Dwarf Fortress' Simpler, Prettier Cousin: Let's Play Gnomoria!

Haha, Fishbreath is obviously just showing off now~ :(.

I fear to see what the guns will do to the delicate balance of shield-smashing everything, and unique statue combat.

They will just bash the mobs to death with the guns.

What a strange coincidence. In real life, I trained in one-handed statue fighting with a Tibetan master.

Honestly, this doesn't seem particularly far fetched, given the Keepers' previous engagements.

I wouldn't worry until they start bashing the mobs to death with their ammo pouches.

Time to get my shootin' on!

The statue Fishbreath used as a weapon ends up left by the stairs for a long time.

We've mostly got the torches placed now, except in a few spots and where the miners haven't caught up yet. There's still loads of mining left to be done, so I decide to let the miners get on with it and finish everything I have set out before doing any more. The workload is somewhat expanded by the way that I end up needing to remove a great deal of excess rock after clearing a seam to ensure that the light from the torches isn't blocked from the newly revealed ground. You can see here, with that little row of coppery lumps on the floor, where I followed out a seam but also mined out in a large radius around for torchlight purposes. Still, this IS more efficient than clearing the entire area.

There's been a patch since I last posted; the developer is regular as clockwork with the things. Nothing revelatory in this one; just a few interface improvements here and there. One thing is, Tinker Benches have an interface now:



There's nothing much to actually set, but now we can see progress toward new inventions. I think I'm starting to reach the summit of the tech tree, now firearms are available, but this'll still help us anticipate the last few discoveries.

I love that the gnomes keep one weapon in hand even while tinkering, by the way. That's battle preparedness. CONSTANT VIGILANCE. Dan Lawrence there is mostly a jeweller these days, but he tinkers on the side. Marcin of course remains engineer-in-chief..



Seriously, so much mining still to do. The red areas you can see there are areas not yet adequately lit: you can see how I end up needing to mine out vast chunks just so the light can reach. It's either that or place loads more torches.



At some point I expanded the wheat and cotton farms a bit. There's not really any space left to expand the emus and yaks into, though, and their populations are bursting at the seams. They're also knee deep in their own milk and eggs, which represents something around 80 to 90% of our apparent food and drink stocks at this point.



I am just swimming in copper ore at this point. This is AaronSofaer and kerzain, I think, hauling it out of the marble for me. Do you really get copper ore veins in marble? Never mind.




We're still getting the odd golem popping up, but they're still only clay thusfar.



Tyjenks here wisely keeps her distance and lets the professionals handle it. The Lurked Damages are typically first on the scene for this kind of incursion:



Nerys hacking off limbs there. However, the Keepers are still content to come in at the end and steal the glory:



Show-off.

Apparently drained form this little adventure, Tyjenks is later seen opting for bed right in the middle of some animal husbandry. She slowly leads a yak to her, erm, private quarters.



I'm... pretty sure that's not the kind of husbandry that's meant, Tyjenks.

The coming Mantpocalypse is so close, I can taste it.

Another good-size incursion of greenskins. Although I really don't know why the copper ones bother.




See, wasn't that pointless.

Not that the bronze bearers fare much better. Especially now we've become pretty expert at finding the heart:



I... don't know how Fargull ended up in this fight, but good job to him I guess? Actually I think it was around this point I decided I really needed to order all non-soldiers to be on enemy-avoidance orders. Leather armor isn't going to be a decent defence if enemies star showing up in iron and steel.

The Traditional Ogre Mauling heads all the way into one of the Keeper's bedrooms, until being reasonably efficiently dispatched by an old-fashioned one-two:



More tasty meat! And check out the slightly changed butcher interface:



Yep, you can now select what things to butcher by pasture, and a list marked "Corpses".

I finally have enough spare bronze to launch the final final phase of bronze armor production: shields! By this point three or four soldiers have bronze shields anyway that they purloined from the corpses of the goblin fallen, but to equip the rest, I give the order. If nothing else it'll give my weaponsmiths some practice.



Yes, shields are made at the weaponsmith. Mind you, seeing as we seem to make as many kills with them as with our actual weapons, was there really any doubt?

By that logic, I'm not sure what in this place shouldn't be made at the weaponsmith. I'm waiting for someone to pick up an emu and use it to bash in a mant.

...speaking of emus, do they (and the llamas) actually get into combat with the goblins and so forth? I remember mention much earlier on of deadly yaks, but not seeing any actual animal combat so far. Have the enemies not been walking through the pastures, or the animals just haven't cared, or have I missed some scene of awesome animal carnage by reading too fast?

My pastures are behind the main gate, so foes never make it that far. If they did, it'd mean the Keepers at least had been defeated or otherwise bypassed.

However nowadays there's generally a few uncontained animals meandering around at any given time, due to the ridiculously high birth rate, so we may see an animal happen across an invader in due course. I doubt they'd achieve much against foes in full bronze, though, not one or two at a time.

It might be fun to see a small group run straight into a huge mass of animals, though... maybe in the future I'll establish a secondary pasture just for this purpose. We'll see.

Some skeletons apparently materialise directly on the stairs. At least, that's where they're first spotted. I'm still not exactly sure how this happened. No zombie this time, but one the skellies is now in copper armor there. They fall on... Amaranthine , who can't seem to stop getting involved in combats accidentally.



This is where I might regret my decision not to have everyone wear helmets.

Fortunately Thasero for the Lurked Damages is here:


I think that's our first actual decapitation kill! Congrats to Thasero.



Amaranthine takes his injured eye to the hospital, where to my unending surprise, EruditeDragon is already lying in wait with a bandage. Now that's a healthcare plan. The magic bandages take care of that mangled eye just fine, and Amaranthine returns to good health.

I've been making a few relatively tedious management adjustments here and there to try and speed up production of good food, as part of my effort to keep my miners working for longer. This has mostly involved twiddling priority settings to try and get more wheat hauled in to stockpile, meaning cooks don;t have to waste time fetching it from the field themselves, meaning bread gets made quicker, meaning sandwiches can be made in quantity. The delicious results of this policy:



Oh yes. Five different kinds of sausage meat sandwiches.

It's heading to the end of spring by now. The miners are pretty much done on levels -9 and -10; there's a fair amount of exposed seams I have yet to order to be mined out, but I am swimming in enough copper and tine ore for a while now, so I decide to leave it so my miners can focus on other priorities. First up, some earthworks.



That's JRave and... possibly kerzain, I can never tell. They're removing the slope from the edge of the slight hill on which the main volcano that comrpises the Terrible Puke is set. My aim is to cut off and then wall off the entire hill area, roughly quadrupling the amount of arable land I have access to.



Somewhere along the line SuperJay kills a clay golem. They're still showing up here and there, but the battles are rarely of much interest.

Summer comes! And with it:



Hello new friends, welcome to the Puke! We have hourly animal births, five different kinds of sausage sandwich, and regular invasions by ogres and the risen dead!



Just weave around the Keepers while they're at work.

Copper can indeed be found in marble strata.

"Cry 'Havoc!', and let slip the alpacas of war"

Wait, so you have to fight the head separately? That's hilarious.

The new gnomads bring us up to a round 40 gnomes; once they've weaved in past the raging battle, anyway.



aceTechnologist is actually merely an adequate technologist. Not that anyone else is much better, since we haven;t actually been manufacturing any mechanical parts yet. Her actual specialism is in Construction, and these days with lots of earthworks, wall construction and torch placement to do, builders are actually pretty useful, so I leave her doing that. I don't even need her to farm; we have way more food than I know what to do with these days. Plus, I really could use more gnomes that spend most of their time hauling, since that's the main drag on production speed these days.



Bryce is a miner! That's excellent news, I need all the miners I can get; I'd been considering reassigning a few farmers to mining duty. He's also an above average mason, so that's all good into the bargain.

(The wealth of the Puke is still rising pretty steadily, but I think the amount of new immigrants tapers off base don your current population, so it takes more and more wealth to attract the next new gnome. That's why we only got two newbies today despite being the richest we've ever been.)

Oh, the battle? Well, it's around now that I notice Blackadar appears to be trying to pad out his kill stats:



Someone's afraid of being last in the annual review again?



Ogre mutilation proceeds with even more savagery than usual. How did an injured neck not kill him?



One of each of the pairs of vital organs gets sliced up, leaving us with the eternal coin toss: will the killing blow be heart or lung? Heart or lung?

PLACE YOUR BETS!



...



...


...




Lung pays out! Heart players, thanks for playing.

Literally on the way back from their sortie to mutilate that ogre, the Keeper see this:



Hmm. The mants are massing. Let's see if these guys are as deadly as people say!

That would be hilarious, but alas, no, that was Thasero killing the OTHER skeleton. Solo!

I've never been so disappointed about a good skeleton murder.

So, mass mant invasion! Will this be the blow that finally overcomes the Keepers?



....no.

I do panic momentarily when I realise Blackadar isn't among the troops in this fight. It emerges, however:



..he was elsewhere, cleaning up stray goblins. Kill stats padding!



Battling finally over for the moment, I remember to induct the new kids into a cowardice squad.



We're more than half-way to a new invention!

WHich reminds me, I really ought o implement some of the old ones.

Previously a scarcity of metals has been holding me back in this regard. Now, though, my soldiers are more bronzed than the cast of Jersey Shore. And, well:



I could be bathing in copper ore at this point. So!



These metal parts, made at the Machine Shop are vital ingredients for all the more complex mechanisms my tinkerers have been inventing. Soon, we'll have traps, windmills, mechanical walls.... and crossbows. And blunderbuss..es. (Blunderbii?)



My Grand Curtain Wall earthworks project is taking shape. The main gate is a little way to the left of this image: as you can hopefully see, I'm aiming to cut off the entirety of this hilled area. Those corpses near the top are the goblins and ogre that were recently killed. Bottom left corner is aceTechnologist, who is toting bronze bars from a destroyed enemy breastplate back to base.

I had an entire paragraph of horrible musket ball double entendre before remembering that they are called musket rounds in Gnomoria. :(

So, instead, I shall say that I look forward to making all of the best shiny reserve non-weapons in the whole of the Puke. Been disarmed? No weapon handy? Grab a door! Better yet, grab a statue! This is the Puke, there are no rules.

Cutest invading force ever.

EDIT: And of course, the images don't want to show.

Can I just say that I love the fact that weapons can earn their own names when they become legendary?? I mean, just look at that sexy lady. The Dressed Fatality. That's right: even my weapon comes to battle looking sharp.

Just how we do things in the Puke.

My miners work pretty fast. I guess they've had lots of practice.



Here's the view of the puke from the opposite side to the last big image. Here the main gate would be away to the top-left. A side doorway into the main room with the workshops is visible here, just under all those white bags behind the red-haired gnome Jacquelle, who is ministering to my main pine grove. You can see here I've now removed the slope from this side; that stretch of right-angled soil wall is no longer necessary, and I'll take it down in due course, and replace it with one that rings the edge of the hill.



This is the view scrolled to the left of that last image. This huge mound is the "volcano" - underneath it is where the great hall is. The whole of the volcano is now enclosed by my slope removal and wall building, so it is now "safe" territory for my gnomes to wander on.



The view rotated and scrolled from the last image: the volcano is now off to the left of this image, and the main gate just about visible to the bottom right. All this hilly area enclosed by the dirt wall is now safe territory, including enclosing this large wood of apple trees, which I'll model into a proper apple orchard at some point. Not that I need it, but I may as well. I'll also end up flattening out some of this areas for use as pastures and groves and possibly even farms if I decide I need it.

I hope that's given you all some insight as to the lay of the land! Sadly its not possible to zoom out any further, so it might be a bit difficult to visualise it all in your head.

In any case I now have a curtain wall/cliff enclosing a huge area. Enemies, gnomads and merchants will still come in via the main gate as before, but I have more room to breathe.

The completion of mining suties for the moment has also led to some masonry finally getting done, with the result that new row of bedrooms are finished.



That's xanomon of the hair ripped straight from the animes enjoying his new room there.



