SmallHands 165No, I'm not using small font for the titlePrologue.Well… I had some ideas, and I hope to be able to pull them off.
I also had a plan, now scrapped, to make an in-character diary, with a narrative behind it. In preparation for this, I picked the most recently-arrived dorf, and given her a name of ill repute:
Malfoy means ‘bad faith’, unless my rudiments of French have completely failed me. This is entirely appropriate for a dwarf under whose rule dwarves would be deliberately killed. The narrative was that miss Malfoy was one of the few dwarves unafflicted by the fever, and was beyond done with the complications of the syndrome; so she aimed for the overseer position, and fully intended to run a sustained campaign of covert murder.
However, that’s about as far as the muse took me; the only part I managed to write is a short intro:
This fort cannot go on.
I have lived here for the better part of a year, and this fort cannot go on as it is now.
There are means for it to be rescued from destruction, perhaps even be made to thrive. But the means remain unused, by fools and by cowards. I will attempt to secure the overseer position, and should I succeed, I will proceed to horrific means. I trust this journal will at least explain why.
And that’s it. No more flow whatsoever. Gameplay was eventually written from an OOC perspective, the first fortress (which isn’t NumberCurse) that I write in this manner.
As to the fort itself:
The fort numbers 32 dwarves according to Dwarf Fortress, and 29 dwarves according to Dwarf Therapist. One’s a child, and that’s why it’s hidden, but this still leaves me with two missing idiots. And it’s not Vabok the newly-ghoulified, he’s perfectly visible to Dwarf Therapist.
Anyway, of the 29 visible adults, all but 7 are afflicted with the fever.
A while later, one of the ‘missing’ people was identified as Vutok WanderedBolts, who’s been caged for who-knows-how-long; he’s the fell mood bastard who killed my previous dwarf, by the way.
I think he’s subject to a bug regarding jails - the room he’s in was marked as a prison from the rope in the center, and a bunch of cages were then built around. Vutok was invisible to DT until someone left him out of his cage, and he wasn’t let out until the jail room was restricted to not include the cages:
‘Course, he was then immediately re-imprisoned in a random room, because he’s melancholic. I’ll allow him to die of thirst and then he’ll visit the friendly neighborhood post-mortem doctor.
Even later still, I also figured out who the last missing dwarf is - NoGood. Dwarf Therapist can't see him in any category; but I didn't figure that out until near-autumn, for reasons that will become apparent.
The Tall Bar has never been finished, and what was built has been vandalized by trolls.
This is how the trolls got to the stack pump, by the way - they first dropped under the surface, and then just walked to the ballistas and the pump stack. I’m more surprised they didn’t also wreck the trading depot, to be honest.
Also below the surface, there’s a giant stockpile of furniture. I think it’s the same stockpile of furniture that I made, when I was replacing the old pieces with masterworks and excellent ones, and selling the lower-quality ones to whomever. Unfortunately, now all the craftsdwarves have the thrice-damned fever, so no more masterworks for SmallHands.
Below that, the last of the dirt layers, complete with a well, and next to it a bizarre ‘soap’ stockpile. By which I mean it only accepts metal bars:
Further down in the resurrection pod, some dead dwarf named Dumed is waiting his/her turn to be risen. Unfortunately, the cyclops has decided to wander away from the necromancer, so nothing is happening, and poor Dumed has started rotting. The cyclops room will be redesigned, to keep this from happening.
The crafting area was joined by a labyrinth which makes no sense:
And which descends here:
The stone stockpile has been removed; there’s literally no point to it.
Lastly, at the bottom of the world, lies the third cavern; filled with old skeletons, and unexploited cavern trees. I’d like to deal with both.
Happiness is quite alright, with one glaring exception: KingZultan’s sanity is quite strained:
She’s one of our very rare healthy non-feverish dwarves, and a near-legendary weaver and tailor to boot. I’ll see if weaving a bunch of masterwork bolts of cloth won’t make her feel better.
The military is in theory made of four squads. Seeing as we have ~30 adults total, you can tell that to be a lie.
Our ‘real’ squads are the Swamp Hunters, with ranged weapons and very little armor:
And the Grave Wardens, a much-better appointed melee squad; they had 8 members total, but two are unaffected by the fever, so they’re removed:
The Puzzling Bodices are King Zultan’s ‘squad’, consisting only of herself; I assign a few more non-feverish dwarves as fortress guards, because Zultan is too busy tantruming to do her job.
The Rainbow Raptors are a sword-dwarf squad with no members in the fort. That’s an important distinction, because the Rainbow Raptors were sent to raid, and met misfortune.
Lastly, we have a squad that was never populated: the Ancient Cloisters, under the theoretical leadership of Recon, have a bangin’ uniform but no other members.
Anyway, the squads will be refilled, with no care for military skill, and with all care for who, when, and where I want dead. Recon’s squad is the future home of named and legendary people; the Grave Wardens and the Swamp Hunters get the other feverish dwarves. The fortress guard, by contrast, is made of healthy dwarves only, and they’ll be kept out of as much trouble as I can manage.
On a sweep of the stocks, I find someone has marked a great deal of ammunition for dumping. See, this is why I spend hours poring through a fort before I even start.
The whole fort gets swept with ‘reclaim, forbid melt, forbid dump’ mass designations.
So, with the overview done, I can put down some gameplan, and set some priorities:
Primary Priorities:- improve the defensibility of the surface.
- tower 'foundation' (right below the surface) with a brand new airlock, and a better entrance on the surface (preferably without airlock, because those
aren't fun need constructions in the layer below to work properly).
- ballista area.
- more walls sectioning off the under-surface open space
- redesign the cyclops room to be 1-tile wide.
- repair & finish the Tall Bar.
- enlist all feverish citizens (bonus goal: send them to pick a fight with the tower)
- except:
`> Salmeuk and whoever's mayor; nobles lose rooms when leaving on a raid.
`> the SKILLED dwarves, in case the resurrection gambit works.
`> all named dwarves, because it's rude to deliberately send people's avatars to their death.
`> miners and woodcutters, because weapon conflict. We still have weapon conflict, right?
Secondary Priorities:- do something with corpses in cave3. I'm tempted to just dump them in magma; it isn't even far...
- finish sealing Cave3
- conquer the other 2 caves (overseer throws a sinister gaze towards the feverish military).
- revise the food situation. At this point we have our own little overproduction crisis, when it comes to animals and meat.
- create a beekeeping area, somewhere; either on the roof to the east, or on the surface.
- a small above-ground farm in the goop zone; I want to see how plants vary.
- magma stack; how are ya? Mostly destroyed? Yeah, I should probably rebuild you as a courtesy to applet and/or my successor, shouldn’t I?
- engrave slabs for the overpaca (and other dead?) See what's on them.
- raise the overpaca as a zombie, cage it, and build its cage somewhere.
- decommission the old cage & door labyrinth. The trolls wrecked the doors, and nobody remembers where any of the levers were, for the few bridges built in them.
- and extend the tree farm in the freed space. If I do right by the cavern, this won’t be really needed.
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Topic: Smallhands - nearly 40 years and still tiny! (Read 448578 times)