Callgrow continues.
Pierce has quickly made it to 12 Pump Operating, more than any other pony save for Mother Butterfly.
Oatmeal ended her strange mood, made a fir bin worth 90k and is now a Legendary +3 carpenter.
The slave caravan is fairly disappointing, but they do have a few bins of cave spider silk. I'm not really interested in the rest of their cloth at this point, but tough leather and tough carapace is always nice to have. They have a curiosity: a large radscorion chitin figurine of slave traders. They also have some rifle bullets, which we buy.
Sadly, they bring no pets of any kind. What the hay? As Mother Butterfly was operating on her patient, Puppysmiles, a Nurse Redheart came along and decided to "stabilize and heal" her, despite there not being a terminal nearby and the medical pony being fine. Now Mother Butterfly is unconscious and so is the Nurse Redheart. Wait, what? "Mother Butterfly" is a he. I should have called him Butterscotch or something instead.
Maybe I should make Caps the Overstallion? Looks like Puppysmiles is going to be rotting in the hospital for a while (that was a pun). That didn't help. I can't replace the "Corporate something" position and the liaisons insist on speaking with Puppysmiles herself, not Caps.
I think the Nurse Redheart incapacitates Mother Butterfly again for no apparent reason. Not sure, though. MB is still in the same place and unconscious and NR wandered off.
Friendly Fire and Slug somehow made it to 12 dodge each. Deadeye is third with 11 dodge. What is it with rifleponies and dodging?
Soldiers are beginning to use spells in combat. Bind seems to work as intended: slows down enemies, so they can be more easily killed. The "Rage" still buffs single enemies (enraging them gives them +4 to dodge and weapon skill) and has such poor range that it has almost no chance of turning enemies against each other, but at least it no longer targets the merchants. I think that rage should have longer range and be a chain of interactions, so that the enemy "checks" if there is some friendly unit around. Now it is just too ?!fun?! to be practical.
How the hay did I get a thousand logs, not even counting 300+ salvage? I'm also running out of stone. It may be a good time to switch to plywood furniture and build more plywood workshops. A single sawmill can provide for several of them. I also have 340 scrap ore.
Looking at ranged weapons, for melee attacks Air rifles use mace, pistols and revolver misc weapon, hunting rifle mace, combat rifle spear (with an actual piercing attack), ripper rifles spear (with a 30:1300 attack, which I think is edged), chainsaw rifle axe, AMR mace and the rare variants same as their base equivalents. Switching Air guns to pistols to combat rifles to upgraded combat rifles will mean ranged ponies pick a few melee skills along the way and later get rusty. Oh well.
Oh gee, another Feral Minotaur Reaver. I wonder who will get crippled this time around. Civilians inside, activate all squads, close the gates (including the one with traders) and see what will happen. The Reaver scares away a few cats and Bookworm gets caught outside. In retrospect having expedition squads inactive but armoured just slows them down quite a bit. I'll open that gate for a moment. And another one for Cherelee. I should have built the bridges in a way that makes it visible if they're open or close (2 tiles wide). I somehow managed to mess up the bridges and levers, because the trader entrance should be closed and it isn't. The "t" view reveals that some gates aren't even linked to anything. Minotaur is busy chasing a kitten, but too fast to track with marksponies. The Minotaur went to massacre the caravan after killing a kitten. It is time to kill it already. The caravan guards are wounding it, but also getting mauled. There is nopony to pull any levers, so the security can't end this :< Hey, what do you know, the traders actually won! The expedition squads are set to train 3 ponies each month. Hopefully this will slowly make them better, while leaving most of them as a (slow) workforce.
The traders said they were leaving, but they seem blocked in the depot. Strange, the entrances are open. Could the Minotaur scare them so much? Oh well, what's the worst that could happen? It took a while, but they're leaving. Maybe the path to the depot should be wider than 3 tiles?
I de-activate the ranged squads so that the Unicorns can learn some magic.
A HE mine is successfully deployed. Then two more. I have a 2 wide pasture around the armoury with ten or so chickens and it works. The mines are moved to the gates. I haven't seen an explosion yet.
Pencils slams into something... for whatever reason. Hm, is it possible that floor hatches cause some kind of concussion? Because the same happened to cat in the same spot. And another one. Ah screw that, I'm dismantling the floor hatches.
I'm running out of mechanisms and am low on stone. I guess, I'll just make them from bronze from now on. Or enable Flux. I can always get more from bones and the steel-making is slow.
Puppysmiles finally dies, diplomat leaves unhappy and the cage mandate ends. Caps gets the nicer rooms. Nopony is burrowed in the hospital, so they can do whatever. Diplomat from the slave traders finally moves from the edge of the map to look for Caps.
A Bloodwing attacked Fortified Tower, who enraged it with illusions, but left her alone and flew away. She goes to the hospital on her own, with just a cut on her flank. Of course there is nopony there to diagnose her.
11 immigrants, including 1 Foal. Skill-wise nothing interesting. As for CMs, there is a restoration apprentice and a scavenger / woodcutter. Oh well, they will at least help hauling stuff, but there are way too many of them and important work still isn't getting done. Attribute-wise some would make good soldiers. This brings me to 119 ponies, the most I ever had.
A sprite-bot is rigged with explosives on the first try.
Mother Butterfly made it to 40k XP in Pump Operating and got 1337/1864 Endurance. This means so far he gained 473 in that attribute, mostly from Pump Operating. I should probably tell him to stop pumping, but maybe he'll max out before I draft him. I may as well, because the damned hospital isn't working anyway. Compass got to lvl 13 Pump Operator and 609/1284 in Endurance, so he gained 325 and is on his alow way to max out. Gains for all other attributes are slower.
In retrospect it may be best to not have stockpiles for lenses, hologems and scrolls. That way those things won't get lost in bins and the right spell hologems will land on top of the terminals for learning them and no EPs will come to haul items. Well, just the depleted batteries maybe, so no stockpiles for those too.
Here are the soldiers. Eight of them are veterans, a few more are combat-ready, but the bulk of them are recruits. This may result in another lengthy military reform, because 30-40 ponies are useless enough to be drafted, but workforce is needed more. Then there is of course the issue of arming them all.