I decided to pull the trigger on all this walling-in because I want to expand my animal pastures. As you can see here the breeding situation is now reaching absurd levels. Now the whole hill is safe territory, by digging away at some of the hillside here I can create a larger rectangular area for the alpacas.



One of the tweaks in the patch provides for the automatic butchering of excess animals and corpses. Right now animals are being born faster than Tyjenks can butcher them.



To expand the emu pasture, there's nothing for it but to floor over some of the lake. Fortunately for this, the game doesn't really model the physics of solid objects (liquids are another matter), so you can have a huge lip of land over a chasm like this and nothing bad happens.

Waitaminute, this was nearly a post without any combat! Quick, kill a bear or something!



There we are. And guess who lands the killing blow?


Moving on up!



Blackadar's totally winning Most Improved this year. If he lives.

New gnome stats, before I forget.



An alpaca watches as I direct the flattening out of the hill. I'm going to keep the modest rise and the volcano, but I want most of the rest to be pretty flat for maximum agricultural usage.



Haven't seen this happen in a long time. I guess bear-slaying is difficult work? I keep half an eye on Minardii 's naptime, but he remains unmolested by any wandering monsters for the duration.



The partial results of the flattening-out project. The volcano's on the top left there; I'm going to leave the body of that and the small hill to the top right intact and flatten the rest to the height shown here.



Bryce is taking to his work well, although he's much slower than the old hands. His mining skill is 20, whereas my original miners, well:



Midnight Voyager mines incredibly quickly.

Another day, another goblin invasion. I have long since given up on the door.

This force is six goblins, still in a mix of copper and bronze. It's hard not to feel we've outgrown attacks like this.



We've only gotten better at shield-fu since bronze shields became the new standard.

SuperJay in particular is tired of this shit:



Legendary hammer in tow, @SuperJay's position at the top of the kills leaderboard is looking insurmountable.

The battles still go on long enough for the Lurked Damages to trot up 20 floors to get involved, though:



Next!



Figuring I have the current level of enemies in hand, I'm being relatively free with improving the value of the kingdom. I slap another load of furniture into the Great Hall. I need to decide on a centrepiece. I'm thinking a bunch of pillars, statues made from valuable metals, and a pile of jewellery and gems.

Tyjenks achieves a miracle of gastronomy:



Behold its yeasty glory!

It's destroyed almost immediately in order to make sandwiches. I sigh.

Then, on the fifth day of summer:


Wait, HOW many merchants?

Whatever the game says, I can only actually locate two merchants on the map. I think how it works is you usually get one merchant, but in summer you csan get multiple merchants. I only have two market stalls; maybe if I'd had eight, there really would have been eight merchants? As it is, I get two.



I have a large amount of valuable trade goods like necklaces by this point, but given the stock on show that I actually want, I needn;t dip into those. I have a vast mountain of eggs, milk and bones - they're only worth 1 each, but in this mass...

Really all they have that I want is the useful metal ores, logs and female animals - even the animals are an extravagance really, I don't actually NEED to boost my animal birth rate. But since its essentially for free:


I offload some excess strawberries and seeds too. Ideally my gnomes are just eating sandwiches at this point. I also offload a load of dirt to clean up the place.



I didn't even need to give away much yak milk in the end.

Half the benefit in these trades is just having some ore that's already hauled to the surface level. Plus all those bones were really clogging up the butcher shop.



All they have left that I might want is silver ore, but that costs 250 per unit, which seems ridiculously overpriced - I've made necklaces OUT of silver that don't trade for that much. There doesn't seem much point in making that trade, so I leave it be.



The newly flattened area beside the volcano, now mostly grassed over. I'll probably use this for pastures and tree groves.



EruditeDragon cranks out a vintage. What's it called?



......yeah.

For monsieur et madame, a fine Terrible Puke "Packgear" strawberry, from year 2? Excellent with our monitor lizard sandwich.



I could buy a yak with that.

The latest goblin attack brings something new.



IRON GOBLIN.

And not just a breastplate and helm, either? Full iron plate!

