Alright, EXCITING THINGS:
The task at hand, taking over the world with only a handful of Vulps, was different from what I originally intended, so I went for a mulligan. The new fortress, Vutokushat "Figurebasements", is directly west of Abirrakust, along the same brook, Bottombalded. We are further downstream, so instead of resting with one foot in the mountain biome, we are between the shrubland, Playful Hills, and the weirdly appropriate woodland, the Forest of Tails.
This time I remembered to write down the Neighbors list:
Vulps (us)
Anatos
Goblins
Humans
Equids
Dwarves
Lagomers
Komodos
Tower
Tower (yup, 2 towers)
Turns out I forgot to put progress triggers on Anatos and Dwarfs, so we'll see if that can be done post-world-gen. The absence of Human interaction is puzzling though.
I've got a more compact version of the spiral castle this time, and the starting swordsmen worked so well last time, that I brought more of them to Vutokushat, plus some trained archers. And since the caravan seizes were much more lucrative and less inflammatory than I thought they'd be, I spend less embark points on junk and brought along polar bears instead of grizzlies. The polars are twice the size of grizzlies (400,000cm3 instead of 200,000cm3) and so far have been breeding like rabbits. 3 starters and 1 migrant pet have become 17 adult war polar bears and 20 cubs.
Unfortunately, caravan seizures have been slow since I had an unfortunate run-in with some zombies. Instead of starting with love-taps like last time, one of the Towers sent a team of 4 faster than I expected. Luckily I had a mote but the roof wasn't finished. After our expedition leader and elite bowman decided to jump off the roof and into the jaws of the goblin zombies, I decided not to send any soldiers to the surface until I had completed the structure. The zombies were melee, so they couldn't do anything to harm us beyond job cancellation, so they blended in with the trees and business went on as normal, minus anything from outside the mote. I didn't realize the zombies had shambled off until the outpost liaison came to knock at our door.