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

So yeah, we're almost at full bronze armor. In fact, with the steel and iron that's available, nearly everyone can get some foot armor...



We've got a reasonably impressive amount of steel stacked up now. I haven't dared use any yet, though; with it still being a scarce commodity until large iron veins are found and exploited, I only want to loose highly skilled crafters on this steel. Poe s been racking up the armor crafting churning out all the bronxe, so I'll probably let him do some when all the bronze armor's finished. Weapon crafting isn't as highly developed by anyone yet, though; I'll need some cheap metal for a weaponsmith to practice on...

Even that small amount of tin ore there should be about sufficient to see to the last of our bronze needs, though. Our long national bronze nightmare is almost over!



Se all those mants? Well.... we have almost all the bronze we need, what the hell.



OPEN THE GATES!



Marcin does the honours.

CHAERG!



A variety of gnomes both military and otherwise, but all in a minimum of almost-total bronze, burst through the maze and into the mant-mass.

Nerys takes an early lead in the mant-hunt:



...wait... the what?



Nerys' shield just went legendary!



Why are all our legendary shields so gross sounding?

Mind you, with all the mant entrails that must be hanging off them..

Ok sweaty I can understand. But beheader? For a shield?

Imagine my panic when I first saw this:



An unarmed gnome facing a goblin in full steel? HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

...yet as the dialog box there says, this is the gnome Merchant who showed up on day 5 of spring. I closed the doors just after he arrived and he hasn't been able to leave since (he'd normally go a few days after he arrived). Now the gates have been opened he's rushed out, finally able to leave... only to run into this.

Oh well. I like gnomes, but this guy isn't my charge; I owe him no protection. If the Iron Kingdom can;t be bothered to send merchants with any, y'know, iron on their person, then that's their lookout.

The military are having a fun old time splatting mants, but some non-military gnomes headed out too, in search of metal bars and other scattered corpse-goodies that have piled up over the last seven days while the gates were sealed. One of them. EruditeDragon , runs into a sticky situation:



I wasn't too worried about this becaus eI figured the military would be right behind them, and that the bronze armour everyone now has should be enough to let them hold out until then. I hadn't reckoned, however, on that steel goblin the merchant found.



That;s the steel goblin on the far left there, the one holding a blue steel shield (the first steel shield we've seen). This is going to be the first time my military have taken on a fully steel-coated goblin properly (without letting them die of thirst first). The military run straight into him, abandoning EruditeDragon to wait out until that fight is over.

So how do my military handle steel opponents? Gryff is first in.



Good, good....



A strong start....

...oh wait, the head?

That's... that's it.



At some point his breastplate got smashed into bars, too:



The military then bail out EruditeDragon:



EruditeDragon hadn't managed to kill anything but hadn't been injured at all either. I'm calling that a cautious win for the All Bronze strategy.

Did the merchant actually get splatted, or did he escape while other people were busy doing their beheadings? (Visit the Puke! Come for the strawberry wine and field of endless emus, stay for the shield-led beheading stage show!)

Meanwhile...



The gnome merchant evidently escaped the steel goblin unscathed, but now he;s been backed into a corner by this mant. Unarmoured as he is, there's no way this ends well.


Leriel ... what are you doing?



I guess that's a novel way to do a headbutt?



Severed heads: not merely an improvised weapon; an effective improvised weapon.

Sadly we'll never know if Leiel would hav ebeen able to kill this mant using a gnome merchant's head, because the military choose tis moment to show up.



With the inevitable result:



Mants are dying all over, in fact:


Gnomes are queueing up to pad their kill stats:



Oh, and that gnome head?



It gets abandoned by the lake. I guess it's a nice view?

Oh my god fantastic. Using a poor merchant's head as a weapon, then just dropping it off. At a lake. Wearing a monocle.

And our poor Xano- Not a poetic battle-filled death, but of thirst and nakedness.

Haha!

...

.......

...........I do not even.

Suddenly, killing things with statues seems almost passe.

Hey, you ever try to fight a mant with your bare hands? It does not go well. You use whatever weapon you can get your hands on and by god you make it work.

Considering the origin of my username, gnome!me trying to merge violent combat with nightmare fuel is very appropriate. Keep up the good work, gnomeself!

Fucking epic.

Legendary head.

Such atrocious treatment. Such ill-advised positioning! No one will ever see it with all those slopes and apple trees in the way!

It needs to be at the front, right beside the entrance to the trap filled labyrinth. Preferably with a sign built beside with a friendly note: "Beware all ye who..."

Every time I like a post about a gnome dying, I feel like I'm rewarding gnomular mismanagement.

