Year 106.
MapCurrent view of the project:
Another year of toil has ended, and the Crafts of Soap celebrate the beginning of their 6th year at this site. The settlement has gone from being a tiny outpost to a significant dwarven city and duchy belonging to the civilization known as the Rock of Fortune. The elephant grows ever higher while the mines slowly extend deep into the earth. The mineral deposits in the volcano's cone have been mostly exhausted except for some remaining zinc veins, and the dwarves have begun to delve deep into the earth to find more iron and gold. Work has begun on a rail system that will extend into the depths, but it will take quite some time to build, and the extent of the third cavern hasn't been fully plumbed.
The dwarves managed to successfully capture much of one of the emu storms that swarm across the map and managed to tame them. A tame female skunk was purchased from the elves, while several more were caught and tamed. A female emu was given a nest box, while the skunk was pastured in the animal pens, and a male for each was placed in the sporing chamber in the hopes of producing offspring. Unfortunately, during the late autumn, the male emu reverted and killed the skunk. Not all was lost though, near the end of the year the female skunk gave birth to several young giving the fortress a viable breeding population of skunks. Now we must decide whether to use the skunks for meat or cage them up to be released against invaders. The emu's clutch of eggs also hatched, and one of the males was born perfectly tamed. The others are still somewhat feral, so they went into a seperate cage to await maturation. With luck, we should soon have a viable breeding population of emus to suppliment the domestic poultry we've slowly obtained.
Shit.
This was my best engraver. I spent many months training him by smoothing over various floors and walls so he'd be a highly skilled artisan. Then the fool goes and stands on one of the minecart tracks and gets hit in the head. Speaking of deaths, a miner who got grievously wounded in a cave-in nearly two years earlier was finally put out of
my his misery. He had a broken elbow that refused to heal and he was simply spending months in traction doing nothing. Even when the traction bench was removed, his injury did not heal, and he simply returned to the hospital. Finally, I deconstructed nearly every piece of furniture in the hospital and told him to go stand under the atom smasher. The only bed left in the hospital was where a foolish child that got hit by a minecart (because she was apparently playing on the tracks in the upper part of the mountain for no good reason) was being treated.