What’s stopping us? Not all of us have to, obviously, but at least some of us can live that way.

If our antiquated predecessors could sometimes manage it, I’m sure we can too. Maybe even better.

  • carpoftruth [any, any]
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    401 month ago

    Groundwater is a terrible thing to deal with for underground dwellings. It’s a hard problem to solve. Possible, but hard.

  • Diuretic_Materialism [he/him]
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    1 month ago

    Digging out a ton of rock and earth is a lot more complicated IRL than it is in games like Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft. Real life geology is pretty complicated, you gotta deal with shit like ground water, unstable types of earth, blasting. It’s all pretty expensive and dangerous. Meanwhile humans have gotten pretty good at erecting shit above ground, we can throw up sheds and huts like nobodies business.

    Edit: Also plumbing, electrical, HVAC, means of egress and sewage become problems with subterranean development. Digging a room underground, doable, but then you’re gonna have to dig out additional shit to get all the water pipes and air ducts in there. Also, people like having windows, and windows are good for fire safety, but it’s kind of hard to put enough windows in if only one side of a dwelling is facing the open land.

        • @ssj2marx@lemmy.ml
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          81 month ago

          One thing DF just handwaves that I’m not a fan of is overburden. It would actually make minecarts mandatory if you needed to haul large quantities of waste stone out of all of your build sites, and the place where you dump it should be a significant decision (ie don’t dump it near the river or you’ll poison people downstream).

        • Tachanka [comrade/them]
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          81 month ago

          I promise you I was only joking when I implied that Dwarf Fortress is literally more complicated than real life

          spoiler

          sicko-satan or was I

    • context [fae/faer, fae/faer]
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      181 month ago

      it’s a dangerous world to live in. just the other day i built a well over an underground lake in a cavern layer. every now and then a giant bat would fly up the well and into the room, flap around a bit, and then leave back down the well. but then one time one of the children was in the room and in a panic running away from the giant bat ended up falling down the well and drowning.

      • Awoo [she/her]
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        1 month ago

        o shid o fuk a giant bat aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa splash halphalp i’m drowning blubbrbrbbllblbl

        This is why you make an automated swimming pool in your temple.

          • Awoo [she/her]
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            1 month ago

            To my knowledge mounts are currently only available to the player in Adventure Mode. I could be wrong though. As far as I understand it mounts aren’t working in Fortress mode for the player but do work for enemies who enter the map riding them.

            They should be trainable though. Also those things are massive, like several times the size of an adult dwarf so the child falling down the well in fear shouldn’t be too surprising. Max giant bat size is 200k cm^3 while max dwarf size is 60k cm^3. Max size figures are pretty good for getting a general idea of the size of these things lol.

  • D61 [any]
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    211 month ago

    Keeping the water out winds up being a huge problem. Either its percolating down from outside water sources and working down through the cracks in the rocks until its inside your house or its condensation buildup from the living things inside the cave house.

    Personally, I’d love to live in an underground bunker because I’m a weirdo, but i would be pretty cool with some small single story house with a reinforced shed style roof with a few feet of soil and let the crass grow.

  • RION [she/her]
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    161 month ago

    It’s generally much more economical to build upward into empty air than to clear large amounts of earth before you can even get started building