[Oh, i just found it amusing. The lack of chairs was easily dealt with after all. The fort was very nicely laid out, and i was quite happy not to need to bother with the magma tap.]
Dear diary,
what a great day! I get to do all the planning for our great new fort, just the thing I've been trained for for years! And I won't even have to deal with all the administrating business. I quickly ordered a few more stone crafts made, to see if we could possibly trade some more stuff with the caravan. It did not succeed, the hauling paths for both the crafter (to get the stone to the workshop) and the trading crew (to get the crafts to the depot, and to go trading) were just too long. And I even remembered to order them to take the crafts directly to the depot and cut out the detour to the "finished goods" stockpile. Ah well, wouldn't have been more than an extra tame animal or the like.
I instantly decided to improve our crafting setup a bit. Get the stonecrafting workshop closer to the stones, get the crafts closer to the depot, get hold of more rocks for me to turn into doors, hatch covers, grates and statues.
In short, work the miners' hands to the bone. Eventually, Mestthob decided he needed a break. After digging a shaft for the water pipes, so he sat at the bottom of a hole and had to wait for his colleague to dig him back out.
Nonetheless, more and better stone was secured, the basic pipes for the water supply finished and Thob the expedition leader made many many stone pots for the farmers to put food in.
Mid-Slate
The merchants have done good work spreading the word of our glorious fort. About thirty newcomers have arrived, seeking to find a new, better future here. To show them that we're not unrefined bumpkins, I ordered the channel for the pipe breached and pushed the plans for the hallmark of refined dwarfiness: the creation of a small area temporarily opened to the sky and then shut with a solid roof, to allow the cultivation of aboveground plants and the creation of an apiary.
Some of the migrants arrived carrying weapons. I promptly confiscated them and ordered them melted down, we're a peaceful fort, we will not even wage war on the wildlife unless it comes to bother us.
Late Spring:
The elves arrived. For some reason they didn't bring any wood, claiming we had killed enough trees already. They must be awfully poor, they had nothing to offer but overpriced tie-dyed cloth, and pitifully few tame animals, mostly tiny creatures with no meat on the bones. The only notable creature, which we bought, was some kind of black-and-white rabbit (?). Nobody wants to pet it, though, so we sent it to the pasture.
I may have been a bit over-eager with my crossbow confiscations. Someone had dumped their quiver where they stood, and a kobold gleefully snapped it up and ran away with it and the forty steel bolts it contained!
Early summer:
Breaching the river bank wasn't quite as successful as I had hoped for. I forgot to shut off two of the branches, and now the intended service corridors are flooded. I made my "just as planned" face and no-one made much of it, but what an embarrassment! I can do better than that!
Still, short of swimming creatures strong enough to break through locked doors and grates, nothing should be able to get from the river to the room intended for the wells, and the water shows no signs of wanting to invade our fort.
When I got tired and went to sleep in the dormitory, I found all beds occupied! I had clearly not kept track of our population number, and too many had gotten tired at once. I also heard someone complain about the lack of a well (the wells in the well room aren't built yet) - indicating that there are too few barrels of drinks for every thirsty citizen. Jobs have been adjusted and more barrels and pots ordered to improve the supply.
I am not at all happy with the current layout of the fortress entrance: a straight path leading directly to the outside, protected only by a single drawbridge. Even worse, there are as yet no defences behind that bridge, if any intruder got through, they could freely move through the fort.
Several doors have been installed so that paths can still be blocked and time bought even against an onslaught of Trolls. More importantly, I designed a new entryway, constructed to allow the installation of protective traps and one of those "waving bridges" I learnt about in my engineering class.
Mid-Summer:
Great news! A child got a strange mood, picked up some planks of wood and made a nice little trinket and is now a legendary woodcrafter. I am not sure that this will be of direct use for the fort, but at least the kid is very pleased about it.
Late summer:
Human traders have arrived! They got to navigate our shiny new improved entrance, while I and other mechanics were still busy installing the various traps intended for protection, when the fisherdwarf squealed in fear: they were accosted by skulking vermin! A force of koboldish swordsmen!
It wasn't much of a fight. We simply spread word that no-one was to go and fiddle with the traps for now, the fisherdwarf kept just ahead of the kobolds, and those that made it into the corridor had little to show for their efforts: one accosted the water buffalo pastured by the gates, with expectable results. Another managed to get within sight of a human caravan guard. After one got stomped into the ground and the other cut apart, the rest of the ambush squad fled.
The humans brought a pair of wagons, but not much in the way of interesting wares. We had hidden the wood we had in the fort and could buy another fifty logs, but they brought just a single metal bar, a gold one. Fortunately, they also brought a few metal cages and several iron anvils. Those we all bought and ordered melted. Some cloth and leather was also on offer and the humans gladly took a bunch of stoneware crafts in return.
