So I thought to myself, no limit on how much in game time passes?? Oh boy I'm going to do like 5 years this is great! Turns out there were way more complications in running the fort than I thought in the end I only did about a year!
Alright as I said my priority here is producing all the material we're going to need later to wage war. To that end I started working on a much larger forge/work area for weapons of war, and expanding the farms and some food storage. Ideally we can make decades worth of food and drink, so if we need to keep the entire fort busy with other things for an extended period of time it won't
be an issue.
Fortunately our site has immense mineral wealth, making all the steel weapons and armor we need won't be an issue, just a matter of time. A lot more mining was done on the levels immediately below the fort.
I noticed we had a
lot of human and elf visitors around, unfortunately it doesn't seem that their purpose was benign.
This declaration seems to have triggered some kind of conspiracy inside the fortress, and a whole bunch of the visitors in the meeting hall suddenly started attacking!
fortunately, since our dwarves are training right there with steel armor and weapons it just ended up being a bit of a slaughter, as far as I could tell we didn't even take an injury from that one. It's a real pain to clean all this up though.
The dwarves seem to know who's trustworthy and who's not, indeed even civilians not hesitating to beat down any suspect visitors. As you can see in the picture a good deal of visitors were still fine.
A miner's and farmers guildhall were requested and I accepted and made those, i started a bit of an area we can use for that kind of thing to the left of the meeting area
There's an immense amount of work to do, and very few dwarves to do it, I went ahead with my plans of recruiting uh.. "entertainers". They want to practice the arts right? Let them learn the arts of smithing, masonry, brewing, wallbuilding, furniture installation, cleaning blood off walls...
So I'm not sure if this is how it's intended to work now in 50.xx but they seem to start doing full labors
immediately when given permanent residence. I did make a work detail I assigned all the unpaid interns to (I just enabled everything by the way, its just for ease if any fture overseers want to adjust what all the non-citizen members are doing) but I think they may have been doing full labors even without that.
In my opinion it would have been well worth it even if we had to wait two years for them to start working, so this just makes it even more worthwhile! I accepted every single petition I got without even looking and our workforce grew rapidly.
Before too long the elves returned to cause trouble though..
Not too troublesome once our military got assembled
Unfortunately untrustworthy visitors returned, a bit more succesfully this time
That was the artifact crown, sorry guys, but hey we can always send out our soldiers now with an excuse of rightfully reclaiming whats ours, who knows how many sites we might have to pillage before we find it..
I'm gonna be honest I haven't dealt with the theft mechanic much, what can you do security wise other thna install stuff in a pedestal?
Shortly after this we had ANOTHER "purge" of visitors
once again this statement triggered an uprising within the meeting hall.. once again the infiltrators didn't really manage to do anything, but its really annoying having to dispose of all these corpses and stuff.
only a small force, once again they didn't cause too much trouble, we did lose one dwarf "Stangus" who was caught out in the open fishing or something when they first arrived.
Not only did we get more migrants, we got another caravan AND an outpost liasion with a trade agreement. So is there another settlement of our civ out there?? It seems increasingly likely. More hands are definitely welcome of course, I ordered some booze, cloth and thread, cheese and anvils from the merchants, they want to buy rock blocks but to be honest its still probably a better use of work hours to just make lavish meals or something if we want to trade big with them next year.
Of course we couldn't have any peace and quiet to build up our new industry... now we have INTERNAL threats too.
so I didn't know this but in the steam release vampires just straight up have funky looking skin, and also there was one dwarf I couldn't rename, which I thought was odd, and sure enough she didn't look.. quite right. Her name was Id which seems poetic for someone who presumably can't control their urge to drink blood.
so bricked her up in an office and made her the new bookkeeper! There haven't been any victims since then and she hasn't gotten thirsty or hungry so I'm pretty sure I got the right dwarf, the resource is there if anyone wants to make a vampire fort or use her for the military or whatever, just to the left of the temple.
Ah, good, another problem dealt with, now back to wor-
Ok this ain't good, I pulled all the dwarves inside and closed the bridge. A bunch of our enlisted creatives were fishing and dumping refuse in the river and got caught out there, I think we lost 7 or 8 residents.
And.. I regret to report...
We lost the elephantsI'm so sorry, there was just no way to bring them inside in time, and I didn't want to risk the military on the hydra, I'm sure with 30 odd dwarves we would take it down but we could suffer quite a few losses, and every true dwarf is precious here.
As you can see the hydra got quite a few of our visitors and the elephants.. hey wait isn't that-
Oh dear, well I guess thats my punishment for not saving the elephants in time.
I turned on full time training thinking I might have to deal with this hydra myself sooner or later anyway
A fairly large (for what we've seen so far anyway) force of humans mounted on forces showed up
And then a bunch of elves too! (you can see them engaging the hydra on the right there)
The humans turned out to be pretty useless, just riding away after seeing the hydra, but the elves got stuck in
they certainly didn't win that fight, but they seem to have injured the Hydra a bit, and it was constantly cowering in fear after that, so I thought we can probably take it out pretty safely now.
Note the Hydra complaining in fear, not so brave now that your left rear pinky toe is broken now are you!
It didn't even fight back that much, and we pretty easily surrounded it and Bruenor got the kill with his pick.
Things settled down after that as we tried to get more work done. Maise Now made a legendary gem window which I installed in the north of the meeting hall.
The Fort currently:
To the right I've added the "Victory Forges" with some other workshops for stuff we might need (please make sure to make enough waterskins/flasks and bags, as well as quivers if needed),
I expanded storage considerably, the farmers guildhall there is still in progress but shouldn't need anything else done to reach the required value.
Down here we have all the bedrooms, and a potential second dining/meeting area, lots of space down here to expand (and we NEED many more bedrooms..)
I did some mining in the levels below that, but didn't breach the caverns yet, just trying to get more of that sweet lignite... I think I used at least 400 coke in this year its kind of crazy how much smelting we need to do, I strongly advise keeping an eye on the coke stocks at all times so you dont run out and have to jumpstart with charcoal.
I accepted literally every petition I got without asking any questions, so we got LOTS of new workers, I think it might be about half our population by this point! So I don't blame you if you want to slow down with that now.
As for what needs to be done, got a second migrant wave as well, and I haven't added the true dwarves to military squads yet, making weapons and armor is going steadily but I've failed to build up much of a reserve of drink, it seems to disappear as fast as I make it! For food I switched to easy meals only to avoid wasting the booze too.
The animals I got from migrants I did put in the same pasture as the elephants were, so we might still need a solution to stop them dying from the next invasion.
Unfortunately some of the dead residents rose up as ghosts, and one human bard ghost straight up eviscerated a living human bard, his intestines were trailing behind him and blood got EVERYWHERE it was fucking horrific. I ordered the slabs made but you'll have to do the rest.
Oh and another couple ghosts..
Hah you thought my turn was over and you're rid of me didn't you???
), leather for quivers and waterskins, Ingots and fuel for smelting. We need to way scale up production for what we need, that will be my focus this turn. There are plenty of elves humans and goblins willing to join us, I say we let them do the dirty work in the fort while the dwarves find glory on the field!