I don't suppose stockpiles have a 'gnome heads' designation yet.

Do you think we could use the gnome head to befriend any of the gnomes that become zombies?

This is the best plan.

Just caught up. This has been great reading over the past two days. I am going to pick Gnomoria up when it finally releases on Steam. I played the hell out of early Dwarf Fortress, but when Toady started adding nerves, muscles eyelids etc I kind of lost interest. This seems like exactly what I want.

Arise from the grave!

Yeah, I've been letting my poor gnomes lie fallow for a few weeks. Been distracted by failing to conquer Hell, quite possibly twice.

In the mean time there's been some big changes to the game. A recent patch totally re-organised the crafting system, making everything much more complicated and generally throwing my careful workflow into disarray. THe developer suggests it's probably best to start a new game so you can see the new production systems set up from scratch.

...

He has, however, maintained backward compatibility with old saves.

The Terrible Puke... lives!

I load up the game and, knowing the nature of the patch changes, instantly inspect my workshops. Essentially all of them have had their existing job queues cleared. Items now require substantially less raw materials but generally more intermediate products. For example, making bronze armor now requires less atctual bronze, but requires you to first make generic "armor plates" and a substance called "padding".

Yeah... apparently my gnomes feel insecure without padding.



Padding, it turns out, requires cloth, fibers and string, and string itself has to be separately woven out of fibers, just as cloth already was This all adds up to a lot more tailoring to be done.



"Armor plates" are just made out of metal, but to assemble them into actual pieces of armor like a breastplate now requires the aforementione dpadding and "leather straps". To the leatherworker!



The Terrible Puke has now transitioned away from leather amro almost entirely, but it looks like all those yak hides will no longer go to waste!



All these changes require a lot of stockpile tweaking as well, to store all these intermediate products. My "planks" stockpile diversifies it's portfolio into "Wood Derivatives". This poorly-regulated and incompletely-understood complexity will ultimately undermine the transparency of the wood economy and ultimately lead to a cellulose-based economic collapse.

SATIRE



On the plus side - BONE CARVER!

Finally I can realise my yak-bone based dreams!



Once I craft a knife, I mean. To the Stonemason's!



Okay... to the Carpenter!



Sigh. I cue up some sticks. Once the sticks are made, we can make them into hilts, which we can take to a stonemasons where we already made a blade out of basalt, and then combine the two into a knife, and then we take the knife and combine it with a table and a chair and THEN we can make a bonecarver! Simple!



The gates are still open, and various gnomes have been dashing out to collect discarded weapons, armor and metal bars as normal. Marcin has the misfortune to run into a steel-clad gnome.



Dying of thirst he may be, he's still strong enough to show Marcin a very bad time. I give the order.

Good luck! Though, I was playing along for a bit... but, this means I'm probably going to have to start over, since I'm going to have NO IDEA what I'm doing.

Skull Helmets! Skull Helmets! Skull Helmets!!!

Also houses made out of bones.

Make them.

You are required to make a Skull Throne if it is possible. That way once you elect a blood god he will already have his throne.

Hey, important; I need three new gnome names! Anyone out there reading along who wants to be immortalised in gnome form, who isn't a gnome already, Like This Post.

(And apologies to anyone who asked earlier that I missed somewhere along the line. Now's your chance!)

Gnome me! I have bonercarver written all over me.

Oh, actually, that raises a good point: would it be too much of a hassle to do a quick Where They Are Now on all the currently named gnomes? Since gnomes don't tend to come up much in updates unless they're in combat or getting destroyed, it'd be nice to have a line or two about what each is currently doing/good at/failing at/what not.

I spent all day reading this, as Meserach no doubt figured out by the GIANT FLOOD OF LIKES I sent his way.

Part of me wants to get this, part of me is afraid it will consume my life.

Yes! All my excites!

Marcin appears to be well-rested, and so is managing to keep away from the steel-clad goblin for the moment; but just then:



...and they showed up just a screen away from the goblin.



Fortunately the attack order had the intended effect, and the squaddies show up before the newbies get an unpleasant welcome.



Left to right of this image, welcome Eightball, Lady Octopus and Sjofn. Identically hairstyled ladies all, and in almost identical clothing. Eightball has the brown hair, while you can tell the two redheads apart by the red sleeves and ruddier complexion on Lady Octopus.



Marcin is safe too - that's him in the bottom left corner, thinking about booze as the army rolls past.



In the end,a force of just four soldiers are sufficient. Flixilber gets the breastplate...



Ozzo gets one lung...



..and SuperJay takes out the other.



Our new laydays enter the walls and immediately take care of the most important task for a new entrant to the Puke: being armed at all times.



