Item — HN Reader

A perfect time to whip out the sad story of one of my dwarves. Important to note that NONE of the details in this story are embellished, they are all simulated in-game:

I needed to tap a source of water to create a nice waterfall in my dining room. Everything was prepared: the waterfall would fall through the dining room, and then a channel under the dining room led off the side of the map through a fortification. All I needed to do was open the wall of the tunnel which was touching my water source.

Feeling too lazy to channel in from above (and slightly evil), I decided to go ahead and sacrifice a dwarf for the effort. I had the dwarf wall itself in and then open the wall. Two seconds later multiple bad things were revealed about this decision:

The dwarf was a mother carrying around her small child.

The water was under high pressure.

I had forgotten to make a floodgate to stop the water if needed.

The water shot out of the wall, instantly killing the baby and smashing the mom against the wall of the tunnel. She was dragged along by the water, fell down the waterfall and was pushed up against the fortification on the edge of the level with two broken legs and a bruised spleen. The baby's corpse was caught under the waterfall right underneath the dining room and wasn't going anywhere. The mother kept trying to run upstream but was unable to.

I felt pretty bad at this point. But thinking there was not much I would be able to do since the mother would certainly die soon anyways, I just tried to quiet my bad conscience and focus on other things, awaiting the inevitable message the mother had died.

A day later the baby's corpse started to fill my dining room up with miasma, making me have to wall out the waterfall to keep my dwarves from vomiting. Quite poetic justice, really: the stench of death was on my waterfall.

I was still waiting for the message that the mom had died. It didn't come.

After a week of game time or so I looked to see what she was doing and my jaw hit the floor. She was FISHING. The mom was fishing to stay alive while drinking the water. She was in an obviously really bad mood having witnessed death and the decomposition of her child. But she was barely staying sane because she was being "comforted by a lovely waterfall". That did it for me. I finally decided to launch a rescue mission to save her. Not 2 seconds after I had given the command to dig a tunnel to where she was, she went insane and died of thirst shortly after. I was too late.

Her name was Môsom.

3 comments

>NONE of the details in this story are embellished, they are all simulated in-game

This is the crucial thing that distinguishes DF stories from LP writeups of other games. Other games provide maybe some suggestive details and you have to read between the lines. DF stories have to be pruned down from the huge amount of detail in the world.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead also gives this deep simulation experience in the form of an ascii survival game.

You’ll be hopped up on cocaine trying to offset the painkilling effects of the opioids, so you can maintain the necessary concentration to install a nightvision cybernetic enhancement directly into your eye, when a once domesticated hungry dog stops by and sees you as a regrettable alternative to starving. Knowing you won’t survive the encounter in your current state, you throw a grenade at it just to be on the safe side. Except, you didn’t throw it cause in your euphoria you decided to take a little micronap.

Or: you build a freaking TANK powered entirely by an array of solar panels. It doesn’t move very fast or far given its power source, so you just let it roll forward on its own while you read a book from before the cataclysm about How to Win Friends and Influence People (in case you ever actually meet anyone). While you’re reading, you accidentally crash at 5mph into a wall. You get out to repair the minor damage, and a zombie grabs you, and hundreds more are spilling out. If only you were in your tank...you bludgeon the zombie with your book and think about how to Win Friends and Influence People.

To save people some googling:

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataclysm:_Dark_Days_Ahead

Home page: https://cataclysmdda.org/

Github: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA

Stable releases: https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/releases

Daily builds: https://cataclysmdda.org/#downloads

Stable releases are very old. 'Experimental' builds are very stable and most players update to newest build regularly. Some prefer to use a launcher for automatic updates: https://github.com/remyroy/CDDA-Game-Launcher/releases

Well shit, I'm sold. Dwarf Fortress is a delightful idea, but it was never something I was actually going to play.

This, though... this is exactly what I want.

Use the latest experimental build

Is it still under development? The OS X builds appear to get built daily, but the last blog post is over three years old, and so are the stable releases.

Use the experimental builds. Active development with a very active modding community.

> This is the crucial thing that distinguishes DF stories from LP writeups of other games.

I had never heard that term. To save others the time of googling it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Play

A Let's Play (commonly referred to as an LP) is a style of video (or a screenshot accompanied by text) series documenting the playthrough of a video game, usually including commentary by the gamer. A Let's Play differs from a video game walkthrough or strategy guide by focusing on an individual's subjective experience with the game, often with humorous, irreverent, or critical commentary from the gamer, rather than being an objective source of information on how to progress through the game.

> I was still waiting for the message that the mom had died. It didn't come.

This really reminded me of the time body recovery divers rescued Harrison Okene: https://youtu.be/ZPz8mxJNPh8

Choice quote:

Diver: Uhghgh!

Mission control: What's that? Oh ok, that's horrible. You found one yeah?

Both: HE'S ALIVE!

Mission control: Fkn hell... I don't know what we're going to do

You told this story here years ago and I still remembered most of the details. Very enjoyable!