This is the first time in a long time that I'm fighting an opponent that actually has me out-teched.



I wonder if 70k total worth is some kind of threshold for starting to see attackers with iron armor and weapons? In any case, I did SAY I had outgrown the bronze guys....



Well, not inherently devastating right off the bat. The Keepers close in.



The bronzed goblin is relatively quickly dispatched:



We get the ogre too, although I don't have a screenshot for some reason.

Then Sheepherder defies the lesson of history:


Bronze can beat iron!



Breastplate destroyed, the iron goblin is now exposed to the nearest fighter desperate to boost his kill stats:



And no injuries! Whew.

There's an immediate scramble by the soldiery to lay claim to the iron armor, which apart from the breastplate survived the battle intact.



Gryff scores the prestigious helm. Others have to satisfy themselves with a single boot.

I've finally got some springs and gears built, so let's actually use some of these inventions!


Most mechanisms require power, but the traps power themselves. They trigger once and then have to be reset by a Mechanic gnome. Gnomes don't trigger them; only enemies do. So in theory you want to funnel enemies through a trap line corridor on the way in. But a corridor seems a bit dull.



LABYRINTH!

And look, some testers!


This group, the largest mant pack yet, at least six of them, appear to have shown up at the map edge and instantly fallen on a honey badger. Encountering something hostile immediately upon arrival seems to confuse them, however:



They end up spreading out and milling around at random over a nearby hill, making no apparent moves toward the base. I guess I'm pleased if they split up? Easier to fight them that way.

They might never have reached my gnomes at all had Tyjenks not run outside.



She was after the honey badger's corpse, to make it into sausage. This is the disadvantage to automatic orders to butcher all corpses.

Fortunately she has enough energy and enough distance to run away, and her mild peril triggers the troops to come out on a sortie.



Thasero scores the deathblow:



And somehow:


It seems odd to me that Thasero, who is a veteran by current standards but is not one of the Keepers who've had the longest experience and do the bulk of the fighting, would be next to get a legendary weapon. Possibly it's a randomised process, or maybe he ended up holding an axe one of my more experienced soldiers had been using first?



The what?



How very... Zen.

What is the sound of one hand axe clapping?

We don't know, but he'll certainly show you! (And he snuck in a joke, clever!)

And then Minime just randomly decides to fall asleep in a field. I guess killing bears really is tough stuff. Hahaha.

I love how Honey Badger deaths announce the Mants. Plus, the screenshot of them being so confused is adorable. Mants are just adorable.

Is Meserach going to be the first Gnomoria player ever to not succumb to death via Mantpocalypse?

Researching combat logs indicates that there were originally eight mants attacking the honey badger. One is the one Thasero killed above; seven more are at large. The combined force of the Starry Keepers and the Lurked Damages, plus Bram of the Conquered Numbers, sweep the area to track them all down.



By which I mean, SuperJay mostly does it. 3/8 down.

The battle is pretty confused, though, and somewhere in there poor Tyjenks gets set upon:



Not that the mant has it all her own way:



Gryff eventually bails Tyjenks out:



A bleeding, eye-sliced Tyjenks retreats from the field. It's a fair traipse back to bandages, but he's not bleeding that much.

Gryff is followed by the rest of the troops, who get on with the bug-crushing



Blunt weapons seem to work better against these beasts, hence SuperJay's success and the even-larger-than-usual number of shield-based kills.



Even legendary axes have trouble, whereas:



The benefits of remaining flexible in your combat strategy.

6/8 mants down. Where's the last two?

There's no immediate sign of the remaining mants, so the soldiers retire back to base. Evening falls before there's any further disturbance... and it comes from Fishbreath , who (unaccountably, or so I think at the time) heads out to the hillside where the mants were being fought earlier.

He encounters... a goblin?

He beats an almost fast enough retreat as the Keepers, plus Bram emerge in his defence.



Yak leather keeps Fishbreath from serious injury, until Bram's interdiction provides the distraction necessary for him to abscond.



The Keepers-plus-Bram fight the goblin through midnight, with the inevitable result:



That seems to be it. A few hours later I get a message that a goblin has bled to death, which takes me to this:



...