Before we had time to melt down anything, a smith got the looks of one fey and blasted off for the smithy. He grabbed the solitary gold bar and went to work:
It has a bunch of spikes and an image of squares. Tosid is now a legendary weaponsmith, a good argument to acquire some more metal bars and get high-quality serrated discs, menacing spikes and enormous corkscrews made. Those should work great in traps.
Early Autumn:
The best engineering takes power, for pumps and fiendish minecart contraptions. So we dug a hole to the surface and installed a windmill under that hole. This does offer a possible entry for enemies, but since it's just a hole with no ramps, few foes should be able to get inside. As we had already felt upon embark, we settled in a place with high winds. A single windmill could drive four pumps at once. For now, only a millstone was installed and the connections laid for the automated goblin-smasher.
Mid-autumn:
We've slept without own bedrooms for over a year, it's time we do something about it. I made a simple layout of sixteen rooms, each 3x3 tiles large. This will not nearly be enough to house our entire population, but it should get everyone their own room who has been here since the first year. To do something for those not lucky enough, I ordered some more statues and tables installed in the smoothed dining room. I'm also allowing the engravers to chisel images into the walls and pillars.
So far, we have captured two goblin thieves and seen the demise of two kobold warriors. To boost the confidence of our population, we installed the goblin cages in the dormitory and dining room. Nothing to spice up a meal of yak tallow stew like watching a goblin sitting in its cage, fuming impotently at the wealth and comfort he would deny us. One of the ex-hunters engraved two slabs, memorialising the pathetic demise of the two kobolds. We installed the slabs at the entrance of the fort, so invaders know what awaits them.
Late autumn:
The mountainhome sent a substantially larger caravan this year. They brought a lot of wares, but alas, the cloth market has been a bit crazy recently and the large amounts of cloth brought by the caravan were unreasonably expensive. Of course we bought all the steel bars they brought, but the bars were more expensive than the steel anvils the caravan also carried. We bought the anvils as well and melted down all but one of them; after all, each gives a bar of steel in the forge, and this time, they were in fact cheaper than buying steel bars directly.
While looking through the goods on offer, I saw a cute cuddly little animal in one of the cages. I instantly demanded it should be bought and adopted it as my pet. Its three tiny toes are so adorable! On my insistence, Thob ordered as many of those marvellous creatures as the next caravan could carry, along with, of course, metal ores, wood and leather.
Well, the year is winding down. I got the metalsmith to strike some coins in honour of the year of my overseership and the beehives bore their first fruit.
And the carpenter got something in their head and went off to the workshop. They worked like a dwarf possessed and brought forth this chair, which shall adorn the office of our leader.
We better elect someone who doesn't mind splinters.
Late winter:
My year in office is over and I shall step down in the next days.
What have we achieved?
The entrance has been overhauled quite thoroughly. An additional raisable bridge should provide improved security, wagons will follow the winding path while intruders will tend to go straight, running right into cages, dropping stones or a little surprise. If we get word of their approach before they reach this point, we can activate the goblin smasher, which will fling or crush the unfortunate brutes under a good solid length of andesite blocks. Most of the path to the depot is paved, the last length of road is currently under construction. The old entrance has been walled off.
The farming level has been expanded with our budding textile industry, the apiary and wells. We might need to designate additional stockpile space for food and drink quite soon. Booze supplies are adequate for 84 dwarfs, at a bit over 1000. The first bars of soap have also been made.
The main workshop and habitation floor has seen little change. The dining room is a bit fancier now and furniture storage has been added. The glassworks were replaced by a magma-powered workshop, which has produced the first glass corkscrews and pipes. We could build magma pumps now. The smithy has been set up and a few bars of metal are available.
The new bedrooms. I got a bedroom, too, but just went through the assignment list from the top - as one of the starting seven, I was obviously high enough on the list to get a room. Office and dining room to the right have been built and decorated, but for now, the doors are locked.
Oh, and we should probably give a round of applause to the miners who made all this possible, and opened fascinating opportunities for the future:
[OOC]
I just got in the mood today, so smashed right through. I'm afraid i didn't see any up-to-date dwarfing requests, so didn't add any. Maybe i've not watched closely enough, but there you have it. I bought almost no cloth off the dwarf caravan - i think cloth was ordered at high priorities? Anyway, it all had outrageous price tags, between 700 and 800 for a bin of pig tail cloth, while our own cloth industry had actually been picking up steam already. And i wasn't selling prepared meals, only crafts.
save:
http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=8296
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Topic: CharmCrafted, Citadel of Mechanisms[Game Open, still recruiting] (Read 49714 times)