Memoirs of Lorbram InethorstistIt's Been well over a year since we've left for this desolate piece of ice.
My name is Lorbram, and I'm the leader of the Hollow Merchants. As you may guess from the title, this expedition set off with one goal and one goal only: get filthy rich. Rumors have circled for quite some time that the area around this mountain is filled to the brim with gold and silver. So me and a few lads got together as much money we could gather and bought ourselves some manpower, supplies, and a wagon. Hard to find good dwarves these days, we managed to scrounge up a few good miners and I happen to have some knowledge bout workin the cold, hard ground, but most of our expedition doesn't even know which end of an axe to hold!
About a year ago we arrived at the mountain. After a "vote", we named the new settlement to be Lorbramsched, as it was clear that my name is the only one majestic enough to be born by our new home! We quickly got to work, or more of, our miners did. While the miners were digging me and the rest of the men took a look around and found only the cold, desolate, landscape, not an animal or plant in sight for miles.
Our miners dug out a simple entrance with some crude rooms for us to begin moving the stocks we brought with us.
The glorious entrance to Lorbramsched!
Our miners dug deeper and deeper; and it quickly became evident that the rumors were true! Every 5 feet they hit another gold vein, but there was still much work to be done before we could profit.
One of the first goals of our miner was to get us out of this blistering cold. The miners got working on carving out a crude lounge and dorms for us built right next to the warmth of the volcano. Still cold down there, but a bearable one.
Obviously its been spruced up a bit since then, but you get the gist of it.
It wasn't long before the pack animal we brought with us started lookin awfully skinny. As they were probably going to die soon, we decided to butcher them and eat their meat while we still can. Shortly after, we heard screams coming from the butchers room! All the dwarves ran in to see our poor butcher being attacked by some kind of abomination made out of yak hair! After tearing it to pieces we chucked the cursed hair into the volcano.
Next goal is possibly the hardest: get the food production going. We brought plenty of food n' drink with us, but not enough to last forever.
A few ideas were kicked around by the team to get some farms goin, the two most promising were to dig deep in search of liveable caverns, and to use the magma to melt the ice and get water for irrigatin'. We dug out a nice big area to melt the ice and let the water flow, but when we moved the magma in all it did is make more ice! Don't know how the hell that works, but it makes that idea pretty much useless.
We had more luck with the cavern Idea, took the miners awhile to get down there, but they eventually reached the caverns and a found a deep, deep, deeeeep hole. When we got to the bottom we found it was absolutely perfect for our farms, good area and fertile ground and it has no ground routes to the rest of the caverns! So we moved all our grazers down there and started farmin. We also started a large scale project to block off the top of the pit, but we don't have the manpower to finish that any time soon.
Durin this whole affair, we started gettin some migrants. Hell if I know where these brave dwarves came from, but the more manpower is always welcome, they just better stay away from me booze. Speakin of booze, are stocks are running dangerously low, So it was agreed upon that we start tapin into the lakes of the caverns. A dwarf clamin to be a good and proper engineer drew us up some fancy plans for a new well system that would be completely safe from swimin monsters. Unfortunately, the engineer had no idea what he was talkin about and all we got is some slightly closer water blocked off by a grate, so I grabbed another engineer and had him start makin a pump to get the water up.
Kids, this is why you make sure you know what you're doing with water pressure.
The arrival of migrants yielded a few skilled metalworkers, somethin we could use at our fort. With their arrival, our miners began carvin out the area for our magma forges. They were completed in short order and our smiths got workin on the wealth of gold we have. Soon gold chests and cabinets were soon in many places around the fort. Sadly, it seems tales of our wealth have not reached other merchants, and we've seen no caravans to trade our gold with.
Now the first year of Lorbramsched has come to an end. We have come a long way and built an outpost worthy of the name, but we have quite a ways to go.
Final stocks
Here is the save:
http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=8069So this fort has been goin fairly well for me, but there is a few things that need to be done.
First the booze stockpile needs to be stabilized, we are constantly dangerously low. Our food stocks aren't quite comfortable, but we have some room with them and plenty of animals to butcher if it goes critical. You may wanna relocate our butcher shop to near the volcano.
We might wanna start thinking about a proper military sometime soon, especially if we get more migrants, but we the only "military" metal we have is silver. I hope you like hammerdwarves!
Finish blockin off the top of the farming pit, so we don't get raped by a flying fb.
Carry on my noble work and put a gold chest and cabinet in every dwarf's room! We have shit tones of the stuff!
Other than that, the fortress is going pretty smoothly.
