Heir to the mess -- SpringPrincess Atis has a strange dream. As if a divine presence is warning her of incoming events. She dreams that she designates her masterplan, prepare the riverbed. Then goblins attack, and the miners ignore the alert and burrows. The soldiers rush outside, to save them. Something goes wrong. The riverbed is filling with water on many places. Someone fell into the river during the battle, punching through the sand and opening a hole. the construction project fills up with water. People are drowning. MDFication is caugh underground, unable to reach the staircases. Instead he punches a way trough the rock into the waterfall. he falls down. water fills the area, and crashes the game.
Atis is back in her bedroom, on the first day of spring.
''I have a feeling goblins are underway'', she says.
''Prepare the troops, and cancel all our current projects.''She knows that nothing good will come out of moving the river the way she intended. there are too many pockets of water, too many sandy patches. She'll focus on digging the moat, and brainstorm on the river over the next year. The first step will be to move the passageway to the Southern Outpost further down. Right now, it is just under the surface, and digging the moat would expose it. A few staircases, a new tunnel and a bunch of block walls should sort that out.
Inside, the workers are upgrading the passageway. Right above, the goblins are getting slaughtered. Children run amidst the battlefield, oblivious to the danger. Why they have 71 of the little bugger, the princess will never know. She herself never married, and the chaos of this place certainly doesn't drive her to courtship for the moment.
With the goblins dispatched, the moat assembly can begin. Miners will have to channel an area around the fort that is six units large (block magmax4 block), while everyone else should be busy removing the floor blocks that were placed there. they served their purpose, but now they'll be replaced with something cooler. A magma trench.
Atis ponders what the project involves, and realize something... the turbine hall section is way too close to the surface. Even if they did manage to dig there safely without hitting something dumb, the river would still not be able to go underneat the moat. That she noticed by removing the area around the southern outpost tunnel. What poor insight. this leaves her with two choices.
A-- Don't move the river, keep the turbine hall intact. great in theory, but they need a magma moatB-- Move the river toward the southern canyon, which only requires some channeling and a bunch of trees cut. Adding a few floorgates along the way will allow future overseers to redirect the river underground, underneat the moat, and closer to the turbine hall. She'll do it herself if she has time. Option b sounds better, so the woodcutters are dispatched to the southern area of the region, to carve a working area.
While browsing the nothern section of the wall, Atis is happy to see that the ground there is lower, and won't require as much work. sadly, it seems people don,t love GnottQT much, because his office is outside, at the mercy of animals and sieges. Said office is also filled with sand and insects, made of wood furniture of poor quality, and the roof is supported by exactly one corner wall. Obviously Deus Asmoth was trying to have the poor fellow killed, to replace GnottQT with Notquitethere, the manager's lookalike, and a man loyal to the Lord of Cactusson.
Obviously this area will be deconstructed.
Feeding the people remains important, and the elves have become valuable trade partners. Zuglarkun also left a note regarding gypsum powder. excelent. It's too bad that most if not all of their trade goods are made of grown wooden toys and crafts. this suggest that previous encounters with elven merchants were not kind. That just won't help matters.
The traders were still waiting. days were passing slowly, with little progress made. At this rate, it would take a year to finish the moat, no less. To worsen things, Mestthos, her father's cousin, had created a precious diorite crown, and named it the triangular bars. Everyone was now partying to celebrate. That's when an elven diplomat came to her, asking that they restrain from cutting trees. This was a bad timing, and Atis told him to stick it up his ass, for they were not slowing down her projects any longer. She dropped a bin of blood-soaked grown-wood toys at his feet, saying they were welcome to take arms if that was such a fucking problem.
The princess felt confident with her declaration. She may like the Lord of Cactusson none, but the man knew how to raise an army, and this outpost had 5 squads of soldiers ready for war, most of them full.
Looking at the surrounding construction area, Atis soon realized that miners were done with their job quickly, and then just waited after the builders and woodcutters, who worked much slower. To keep them occupied, she browsed through the paperwork left by the previous overseer, and handed a scroll over to the head miner.
''Execute Plan B'' she instructed him, and the miners rushed toward the magma forges.
*a month passes*
''I meant now'' she add.
As the miners return from not working on project ''Plan B'', they report that the forges have officially ran out of steel. Which is sad because the Lord of Cactusson had order 20 of every piece of steel armor possible. instead he got... 3 helms. He isnt too happy. Meanwhile reports of hyena attacks reach the fortress. The soldiers are dispatched, but for now the civilians dare not venture outside...
As work resumes, the area above the southern outpost tunnel is channeled by mistake, without first securing the area above. Zefon the planter plummets two levels below into the Turbine hall refuse tunnel. GnottQT the manager sort of suffers from a mid-case of the exploding leg. Progress is halted once more to avoid further cave-ins.
Bridges are slowly deconstructed so that a full channel can take place. They'll need to be rebuilt, anyway, to cross the full lenght of the moat. The old blocks have been mostly removed, and miners are digging the side of the trench, while builders replace the sand by granite blocks, as to create the sides of the upper moat level. slowly, but surely, but mostly slowly, progress is made.