Lol don't call it ☼Masterful☼ till it works! I could be very mistaken about lava flows here though I hope to post my updates to lemmy so we can all see how it goes together.

My inspiration was, in a roundabout way,: how to find a FUN way to dispose of kings who keep making insane crafting requests like weapons made out of soap. I envisioned a room suspended over a lava tube with a hanging pillar holding it up and drawbridges providing access. If the king got silly I could pop the pillar and drop his whole royal suite into the tube.

And of course I had to keep his subjects near him so I built the fort into the volcano side but I was annoyed about how irregular the floor size and mineral patterns were. I had just learned about obsidian casting in industrial quantities (the reason for the initial volcano embark) so as I was playing the thought kept coming back: 'Well, obsidian is a really valuable mineral when carved, and obsidian mechanisms are an amazing trade good, so... what if I made a whole fort out of obsidian?

So I tried that with that existing fort, not a fancy fort with a lava tube, more like just a giant cube of solid obsidian cast off to the side from the volcano.

It worked magnificently! The rooms were all lavish with just bare stones engraved, and I had unlimited material for stonework and mechanisms.

Smiling in satisfaction I said "This is cool... but it could be cooler."

And that's when I came up with my 'volcano base with a live active lava tube in the middle'.

The original took about three months of damn near every moment I wasn't working or sleeping, hopefully my experience since then will cut that time down a bit.

I'm really excited to see how this goes, and can't wait to share my updates.

Fun Fact: If you dig out each floor and drop them all at once, the game registers the internal hollowed out tube as being 'outside', meaning even after you cast the obsidian tower, all internal areas are considered in sunlight, so your dwarves never get sunlight sickness when defending raids and you can grow aboveground crops in the safety of your mountain home.