I figure I may as well clear-cut the trees on the volcano, which appears to have become a Mecca for a bunch of the animals I turned loose a while back. I have big plans for this volcano one day. BIG PLANS.

Heeeeey Ladies!!!

Did any of the other two go Lizzy Borden and grab an axe?

That's Lady Octopus in the field with an axe to the right of you, so yes.

Here's where I installed a patch. Fancy new main menu screen! The new logo is endearingly retro. Takes me back to my formative days playing games on the Amiga.



The troops returning from the successful goblin-kill in the last post. Eagle-eyed and knowledgeable readers can work out who each of these are from their weapon choices: that's SuperJay on the far left stubbornly keeping the faith with his legendary bronze hammer, Ozzo next to him in a patchwork of iron and steel, Blackadar with the blue steel shield and sword and Flixilber with the axe.



Lady Octopus has her main skill in woodcutting and a little carpentry, so I let her carry on with that - the crafting changes have only amplified the Puke's thirst for lumber. She also evinces minor talents in Masonry - and I need a lot of masons for my current construction projects, which absorb a lot of smoothed stone - and Animal Husbandry. She accordingly becomes a Lumberjack/Mason/Vet.



Eightball 's main talents lie in the more directly violent use of axes, so she's to become our (previously unprecedented) twelfth army member! She'll be keeping Ozzo company in the Conquered Numbers, who have lookout duty:



Finally Sjofn comes to us as a builder, but I also have her on smelting and leathercrafting duty, plus as the first person I've bothered to check with a bonecrafting skill above 10, she becomes our first ever Bonecarver!



One effect of the patch - a bunch of graphics changes/upgrades, most notably on the designs of decorative wall and floor tiles. You cannow choose from several different types of wall engraving, for instance. Here's what the Greatest Hall now looks like:



(Yak is an optional extra.)

Gnome head status?



Yup, still there. It is tempting to stockpile it somehow, but I think the best I can do is set a stockpile to "limbs" and hope that the gnomes choose the head (rather than the rather distressingly large numbers of other limbs they could select). Perhaps it's better just to let it rot away there, as body parts appear to do even if you do stockpile them.

My new gnomes place further demands on the armour stocks, so it's time to check that armour is actually getting made with all the crafting changes. Bronze production is fine, but the new requirement for paddign is proving a problem. Why?

The tailor, which I previously used just for mass-producing the famous Cure-All-Bandages, now actually has other functions, including producing this all-important padding; but such was my enthusiasm for bandages, all the stockpiles are overflowing and the tailor itself is filled to the brim with bandages, preventing all other work. I presume it's like a toilet-papered house on Halloween in there.

The quickest and simplest way to resolve the problem:

I see the first skull for the throne.

It's what I always wanted to be! I'll get my stethoscope to match with my axe!

Looks like they got rid of the weird saturation on the engraved wall, upon my suggestion.

edit: Nevermind, they did not.

Well helllllloooo there. Oh wait, my gnome is female...Never mind.

At least she is a fan of axes...

No bone will be safe from my ARTISTIC NEEDS.

Ah, but the real question is - can you make other things menace with spikes of yak bone? Sorry, I'll show myself out.

My callous decision to unleash more than half my emu population on the unsuspecting world is having some interesting consequences. In this post we'll explore a few.

ON THE MILITARY USES OF EMUS, PART 1: EMU VS. MANT


That's about as far as it goes before the military intervene.



Still, the principle is sound, we just need a more extended test. Meanwhile, though:

ON THE MILITARY USES OF EMUS, PART 2: BLOOD CAPACITY


This is that same emu. He stumbled out of the labyrinth at the gates and into the open fields to die. As I zoom out:



EMU BLOOD.

All that blood is just from the emu. These things may just be able to fight after all!

ON THE MILITARY USES OF EMUS, PART 3: EMU VS. HONEY BADGER


A WINNER IS EMU



I investigate the combat logs: this is basically the emu's first blow. The honey badger manages to last an impressively long time bleedeing from the neck, and the emu doesn't manage any other blows of consequence. What it DOES manage is incredible resilience:



KING OF EMUS

Wait, what's that?



That's... that's a mant that's fallen into some water.

...

Now, I can't prove that the emu kicked it into there. It's more likely that a goblin did it or something. But I ask you: which story would you rather believe in?

That's what I thought.

ON THE MILITARY USES OF EMUS, PART 4: EMU VS. MANT VS. WATER


The mant doesn't seem too bothered by its predicament. Apparently mants don't breathe? Or at least, they can't drown.

Maybe we can keep the mant down there like he's part of some sort of aquarium or pond. ;u;

Way more awesome than a silly goldfish.