This was an embark I very nearly gave up on – after Smake’s multi-race community world, I’m trying the newest release w/o any DFHack cheating. 22 embark points to work with.
Standard (for me): Untamed Wilds, w/sand, a few metals, running water, Invaders ON at moderately high skill levels, a few bats and turkeys, very few skills then affordable. I *thought* Prospect said it was going to be a steep hillside of soil for easy miner training; turns out to be a pile of rock with bits of soil here and there on the edges only. Unskilled miners with rock = not much happens for a very long time. Cutting logs, spiked wooden balls worth all of 254 each, wasn’t looking good. Then the miners came across some gold in an exploratory shaft, the first metal. End of summer, still not looking good and we’re foraging off the land to have food and booze when 3 migrants show up to our outpost:
A lvl 11 weaponsmith, a lvl 12 plant gatherer and a lvl 11 gem setter. !!
Immediate change of plans: switch to gold rings, amulets and bracelets, encrusted. Our new gem setter, Jules, can take a 300 earring to 4 – 8K with the few hidden emeralds we’ve come across, each worth way more than the 18 or so spiked wooden balls we’d stockpiled for early Autumn. The caravan just arrived is a rich one and we’re loading up and really getting greedy for next year with the Wish List.
The new plan: only 14 weeks before New Year’s and who knows what coming by to visit and we have one copper axe to defend ourselves. We’re going to seal up with a raising bridge, butcher all the livestock outside for tallow, live in a dorm for a year and build ourselves a proper fortress w/o interference. These 10 will do. Gold = coins, means a Guildhall and speedier experience, going to try and force metalcrafting as an early mood. Digging on the same level as the gold pocket revealed (finally) some flux and hematite so, yeah, we’ll stay here for awhile. Someday, we’ll rival MountainHome but in the meantime, these dwarves are giddy with the prospect of dripping jewels on gold and steel ornaments. Greedy Little Bastards, Take Two. Each dwarf can stack 11 earrings on each ear, right?
Edit:
And I thought this was going to the The Perfect Embark. Wrote up a good backstory, PM’d a couple of folks with ‘This is great! Let’s have a new release ☼Masterwork☼ community fortress. Yeah!’ Then, Surprises:
#1) zombies. Necro OFF in the GUI, monster parts keep reanimating and messing with the dogs anyhow.
??
OK, hammer ‘em to a pulp and continue on, you know how dogs are. And
#2) living rock. Turned OFF Earth Strikes Back before embark or thought I did, after having read the many thread comments on game crashes and such. Red x’s on two of the three, didn’t notice Secrets still ON. Should have noticed the pet rocks available at embark, didn’t. Living Stone is a bit of a hassle, followed the GUI link for the first time to read Dirst’s thread and – sheesh. Unhappy rocks are only to start and the least of it. And for
rocks, they’re fast little buggers, aren’t they? This is worse than Digging Invaders, it's
Already Dug Invaders. How do people deal with this?? Warren every rock shaft and room for a particular, charmed miner? Limestone Fred and Granite Gus? Or dedicate a militia to stand there for every single time a stone tile is removed??
Why isn’t there a DFHack command line to salvage this?!So much for my Perfect Embark. Still, playing dwarves as Greedy Little Bastards, lots to be said for a skilled gemsetter migrant wave.
