Now then. For anyone that has spent some time in the IRC room over the past few days (or seen Potatoes' other thread in here), you're probably already aware, but I'm a fan of Dwarf Fortress. It's one of those games that I play on and off, and I'm currently in one of those "on" periods. It's an incredibly complex game with a steep learning
curve cliff.
Now, originally, I'd have liked to do a Community Fort with all you people, but I only know of myself and Potato that are able to even play the game and I'd rather not use this as means to teach any of you (see learning cliff above). So, instead, I decided that I'd like to run the fortress and document my progress on here. Now, I imagine that might be a bit boring, so I'm taking a page out of many,
many community forts and I'll be posting in character. As Ironfire. To make this relevant to the forum, I'm going to be using a My Little Pony conversion mod, making ponies as the playable race and going from there. Now, while managing random ponies is (probably) fun by itself, I thought it would be more fun if I recreated the forum characters into this game.
So this is where you all come in. If you'd like me to include your character(s), please post a response in this thread. But here's a few things to consider before doing so;
1) This is Dwarf Fortress. While I'll do my absolute best to avoid it (and I mean it), death is a possibility. Could be bad timing on a random invasion, a rampaging mega beast, or derpy AI meaning you starve while stood in the food stockpile (glitches can happen, albeit rarely). Another character can be renamed to carry on your legacy, but to avoid inconsistencies in the posts, they'll likely be named to include "-the second" (if I have a spare unnamed character, I may be able to hide the death entirely)
2) As for how canon this is, not even slightly. The mod itself borrows aspects from Fallout: Equestria (reading the documentation, it seems to mostly be in the form of guns and many creatures) which is definitely not canon.
3) If you've gotten this far and still want to throw your character to the wolves (I'll build a big wall, okay?), then you'll need to pick some skills you think fit your character best. Due to the way migrants work, they may come pretrained in other areas, but I can toggle that off and tell them to focus on your desired skills. Only the original 7 starting characters get complete free reign.
Continuing from the skill point above, only the first seven get to be completely designed, after that, I'll be waiting on migrants which can take upto an in game year. And that's if I do well enough to attract them in the first place. I'll state this right now, starting out, there are some skills more desirable, if not out right required. These include Mining and Woodcutting, Masonry and Carpentry to process them and Farming to avoid starvation. It's possible to train in multiple skills (for example, I usually train the same Dwarf to do Carpentry and Woodcutting), and is usually recommended. Other skills which most find to be common to start are Metal smithing (because they're among the hardest to train skills), many craft skills (need to trade something) and mechanics (someone needs to make the bridge retractable).
Find a list of skills over
here. There's too many for me to name them all and give descriptions, so choose from that list.
Since actually picking genders, race and colour scheme is impossible, I'll only mention your character's actual description (I'll try my best to match races, but that's the best I can promise with a random generator over 7 characters). I
may make your character take side jobs if I need to, so just take that into consideration (by that I mean if there's no one to fill the professions I listed above, I may assign them to characters at random so I can actually progress in the game).
Now, with that out of the way, I'm going to go fail at a few forts so I can hopefully get down the basics of this mod.