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...  Calculating weather it would be better for my crossbowmen to have masterwork wood and bone crossbows or average steel ones.

Crossbow quality and material only affects the damage that the Dwarves do when beating the opponent over the head with it, yes?... after running out of Bolts.

In my Fort, I just received my third wave of Immigrants (taking me up to 40). One of them took eight steps onto the map and immediately fell into a Strange Mood. Now a Legendary Bonecarver.

[Hortun]

In my Fort, I just received my third wave of Immigrants (taking me up to 40). One of them took eight steps onto the map and immediately fell into a Strange Mood. Now a Legendary Bonecarver.

Dang, I only ever get cheesemakers and threshers! Lucky you.


Finally got a king the hard way. Then got a titan and a goblin siege, which felt way too easy. I didn't think my army was that strong. I decided to bust out the HFS, and to prepare, I chained all of the stray kittens in my fortress around the breech I was about to make.

The HFS had some casualties, but it was still too easy. I want a huge siege that will obliterate my entire army. I want to convert everyone who isn't farming or cooking to a soldier and have a massive battle that I actually need to bust out siege equipment for. Come oooon goblins, attack already!

After this fort, I'm going to either A: settle in a terrifying zone, B: Install the orc mod or something like that, or C: play that cat fortress mod frogman posted.

[Lord Shonus]

A bower went fey and made a nondescript artifact pine crossbow somewhat early in the construction of a surface fortress.  Oddly my first artifact crossbow.  Calculating weather it would be better for my crossbowmen to have masterwork wood and bone crossbows or average steel ones.

I should probably make the decision soon, I now have 100 hippoes in the major river directly north of the fortress and I'm starting to see slowdown.  The hippo genocide must happen before it's too late.

Crossbow material only affects damage in melee, while quality has a significant affect on ranged capability, so the materwork wood/bone ones would probably be better.

[Greiger]

Yea that's what I ended up settling on. For some reason I noticed the quality of the metal used effected the skill of the crossbowman as well, but after looking I couldn't find any mention of it anywhere.

Of course I didn't really experiment very well with it, so it could have been minor variations in item quality instead of the use of steel that was actually making the steel using crossbowmen more effective.

[A-chana]

There was a cougar running around the the property of Bootlashes, my fortress. It's the first relatively-dangerous thing I've had (I was told it could mess up war dogs and unarmed civilians pretty well), so I've been sending newbie hunters after it for the laughs (not saving, though -- I can't really afford to have anyone dead right now, and I'd rather they die of some freak accident or something seeking them out themselves to kill them). Neither have any sort of armor, only one has a weapon, and their combat experience is just killing some cute little groundhogs.

First one was a planter/woodcutter type, so he was dragging his axe around when he started to chase down the cougar. 'Kooks' Knighturns could not make the first strike, however, and the cougar instead swiped at his right leg, breaking it, before Kooks stunned it with a quick hit. After the creature recovered, it leapt upon the hapless woodcutter...just to have its right front leg completely cut off. As my friend said when I told him this, a leg for a leg. The cougar passed out from the shock and pain, and Kooks finished him off where he was.

I had to leave before I could see just how he intended to get home with a broken leg and a dead cougar, though, which was a bit disappointing.

In what was meant to be the other alternate timeline (more on that in the end), I sent 'Jason' Esteemroughness to go after it instead (I had originally tried to send both of them, but Jace backed out while I wasn't paying attention and instead worked on making rock mechanics for my puny stone traps). A note on him is that he is a farmer-type, a mere novice at fighting, and completely unarmed. He's previously run into a wolf pack and singled out one to fight barehanded, and only had a tiny scratch on his leg as a result. That was one wolf, with the whole pack scattered. This is something that broke the leg of someone who had a weapon. What follows is something of a blow-by-blow, with my own very serious interpretation of the injuries.

Jason gets the first strike this time, hurting the left front leg rather badly and stunning the cougar, then proceeds to jump it, probably to kick it to death or something. The cougar, while, stunned, managed to stun him with a sudden nip at a hand, which managed to cut up his second finger a bit. Maybe you shouldn't leap on a prone cougar and make yourself prone, Jaceface. Then again, it was his middle finger*, so maybe he was just telling it where to stick its claws and it backfired.

*I think the thumb counts as a finger here, actually, so it'd be the index finger. I like this way better and I forgot to get screenshots of the injured finger so I will insist it was the middle finger.

They lie there like idiots for a bit before Jace recovers and hits it a few times, but finally decides that maybe fighting a giant cat on the ground is a bad idea, and gets up and backs off. Kitty Cat recovers as he does so, but Jason is a badass farmer and just smacks it in the head and gives it a mild concussion, leaving it sick to its stomach. Of note is that Jason's finger apparently stopped bleeding in the middle of the fight. Sweet.

