I'm done! Here's a map of the fort as it stands at the very beginning of Spring, 255.
http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-12206-slingblock
The following is a rough log of the events that transpired during the year of 254. At the bottom of the post is a link to the save, plus some suggestions for whoever's coming after me. Spring:At the beginning of this year, Slingblock was a bustling 98 dwarves strong. Our exported wealth is a measly ☼3,000☼, quite low for a four-year-old fortress. That's fine though, because exporting wealth attracts unwanted visitors.
To kick things off I did a large amount of rearranging, organizing, that sort of thing. Specializing Dwarven roles so that our valuable workers only do their valuable job, while things like hauling are done by unskilled peasants. This was the result of my stockpile management after unpausing:
I was able to keep the Idler count below five dwarves at any time for most of Spring. There was quite a lot to be done!Next, I looked through the fortress and take account of our stocks and overall situation. In the food department, we had over 1400 units of Plump Helmet, but only 200 of booze. I immediately had a third Still assembled, and had all three on
Brew Booze /Repeat for a long while. I soon did the same with the Kitchen as well, getting our cooks pumping out Lavish Meals for a while in order to simultaneously boost happiness and cut down on our ridiculously large numbers of Plump Helmets.
After that, it was time to plan out the well and get the miners digging a shaft to the underground caverns. My strategy was to dig out a
Cistern and fill it with water. The cistern I built is 3 tiles deep, enough that the water drawn from it is completely clean.
Also, Slingblock had a tragic lack of available beds for the general population. I dug out two layers of budget housing, later smoothing and engraving parts of the area. It took entire seasons to craft the necessary beds to accommodate our population.
By now, one of our dwarves had been taken by a mood, and began a mysterious construction! What did he make?
It's beautiful ;_;Finally, in late spring the Elves came to trade. Unfortunately, something I tried to trade them must have had wood in it, because they got mad and refused to continue business with us. I'm not sure why, I was quite careful in selecting only rock trade goods to offer, but oh well. I wanted what they had, so I just deconstructed the trade depot with them still in it, which causes the merchants to drop their goods without it being counted as me stealing them.
I don't recommend doing this often though, only as a last resort. Because the Elven civilization will still recognize that the wealth exported to Slingblock is way more than is imported, so they will be unhappy. Just, less unhappy than if I'd seized their goods.
Summer:
'Now you will know why you fear the Deep.'A Forgotten Beast, in the caverns below Slingblock! Mobilize the militia!
Sorry Skullsploder
We lost three dwarves and a number of war dogs to the foul beast, before its accumulated wounds brought it down.
At this stage, work on the bedrooms was in full swing. Our woodcutters were hard at work bringing down trees on the surface and underground sprouts in the caverns. Unfortunately, this also meant that our dwarves were in greater danger from the horrors of the Glacier.
Blizzard Men in particular caused us many problems this year. Our dogs could not defeat them, and they are impervious to mortal wounding from any blunt source.
I eventually had to send a swordsdwarf over there to finish the job, because this marksman spent a whole month trying to kill that thing!We eventually got migrants, and had been promoted from 'Village' to 'City' within the dwarven civilization! A great achievement for the brave dwarves of Slingblock.
Autumn:
The industry of Slingblock is of the highest quality!
Let the wealth of the Deep Glacier flow forth!
It is time yet again for the militia. Go ye heroes.
Go and die.
Or, uh, or not. That's cool too!
We did not lose a single dwarf to the Sand Titan. Between our sharpshooter marksdwarves and our brave warriors, we made short work of the beast. It's corpse now adorns the corpse pile outside our fortress with the rest of the vile creatures that dare to challenge our might.
The humans arrived soon after, bringing with them plenty more wood, booze, and pack animals. Perfect!
Although, I noticed that the past two times, the caravans had to bypass our site because they could not path to the Depot. Upon looking online, it seems that our traps in front of the entrance block Caravan movement! Do not worry, I fixed the problem by building an alternate route into the depot that only caravans can move through. Normal creatures like dwarves and goblins cannot path through it, so they still must go through the trap entrance. A very useful feature for the fortress!
Excellent! I have not given this artifact to any of our military yet, stupidly enough, so my replacement will have to.
Work on the fortress continued as it had before. By this time our food stores were much better. We now have two Legendary cooks and a number of Grand Master brewers. We have over 1300 units of wine and 300 plump helmets, a much better ratio.
Winter:
Oh, did I mention? After that steel cap artifact was made, I began working on smithing better equipment in earnest. Between our Legendary armorsmith creating masterwork iron armor, and our skilled weaponsmith doing the same with iron short swords, I believe the results speak for themselves.
I don't know enough about military to do anything beyond the simplest of equipment and assignment stuff, so somebody more experienced will need to go through and make full use of our new iron assets.
Finally, the Dwarven Caravan arrived. I've found that silk robes make perfect trade goods. With all the cave spider silk we have from the caverns (a dwarf automatically gathers it when there's room in the stockpiles), it is trivially easy to produce enough robes to buy out an entire caravan. One robe from our clothier is worth roughly 300-400, so only a couple bins worth are enough.
They do indeed, my friend.
Spring, 255:
And thus, my turn comes to a close. This is the status screen right after the Winter of 244 ended. We are now a Metropolis of the Dwarven Civilization, with a population of 142 strong.
That's basically my turn, everybody! A few other things happened, like a goblin ambush where we lost a person or two, and the details of the new hospital I made, or the Noble housing, or the new engravings everywhere, or things like that. You'll see a lot of that in the save though, so I think it's fun to leave a little of the discovery to you all.
Next person, have fun! I had a blast with this, and I hope the fortress survives long enough for me to get a second turn. If you have any questions when you load up the save about what I did or where something might be, just ask! I set a few workshops to just build stuff on repeat, with the infrastructure set up to feed them materials, so that stuff might drain dry eventually. I recommend [q]-looking through the workshops and stockpiles to see how things are arranged.
There's tons of Limonite (smelt it to make Iron) on this map, and cool gems down in the caverns. If you're brave, you can try digging deeper to reach the lower caverns and maybe even magma, but we should really get a better military set up first. Our military is our one weak link right now.
Okay, here's the save, and have !!fun!!
http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=9391
