Everything's well in Plainplains (a savanna, flat and boring place). At last, I've managed to attain seven recruits, which are beginning to be professional soldiers. As they're currently sparring. Yeah.
The site itself is nice. Untamed Wilds Savanna means interesting animals - Giant Leopards were spotted, so were Rhinoceri, and the fort's residents have even tasted giraffes, warthogs, and somehow, milkfish. The soil has four layers, two of which are sand and two are clay.
The fort itself has three layers too. The first layer is in the soil - some farms for all kinds of crops, an underground pasture, where all kinds of animals graze on moss and fungus... and collection zones for clay and sand.
Between the first and second layers there is the sedimentary layer. An exploratory tunnel has found a magnetite cluster and mined it, which had a vein of bituminous coal close, so it got mined as well.
The second layer is two levels of general residential stuff. The first one is a 50x50 square or similar, with four sectors - one a stone stockpile, holding workshops of masons and stonecrafters, as well as the mechanic's. The second sector is light industry - a wood stockpile with carpenters' as well as an ashery and a wood furnace, and a cloth/leather/dye stockpile with all the related workshops. There's also a siege workshop, which would be useful if I had an use for it - I do have a legendary Siege Engineer, so...
The third sector holds refuse, butchers, tanners and the soapmaker, as well as the bone carvers. The refuse stockpile is cluttered with shells of turtles and mussels, as no bone carvers have been found yet. The other facilities work just fine. Elves have brought animals, and I have kennels, but I can't tame them, sadly. Seems I'll just have to restrain them at the entrance, or something... any goblin ambushers I catch will be used as combat training, so, sadly, fun is out of the question.
The fourth sector is just a warehouse where furniture, ropes and blocks rest.
The second level of this place is barracks, hospital, dining room, kitchen (with all the food-related facilities and a stockpile) and loads of 3x3 rooms, as well as some 5x5 ones for nobles.
And best of all, those two levels are all marble - valuable AND flux.
The third layer is deep down, at the magma sea level. Forges and all kinds of furnaces. Many green glass cockscrews have been made already, to be used in a pumpstack or traps... additionally, the furnaces are processing iron into steel, and the forges keep churning out copper bolts from the early times when all I have found was tetrahedrite. Exceptional and masterwork steel swords have already been made for the recruits to use, and they have tapped themselves lightly all over with them.
Sadly, our only armorer is not very experienced, so what the recruits have to wear is at best *steel mail shirts*, but more often -steel mail shirts-. Currently, helms are being made as well, with the rest of equipment soon to follow... hopefully.
I really hope I'll be able to repel a gobblin siege this time.