From here on out, Jason just pummels the thing, knocking it out after some time with a direct strike on the head and continuing to totally wreck its limp form. These were the injuries before it finally expired (the second screenshot is older, but the brain, nose, liver, and stomach didn't sustain more damage). He takes it home and then proceeds to hunt down a groundhog because I forgot to turn off the hunting labor before he ran away again.

tl;dr -- In an alternate timeline, a cougar broke an armed lumberjack's leg and merely lost one of his own before dying. In the now-real timeline, an unarmed farmer-wrestler punched it until it died messily and only had a bloody index middle finger as a result (from flipping it off, no doubt).

With that done, I'm finally getting to work on making armor. You know, in case I want to hunt cougars or something. They're all being made out of wood, bone, or leather, though -- I haven't found ore yet for metal (I found a cluster of something, but I have no clue what to do with it to get whatever that cluster contains). The supply wagon the intro mentioned is still a few months away from arriving (and I suspect I may have to trade for said supplies), and no migrants want to come into such a dumpy, unimportant place. This is my first fortress ever, and it's been a crash course of trying to figure out just what the heck I should do. Still pretty fun, and not the losing kind of fun. Yet. I want to get ambushed or something -- I know who'll be leading my military then.

I dunno. All this is small fries compared to what else happens in other games, but it's awesome for a newbie like me.

[Sphalerite]

Pageslipped had its first goblin siege today.  After being sieged several times a year by orcs for a decade and a half, a goblin siege is a bit underwhelming.  You're expecting to see an overwhelming force of bloodthirsty feel-no-pain orcs, but when you look out there's a dozen goblins in their silk pajamas.   It's adorable the way they actually think they're a threat, you just want to pat them on their head and say "Aren't you kids cute?".  So rather than activate the automated defense array I sent the backup military out to say hi.  My hammerdwarves could use the practice.

Meanwhile, the cave crocodile farm continues to be troublesome.  Several of the latest batch of hatchlings decided that rather than head for the meeting hall, they'd head for the newly filled water channel under the meeting hall where my butcher dwarves can't reach them.

[Retro]

Raptorlabored had its share of fun the other day (the lowercase 'fun').

So I've got this underground river, see. And after digging about five sets of fortifications into the tunnel leading to it, I finally channeled out behind the 'waterfall' water-generating part of it and had safe access to my magictreewater. Could be the time to call it a day.

And that's when I remembered that I absolutely despise the underground river critters.

My attempt to asphyxiate the bastards didn't work so well. I collapsed some ceiling into the top of the river, so the rest drained out, but unfortunately the creatures still hung around. I suppose I should've expected that. So now what to do? I considered my options and selected Apply Liberal Dosage Of Magma. I cut a new tunnel towards the top of the dried-out river.

So now I have a magma river and no riverlings. This was nice too, but the chasm meant that the magma kept disappearing forever and my magmapipe couldn't refill. So I stopped the pumps and closed off the tunnel, letting the magma drain out.

Ooh, but what's this? My rather long and windy riverbed generates insane amounts of cave spider web at a very fast rate due to the lack of fluid on it and the riverchasm?

So now I have more web than I'll ever need and about seven pages on the unit list of flashing red-and-yellow deceased enemies. T'was a good day.

[Blackburn]

Magma: Both the first and last resort of the average Dwarf Fortress player.

[ManaUser]

I just finished my first obsidian factory, failing to realize that mining it out would leave an obsidian "ceiling" in the way. So I had to tear it apart and rebuild. Next time I'll have to dig it out using ramps... I think that'll work. Meanwhile I got attacked by to megabeasts in rapid succession. (Bringing this fort's total to four, I've never got any before.) First was a very pathetic titan, he had lost his left arm at the elbow and way constantly passing out from pain. I sent my small squad of marksdwarves to put him out of his misery. Next was a dragon named "GildParch the Flame of Taxes". I already have tame dragon, and I was really hoping to catch another. (They were even opposite sex, though I know they don't really breed.) Sadly, that plan fell apart when the human caravan pretty much walked right into the dragon as the left my fort. Surprisingly their guards took care of it with minimal losses. Now I'm working on a recipe for candied dragon.

Edit: The candied dragon turned out better than the obsidian factory.

[Grendus]

I sent one of my dwarves to chase a kobold thief out of the fort. A nearby fire imp blasted the kobold into oblivion, and my dwarf disembowled the imp. The flaming kobold corpse lit the left half of the world on fire, so I quickly restricted all the dwarves to jobs inside the fortress which is on the right side of a brook bisecting the map. As the fire slowly worked it's way across the map, I noticed some random sets of armor lieing on the ground. Turns out the wall of fire caught a goblin ambush halfway across the map. Very fortuitous, actually, as I have no armor and no trained military.

[Reese]

The first full test of my inverse magma chamber was a huge success, but with some minor problems

the 40x3 pathway that I have set up to be flooded with magma fills almost instantly from the primed magma pumps at the base of my reservoir (three pumps for rapid filling!) but the single evacuation pump takes a lot more than three times as long to pull the magma back out... once the chamber clears entirely of 1/7 magma, I need to add a couple more magma pumps spaced evenly along the length of the channel(problem with fluids flowing slowly, it might have worked better if I was using water instead of magma).

the support columns that allow for a 3 wide corridor(every third square down the middle is a floor instead of an iron grate) are a problem, but I knew they would be... unfortunately, I don't think there's any easy way to make it not a problem... I should try putting 1x1 bauxite or iron retracting bridges in the single squares to see if those can be used to remove the magma more quickly...

