Ahoy all, just started playing a few weeks ago and after losing a few fortresses to my own stupidity (flooding, thinking that alcohol requires water to brew and thus not scheduling booze to be made causing all the dwarves to die of thirst during winter, more flooding) I had a workable fortress this time around but two things have popped up that nearly ended me.
For the first I had 21 dwarves and was preparing for a spring ingress of migrants and lo and behold I got 49 migrants all at once. Now my miners are furiously digging out new bedrooms and my seven new hunters are killing everything in sight for food, and after a sketchy month my stores are growing again so I won't run out of food and drink quite yet. Mainly I just want to know how usual or unusual such a high number is, and whether I should expect that again.
Now for the second a Weredeer wandered on-screen and got kited towards my fortress by one of my hunters, and after an extended fight with my squad, with several limbs torn off of one hapless wrestler, I was able to kill it. Since I was a little paranoid about the idea of a weredeer-dwarf, as soon as my medic was done with his first round of triage I built a wall around the bitten wrestler, and like I suspected he turned into a weredeer. After a little while he turned back into a dwarf, but I have no idea if he'll turn again or if he can be used as a productive member of my little fortress.
So, help! Should I keep him walled up until he dies of thirst, will his weredeeriness which re-grew all of his missing limbs keep him from dying of said thirst, or will I have a howling dwarf-beast on the other side of my hospital wall forever?