A new day has risen on our (not so) glorious formic hive, and while the others may not know or care that it is now summer, I'm proud the hive has lasted this long. If we can last 3 months with freezing weather and relatively low supplies, I'm sure we can last a year with basic accommodations and a farm.
With a farmer's workshop finally built and the order to milk some creatures given, Ka, our part-time lumberjack, rushed to grab a bucket and a watergrub. I'm not sure how he did it, but he managed to squeeze an entire bucket's worth of water out of the little critter. With that done, I ordered them to milk all of the watergrubs we'd brought with our caravan. We predictably ran out of buckets with the first three, and the carpenters were busy making furniture, so extra water storage would have to wait.
I noticed that the pack beetles seemed fairly emaciated and hungry today. While we could stick them outside in the cold and let them eat the grass, I saw no use in keeping them around, and ordered a kitchen and butchery area to be dug out post-haste.
The regent is now demanding a tomb, office, quarters, and a private dining room, on top of the chain robes he had requested earlier. I was finally sick of his demands, and told him he was demoted from regent status. He seemed mad, but apparently believed that I could, in fact, demote him to a normal formic. Huh.
I don't even know what a regent does.
Apparently that was the wrong choice, he came back later stating that a regent is of nobility, and thus cannot be demoted. He also claimed he did not have to do menial labor, and proceeded to sit in our unfurnished dining room, acting as if he was above everyone else.
Ka, the regent, after making a large fuss about not having to do menial work, started sitting in the carpenter's workshop, doing nothing. He keeps saying things about how our treatment of nobility is poor, and that we should be executed by the royal guard for the filthy conditions he has to live in.
After a while, when I went to check up on him, I noticed a wall in the way of where the entrance to the carpenter's workshop used to be.
While I was walking past the workshop area later, I heard what I thought to be someone screaming about lances and how we aren't supposed to export them. I think it came from behind the wall, but it must have been my imagination.
The aphidada seemed to be getting hungry, so I caved to the cries of the animals, and ordered an area to be made into a pen. Whatever honeydew they make better taste damn good, especially after all of this effort. When the insects were led outside, I saw something I may never forget. The herd of insects all went seemingly feral, tearing and biting at the grass, looking to satiate their starvation. After seeing that, I figured it was a good then to pasture them outside of the hive, as they might server as the hive's first defense against invaders.
When the pasture was designated, I also ordered our mason's and carpenters to construct a wall around it, they've been making great work, but are unfortunately too focused on that to finish digging out the hive and felling the trees outside.
Migrants arrived! 8 of them, to be exact, they brought their pet hounds and theraposa with them, which I told them to leave in the pasture. One of them must have brought pumpkin seeds, too, as someone had planted some in our above-ground farm. On top of our new source of food, it appears the first stalks of our coral fungi harvest have grown. I'm no botanist, so I don't know whether or no they're edible, but they seem to be the only thing we have that grows underground.
While the chairs were being carved out of stone for our dining room, I was informed that our masons had produced a masterful piece of furniture. The chair was the first product of our hive that I could truly call a masterpiece, and it is quite a milestone in our development. The last bits of dirt were finally picked out of our stockpile area, too, so we could begin moving goods through the hive. Our miner has moved on to start digging out our now-pointless butchery.
Later, some of the migrants came to me and told me they couldn't recover the last of the goods from our caravan. When I queried as to why, one of them showed me a scratch in his chitin, and claimed the mallards outside were too fierce for them to handle.
I gave them a stern look and told them to recover the goods anyway. If the hive wasn't so low on population, they would have been executed for such colossal stupidity.
Today I heard a pleading voice coming through the wall, saying that it had withdrawn its so-called "mandate" and asking to be let out. If we had a chiturgeon general, I would have asked them if this was a sign of some terrible disease. The voice behind the wall ceased shortly after, and I declared that the wall was now safe to tear down.
With the Carpenter's Workshop back in commission, I ordered many buckets to be made, so we could milk all of the water grubs. Coincidentally, the old regent, Ka, was also found dead in the old workshop, shriveled up and dried out. Upon seeing this, one of the other formics claimed that they were the new regent. I told them to piss off, and went outside to deal with the caravan that had just arrived.
Sadly, we had no goods we could afford to give to the trading caravan, but they stuck around and said they'd protect us for a bit, as they had quite a bit of spare time before the next stop on their route. While the hung around, I managed to convince them to send another caravan, telling them to come a year from now. They seemed pretty convinced when I told them we would have riches by then.
The butchery was finally completed, although we had very little use for it, it at least provided us with a place to lock away our refuse and corpses. The chairs for the dining room were completed at the same time, meaning the room was now fully furnished.
The walls of the pasture have finally been finished, though they don't look pretty. They may be a mass of piled-together wood and rock, but it keeps the insects inside, and that's all we need at the moment, which is accurate of the entire hive. And with that, we move into autumn.
Poll
16 (22.9%)
Author
Topic: DF from scratch: The entirely player-made universe succession. (Read 492661 times)