I have an elven caravan in my depot, I should test the magma chamber on them when they try to leave.

[Fien]

I loaded up an old save and started playing it a little while ago. Soon after a woodcrafter went fey and made a pretty cool flute. Then I nearly had a heart attack went I saw a giant eagle next to my fort entrance. Luckily I remembered I had bought it off some elves and chained it near my door (on a legendary iron chain I believe).

[Roundabout Lout]

My legendary axedwarf, Tekkud Bridgetouch the Incidental Memory of Boats, just fought off a goblin siege all on her lonesome.

When the siege started, both Tekkud and Olon Roofsquare, a champion wielding Warmgalley the Inky Mysteries, an iron mace, and protected by The Ankle of Apexes, an iron shield, were asleep.

The dwarves under them, some champions, some not, didn't know what to do. They ended up charging into the crowd of Gobbos one by one. Worn down by ten gobbo wrestlers, organs pierced by 3 marksgobbos, and cut by the leading swordmaster, guarded by 5 axegobbos, they failed. A good fight was put up, but exhaustion claimed them in the end.

Tekkud now woke up to realize half the military was now dead, including her lover, and squadmate. Being awake, she finally ran towards the station I had set up, while Olon snoozed away.

She ran into the crowd headfirst, and killed two of the wrestlers with little more than a glance. Her attention was then however turned towards the swordmaster. The two became locked in an epic duel, while wrestlers started tearing her clothes away (pervs.) A bolt managed to find a way into her stomach, and Tekkud immediately began to vomit. She recognized trouble, and took off into the woods.

The goblins chased her for three days, but never caught up because she was perfectly agile, and vomited on the run. After the third day, Tekkud's stomach wound closed up, and she turned right around to face the menacing invaders again.

She STEAMROLLED them in a display I can't hope to describe. 20 goblins, along with the swordmaster, all lay dead, the rest fleeing.

Olon finally woke up, and strolled over to find an unconcious gobbo survivor, and flattened his head. How heroic, Olon.

2 kills for the dual artifact holder, Olon.
32 kills for little ol' Tekkud.

Edit: She doesn't care about anything anymore, and now never leaves ecstatic.
Spoilered pic.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Tekkud walking away from the last batch of corpses.

[MelloHero]

Just got a fey mood with a clothier raving about silk cloth on a map with neither underground river nor chasm, and the dwarf caravan up and left without trading because I didn't notice the broker was busy. Given the options, I've decided it would make sense that cave spiders could have been carried along by us or by a caravan and so have performed my first raw mod, changing the vermin cave spider's biome to NOT_FREEZING. This doesn't seem especially effective, however.

ED: And... second ambush of the year. 3 casualties, including both my hammerdwarves (marksdwarves still remain). Great, as if immigrants weren't steering clear of this colony already.

[loser]

Since my past post in this thread I have plumbed out almost the entire map of Doorkindle using the one-shaft-to-every-nine-tiles technique, except for the place were the HFS are waiting.  I'll leave them be until I'm ready for my overkill solution to their inevitable intrusion.

I have also completed my water tower and the stair-stack for the magma tower.  Magma-safe pumps in the pump-stack nearly reach the surface from the bottom of the map, but will need to run all the way to the top before the stack is finished.

Doorkindle was made the Mountainhomes based on merit, not happenstance.  That was somewhat more difficult than I expected, but still fairly easy.  That's a whole lotta road, for one thing, especially when it's all built with common stone blocks.

Fortress Created Wealth is closing in on fifteen million, and the attention from my goblin neighbors has grown as well.  Because of this, I have discovered that an old flaw in my cunning plan for invasion-and-caravan control is not as minor as I once thought it was.

See, I have underground passages leading from a central Trade Depot out to entrances at the edges of the map.  The vast majority of the map is walled in, so these entrances are the only way that invaders or caravans can reach vulnerable targets, or for my dwarves to get outside of the walls.

Seems like a great idea, right?  Put a Trade Depot airlock in the center and dwarves are never in danger.  The trap-zones themselves could be isolated, similarly, and harvesting goblinite would be equally low-risk.  The problem is that the Trade Depot Lock design depends on being able to clear dwarves out of the danger zones. 

In the past I've done this with the "Dwarves stay indoors" command.  However, this time the Depot and all the paths are underground.  Not only that, but I've built convenient rooms over the Depot and the underground paths.

So I've lost some dwarves to invaders.  Most weren't anyone I cared about in the slightest.  but now I've had the mild inconvenience of losing the Dungeon Master, the only Gem Cutter of any skill (which happened to be Legendary +5), and one of my half-dozen Legendary Glassmakers.  This needs to stop before someone important and difficult to replace dies.

I see an awful lot of channeling, ramp-making, construction, and redesign in Doorkindle's future.

Current population is 266, of which 99 are children or babies.  There are 33 coffins with names on them, although some of those belong to merchants who received a local burial.

I think this fortress is fairly stable.