OBLIGATORY PREFACE:Angelcrux is a fort situated on both a terrifying glacier (complete with reanimation and thralling clouds) and on a vault, courtesy of DFhack's embark-anywhere. Also it's near a crapload of towers and dwarves are extinct outside of the fortress.
Previous Updates:
Update 1Update 2Update 3Update 4Update 5Update 6Haven't posted an update for a while, since I haven't been playing this fort a ton recently. Not a ton of interesting stuff has happened in the recent years, but that's probably for the best. Angelcrux needs a break. The fort has pretty much fallen into routine, and day-to-day life requires little input from me and frankly, little input from the fortress as well. Almost no dwarves are doing actual labor outside of the occasional brew order and the creation of more clothes. Most dwarves spend their time in the dining hall/tavern, enjoying the mist generator, although there's always a few dwarves praying. Normal dwarf stuff, y'know. I have the fortress mechanic and medic beginning scholarly duties to get writing some books, although none have been produced yet. It's not a very high priority. In the caverns, the undead regularly pop up and get culled by the minecart traps. All sections of the caverns are clear of undead for the most part, barring a few reanimated limbs stuck in trees. There is not 100% coverage by the traps (some parts of the caverns are too far for the undead to be lured in) but the pursuit of living wildlife normally gets them in range, and there are always few enough undead that they pose little threat to my FPS, and will be easily defeated by any competent military when I get around to storming the caverns.
There are two schemes that I have currently ongoing, however. The first, and most active one, is the dwarven breeding program. The honeymoon suites have begun seeing actual use, all four of them now. The fort's children are finally starting to grow to adulthood, and I have arranged a marriage between two of them, which fills out our last suite. That's not to say that more couples won't be welcomed: the suites are hardly in constant use, as I mostly just use them to speed up socialization between couples and then let them out once I'm sure they're with child, which is hardly a month's usage. Plus, keeping them in the suites forever is liable to make them upset, though I have very little concern for morale problems seeing as two thirds of the fort is ecstatic and the other third is probably getting there but is mostly comprised of children.
The second scheme is the plan to finally claim a few shards of divine metal from the vault. There'll be nothing as grand as an actual storming of the vault, not for a long time (I was, and still am, quite surprised at how effortlessly my soldiers lost to the guards), but I may have mentioned before that one guard's severed limbs, which are relatively safe to grab, contain enough metal to begin forging and melting the precious metal. A path has been carved right up next to the armor pieces, and when the current undead siege leaves I will quickly move them to the safety of the fort. This seems more a long term goal, but it has recently come to my attention that I am on a bit of a time schedule here. Angelcrux's legendary weaponsmith/armorsmith combo dwarf is 163 years old and not getting any younger. The threat isn't just of losing the skill required to forge exceptional armaments, either. Without a standing military, the reanimated corpse of said legendary smith has the potential of being incredibly dangerous, though of course this threat is somewhat mitigated by the most recent project, one that gives the fort many levers indeed.
Basically, I've obsessively placed bridges over like, everything. The bridges are all over the place, not just on the main level. Should allow me to effectively isolate whatever parts of the fort I need to, which, in the worst case scenario of the fort being overrun, will at least preserve some dwarven life and prevent the total collapse of Angelcrux to whatever is destroying it. There are still some locations that would be exceedingly bad to have overrun, but most every part of the fort has multiple access points, and there are few central locations outside of the dining hall and its neighboring rampcase. The fort has dealt with the overruning of the rampcase before, so it's not the biggest deal out there, and the dining hall isn't that central, so I'm confident in my new safety measures. There are a few doors barred open by various pieces of junk, but that will eventually get handled. Pickaxes will also eventually be distributed to most every reasonable gathering place in the fort, to lay forbidden on the ground as emergency tools. Everydwarf knows that where there's a pickaxe, there's a way.
The fortress is now sixteen years old, and has swelled to 27 population. Well, not swelled by most standards, but I'll take what I can get.
EDIT: Oh right, forgot to mention my other cool artifacts (other than the previous slade warhammer). They're a pair. I'll let their descriptions do the talking.
What's interesting is that these are my first two armor artifacts, and actually, my only armor artifacts, not counting some clothing which I suppose technically classifies as protection. One dwarf had a preference for gauntlets, but the other was just RNJesus deciding my fort needed a wicked pair of gauntlets. Having them as gauntlets is particularly nice because of the grasp protection: no lucky hit will disable the warrior who wears these! Well, outside of upper arm hits, instakills from headshots, spinal injury, and all that stuff. Which is most disabling blows. Whatever. Cool gauntlets!
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Topic: What's going on in your fort? (Read 5838251 times)