My fort has had an insane few months.
First I hit adamantine and just started mining and extracting strands, found two whole veins and was dreaming about what I'd make first with it, when something terrible happened - my 60 z-layer magma pump stack deconstructed. The first pumps were built with wooden screws, and that caused them to deconstruct, and the entire thing came down.
Unfortunately it had already filled its purpose and so magma began flowing down at an incredible rate. I only discovered this when I got a warning about someone bleeding to death. How did magma get in this area, I wondered, assuming that was the cause of the smoke. I looked around for fire men or fire imps, but no signs of them. Suddenly I noticed, a floating giant steel corkscrew - then it all made sense.
Dwarves were drafted rapidly to flood the breach, try to do something, anything, to keep lava from flooding down. They succeeded but not before about 10% of the reservoir was at 3/7. (Thanks to an idiot dabbling mechanic who took the floodgate task, and idiot miners and idiot everyone taking forever). So now I am stuck with jobs always canceling at my forge and smelters, but they at least work. Since I had to seal one of the tiles the top magma pump was on, I don't think I can reconstruct the stack as it was, which is depressing since I spent like a day on that thing. I get it 59 Z-levels though, and I'll deal with the last one.
In the midst of the flooding on various levels and steam clouds and so on, a massive goblin siege arrived. I had built a defensive measure, a long bridge with traps in the middle, up to the level of my fortress floating about 3 z-levels above the surrounding ground. I ordered my dwarves to hang out around the fortress end; ordered civilians inside, and waited.
The first goblin to reach the three traps was the leader of the group, a pike lord, and he dodged all three of the serrated spinning disc strikes (each trap has 3 but I think only the first went off, because...) as I watched he dodged off the bridge and fell several Z-levels, becoming just a twinkle and incapacitating himself.
This sort of stupidity continued for a time, with gobbos mostly getting ripped apart by traps and muddling in the trap area, trying to get around fallen comrades. I ordered my marksdwarves to fire from behind the fortifications on the fortress side, and for once in their miserable lives, they did something right (instead of rushing in to bash with crossbows!), and while the pike goblins got pushed forward by a surge of trolls and bow goblins, not one made it more than a few squares from the traps. At some point I dispatched some melee squads to get some experience and clean up the mess. At least 4 in that squad got hat tricks.
On the other side, a group of goblins and trolls were intercepted by a melee team, and by the time I noticed they were already being chased off to the hills. The squad defending did not wait until they hit the traps, though the traps claimed several trolls who snuck in when the original squad went chasing down goblins. I sent a backup squad who did take out a couple trolls, but that side was done.
After the dust settled, I had a few casualties. One was dead (suffocated; did he land on his chest after dodging off the bridge? I don't know), one had a busted lip (really, now do you need to go to the hospital for that?), and one had some arm nerve damage. Hard to tell what was bridge dodging and what was inflicted by enemies, but the badly injured one was in combat a long time - thanks to his masterwork and exceptional armor, even injured he was able to ward off most blows.
During all this one of my lifetime injured dwarves - bedridden for 6 years as a kid by an elk bird, never able to receive treatment, got struck with a strange mood. Shrugging off severe injuries, he took over a craftsdwarf workshop.
That workshop was being used to process adamantine. So what stone did he grab? Raw adamantine. So I got my first truly valuable artifact. A raw adamantine bracelet encrusted with tetrahedrite and pyrite, decorated with chestnut, and encircled with bands of raw adamantine and oak. With a value of 908,400, it's more than 10 times my next best artifact.
I also have a severely injured Potash maker in my hospital, who needs just about everything, surgery, dressing, etc. What happened to him? Probably an Elk Bird.
So next up, time to build some walls to that bridge. Though it's almost worth not doing so, just to watch the gobbos dodge off into lala land... I can't have my guys batting cleanup share their fate.
Probably going to fix my magma situation (it's finally starting to evaporate, water and magma both) and get back to smelting adamantite.
But what will I do with when I have it? I have a legendary armorer chomping at the bit. Perhaps I'll let him have a go.
Edit: One of my dwarves got 8 goblins/trolls in the latest blitz, another 7! go team!
Also, I accidentally exceeded my lumber limits, while also offering the elves a splint or something wooden. So maybe I'll get besieged AGAIN? Who knows!