I have a fortress in its second year. Started next to a hidden magma pool and some HFS, since I've never had to clear out an area of HFS before. Things go well enough, there's plenty of obsidian, tetrahedrite, platinum, gold, and various gems around. My area includes a smidgen of forest to go with its volcanic wasteland, so I have the best of both worlds. Even better, I was able to dig my central stairway in one of the obsidian peaks but still only be a short distance from the silt loam for farming. Migrants arrive, I rearrange professions to more useful ones, and give some nicknames.
Suddenly, the glassworker migrant goes into a mood! He doesn't claim a workshop, so he definently wants to make something out of glass. I order another dwarf to build him a glass furnace (and then two more, one to collect sand and the other to make the raw green glass he wants), but then I realize... I HAVE NO SAND. Crossing myself and bitterly weeping, I order my masons to build an alunite wall around him that will be torn down after he goes insane and starves. Then it occurs to me: I can mod my silt loam to count as sand! I look over my shoulder then attempt to mod the file, except I do it wrong somehow and DF refused to load my fortress. After a while longer, I figure out the problem and DF is working again.
As my dwarves take forever to make charcoal for the furnace, collect sand, and make the raw green glass, a human caravan shows up, and I forgot to make my usual shipment of 40 stone baubles. Worse still, my best stone crafter is one of my original miners, and he's busy in the depths, digging for that magma pool. I have some leftover stone crafts, so I order forty more stone crafts and hope the miner gets to them sometime.
Then I get a message.
...One of my miners opens a hole into a chamber. At first I think "crap! I didn't think there was a chasm here," then it says "You've discovered adamantine! Praise the miners! ... oh CRAP. I check out what I've found. It's sixteen z-levels deep, glowing with the light of an eerire glowing pit and echoing with the screams of the caged insane. I told my masons, "WALL THAT THING UP, WALL THAT THING UP NOW!!!" Just as my masons show up, I get another message, "Horrors! Demons in the deep!" AAAAAAAA!!! I order for more walls to be built further back, and the first demon I see is a spirit of fire. My masons run out while their pets and a few attack dogs distract the demon. The walls are eventually built, and thankfully, it seems my war dogs somehow literally tore the spirit of fire to pieces and killed it, allowing me to build the wall closer to the chamber than I expected. I ended up walling off the various animal remains inside the chamber, so now the chamber is filled with miasma
I lost a handful of animals in the attack, but no dwarves killed. A mason was injured, and went right to bed, where I started to get spammed with "I NEED A WOODEN BUCKET PLZ" messages. I build a bucket, then I get spammed with "I NEEDS WATERS LOLZ," and I remember all the pools of water outside dried up. I figure I'll just write off the mason, I can always get more, then I realize he's one of the original seven. Recalling an interesting bug/exploit I heard recently, I deconstruct all the beds and the mason gets up to numb his injuries with wine. Whew! During this fiasco, the human caravan waited patiently the entire time at the depot and never left. Haven't traded with them yet, but I'm not that worried about it. Oh yes, and the glasscrafter successfully made his artifact: It's a green glass grate, encircled with bands of green glass, menaces with spikes of green glass, and it's called Akamcerol, "The Fortunate Lens." Fortunate indeed!
At least, until the king shows up... D: