins to rot…

Eventually, though, I get the foul stench under control by ordering a WALL to be built around the heaping pile of rotten food. Scouredbridged lives on!

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Scouredbridged is the best, most valuable, and the happiest (so say my dwarves) fortress I’ve built so far.

I wanted a site with magma, no aquifer, and flux stone. I got exactly that. What I didn’t get were trees and water. I guess you can’t have everything.

Here’s what the landscape looks like in all directions… flat and barren.

In Dwarf fortress, dwarves will always drink alcohol if they can, and will only drink water if they’ve been injured and need to recover. On a map with no water, this means that a dwarf with a broken leg will NEVER RECOVER, and in fact, die. And because military dwarves inevitably get injured, I’ve decided to play this fortress using nothing but traps and drawbridges as my main defense. I shall cower in my  fortress, deep underground, and try my best not to confront the various evils which prowl the surface!

(I have temperatures and weather turned off because my computer is too slow to run them. That means no rain for me. Also, the tiles are all a little squished horizontally because my screen is small.)

Behold, Scouredbridged!

The trade depot is the only way to get wood, and the soil is the only place to grow food. Let’s just pretend it’s really wet soil.

In Dwarf Fortress, you start out with 7 dwarves. I decided to give them really nice, large bedrooms, because I felt bad about the lack of wood. At least I have lots of stone!

Here we see the dining room and statue “garden.” Those red “7’s” over there represent magma. And then there’s the hallway of pet-slaughter.

Now, I like animals. But in Dwarf Fortress, all they do is slow the game down. And my computer is not that fast to begin with. That’s why I’ve created a crude but effective method of crushing them beneath a giant stone “bridge”!

So far, the most exciting thing that has happened in this fortress is that the guy who pulled the lever to kill a pet decided to visit the statue garden immediately after, and got crushed by the descending bridge. Fortunately he was just a useless hide-tanner or something.

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