I have good and bad news.
The good ones -
there is a workaround for the bug that keeps migrants and caravans from coming from the mountainhomes.
The bad news are that it requires a script unavailable for my version of the game/DFHack. The regular matrimonial arrangements will therefore proceed as usual.
So far that resulted in 11 kids born. Still, deaths caused by various factors brought the fort down to a dangerously low level of 119 citizens. Among others, I lost my last dedicated mechanic to old age. And I accidentally dropped a furnace operator into an eerie glowing pit. Anyway, the last couple to enter the honeymoon suite is Cog Talktongs and Datan Boltsflights, and they've been there for a while now, apparently not quite in a hurry to seal the deal. I can with all confidence say I'm getting close to matching the natural population loss.
Now that I think about it, maybe I should move the suite somewhere there is a well. Keeping it supplied with booze has been a problem no matter how much I fiddle with stockpile and workshop links. Lack of bonus happiness from drinks might be a problem, but a nice enough well could offset that.
Minotaurs visited Wirejade a few times. I have five captive now, and put four of them in a room to see if they can breed in fortress mode. Nothing has come out of this so far and I doubt anything will, not that I was expecting much.
Iden Armorkeys, a hammerlord, got the title of the Dour Deep of Problems out of killing kobold thieves. On the opposite side, kobold thief Griris killed a named war lion and became Griris Risewalks, at least for the short while before the military showed up and he took a hammer to the skull.
I continued the work on the training facility in hell described in the last update. Once I calibrated the minecart route (which involved a bunch of carts ending up forever lost in the depths of the glowing pits), it was time for testing. Fath Dentedcoal got in the minecart and rode it all the way around the loop and again, and again, until I had to forbid it and force her to get off. With that confirmed as working, I moved on to get the Forgotten Beasts out of the spire and in the prepared area.
The plan was simple. Put a few war animals in the way to lure them in, and a piece of artifact furniture at the end. Once the beasts get there, retract the drawbridge to shut them inside. The thing is, I had used an artifact table to make them stay in the spire to begin with, and they were unwilling to leave. Taking out the table with a cave-in was the only way.
This backfired spectacularly.
As many of you know, cave-ins work in strange and often unpredictable ways. Still, I thought dropping a single wall tile down several floors won't end in anything too disastrous. I was wrong.
The dwarf who mined out the last supporting floor was caught in the dust cloud and fell straight onto the slade floor of hell. Needless to say, he did not survive. RIP Ushrir Glazeddoors. His main profession was actually animal training, and that in Wirejade means being constantly followed by a large herd of war animals. Take note - this will prove important later on.
These are the creatures stuck in the spire back when I had first sealed it. At the point of the cave-in only two were left alive and uncaptured: Slevina Deathmenace the Ruthless Curses, a web-spinning porcelain humanoid with three tails and and Emura Lobstermenaced the Washed Poisons, a steel cockroach with poisonous vapours. And instead of slamming them into the walls, the knockback somehow sucked them in through the hole in the floor and into hell, on the wrong side of the walls of the containment area.
They destroyed a bunch of doors and then headed straight for the forges. The recently built garbage disposal railway wasn't sealed off in time and I was forced to order everyone to quickly evacuate, leaving a few soldiers behind in case capturing the beasts was no longer feasible. Emura and Slevina broke some more doors and at that exact moment the animals which used to follow Ushrir around began to arrive at the entrance to the forges on their way back to the fort.
Slevina broke off to fight them, covering everything in webs. Already damaged by all the animals I had previously dropped into the spire as web bait for the cage traps there, it lost most limbs and was almost destroyed, yet found a corner right outside the entrance where it just pinned everything down by spamming webs faster then its foes could untangle themselves.
Since apparently that wasn't enough trouble, a minotauress paid Wirejade a visit. She promptly fell into a cage trap, much to my relief.
Meanwhile, Emura stayed behind to break some furniture, then slowly followed in Slevina's footsteps. But he only way there led through a narrow corridor filled with traps, a single tile in width. This wouldn't have been a factor had Slevina not thoroughly covered the whole thing in webbing. For a web-spinner, it's still not a concern, but all Emura had was a poisonous bite. The weapon trap had been jammed by the corpse of an unfortunate giant jaguar, which lost all its limbs to the serrated blades before death, and couldn't trigger. And with its next step, Emura walked straight into a cage trap.
With the nearly 79 tons of angry metal monster contained, I set about defeating Slevina. A frontal attack would have likely ended with my entire military suck in webs, so the situation called for clever tactics. Fortunately, there is more than one way to leave the forges, creating an opportunity for a flanking manoeuvrer. The soldiers marched out of and over and around the metalworks. Even though most of them threw themselves into webs, all I needed was at least one dwarf in the right place. The beast didn't last very long.
Cleanup took a while due to all the webs. The spire in particular was filled with webbed cage traps, some of them still armed. I had to wait for weavers finish their job before hauling out all the cages, mechanisms and skeletons. In the end, I got a nice mountain of meat, bones, tallow and other products from the butchered beasts. The soap makers are still busy with it, and I (literally) burned through a decent chunk of the wood stockpile. The whole setup meant to lure the FBs into the containment area was no longer needed as I can just release them straight from the cages, so I pulled it down too. Punched a way from the ore stockpile to the spire too, as there's no need to take a detour through the cavern.
Emura will be used as an eternal practice target for marksdwarves together with two vomit blobs I happened to capture. I don't even remember if projectiles can kill them. Two more FBs and an ape devil are in my cages, but I don't have any plans for them yet.
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Topic: [0.34.11] [SPOILERS] The Tale of Wirejade (Read 95381 times)