It's quite the tableau.

Investigating the combat logs reveals what a strangely excellent farce occurred here. The gnome corpse vjust visible in that shot is one of the summer merchants. Apparently at dusk on day seven, he'd left to return to the Iron Kingdom along this ridge and had apparently been interdicted by one of the missing mants.

Merchants don't wear armor, so the battle is short and brutal:



Then things got interesting.

A squad of three goblins arrive to find a confused mant standing over the corpse of the goblin. Then the goblins and the mant... attack each other.



One of the goblins appears to leave the combat a little way in... to go after Fishbreath, resulting in the combat I reported eariler in this post. The other two goblins, one of them in iron, persist with the mant.

The mant is mostly losing, getting various limbs mangled, as you'd expect against the heavily armored goblin. But it isn't all one way:



That's arteries opened on both goblins; both the one in iron and the one in bronze.

Finally:



The iron hammer-wielding goblin kills the mant, and disappears. The bronze goblin leaps up from prone... and bleeds to death, leading to me getting the message which led to my discovery of this battle site.

So, that's 7/8 mants accounted for, and 2/3 goblins. Somewhere out there, though, there's a heavily bleeding goblin in iron armor with a hammer. And then there's still that one missing mant, who remains entirely unseen except for the first fight with the honey badger.

As dawn breaks, Linoleum heads out to the various corpses on the ridge; I presume seeking to collect the armor and weapons from the bled-out goblin. THere she finds:



...the injured iron-clad goblin that killed the mant and then watched his friend bleed to death, out for blood.

I now present the entirety of the combat log between Lionleum and the goblin:



Oh no, Linoleum's in trouble!



...

..thanks, that mant!

Seriously, he managed two blows and then dies of blood loss, right in front of Linoleum, who never even touched him.

This actually means the goblin bled to death with much of his iron armor intact, including the iron breastplate. Which means: free upgrades!



What a bizarre incident. Sadly the gnome merchant corpse doesn't have all his trade goods still on him. Just as well, I think I sold him like five thousand piles of dirt.

In other news:



I really need to go through my gnomes and put together a marksman squad. Soon!

The combat in this game just keeps getting more and more awesome.

I guess it's lucky for the gnomes that the Goblin Menace is working hard to keep the Mant Menace at bay, and vice versa.

I love that they do that. Every so often I see "The goblin has died" or "The honey badger has died" and I'm like fuh? I had goblins? Nope, some wildlife took care of them. Hooray for wildlife!

TIL from Meserach that you can flatten landscape and grass will re-grow over the dirt tiles so you can farm them. I had no idea! I can't wait to do some terraforming in the Venomous Twilight - we've got some nearby hills that could be much more effective as fields and pasture.

Yay! My gnome invented something awesome!

A new greenskin attack - two ogres and an ironclad goblin - finally tests the trap system. Results?



Well, useful enough I guess. The spike traps didn;t trigger - it takes me a while to realise this was because I placed them at the corners of the paths in the labyrinth, which meant monsters could sneak past them by moving diagonally. The cheats. Since when are ogres smart?

Battle is joined:



Bronze beats iron once again. Take that, Civilization I through V!

Although now you've dropped that iron sword... swipe

Of course others have legendary weapons:


No, the weapons aren't so legendary that they induce deadly bleedign without a touch - that's Blackadar's wound above proving eventually fatal. That's another iron breastplate thereby secured!



The pre-softened ogre is easy meat.



The troops start to bleed out the other ogre. In a fit of pique, it gets a stray alpaca involved in the combat...



..but it turns out even our alpacas are ninjas. Least terrifying ogre ever.



I'm calling that a mercy killing.

Whoah, that's even possible?? My entire Southern Bridge Defense System is predicated on the idea that no enemies are moving diagonally, and I've never seen them make it past that wall - but if they're capable of doing so, they should be circumventing my defenses regularly. Maybe being over water has to do with it? Very interesting.

Well, now I'm not sure!

I don't see how that's possible. Two diagonal blocks are not passable. Perhaps the ogre dodged the trap, if that's possible?