I've finally selected a new site after my last fortress. Took days of searching, embarking, and abandoning. All to find mithril. Never. Found it. My sole supply of mithril is my own civilization.
It's early autumn of year 2 now, and a high master armorer that immigrated this spring was struck by a strange mood and created an iron shield; Akmeshokun, "Tempestshrine." It is encrusted with chromite and menaces with spikes of iron, worth 45600☼. I also noticed his name: Zasit Armortrue.
He is now the One True Armorer.
So far I've only seen thieves and snatchers from the various hostile civs. Probably because this is such a sad little hole in the ground at the moment. But; I've recently uncovered a vein of candy in the third cavern layer, sticking up into the ceiling. That's a pretty important resource, even though we currently have huge limonite deposits in a layer of dolomite. Once the miners reach the magma sea and the steel industry is set up it's go time for the military.
For now, the enemy will have to accept a humiliating defeat at the hands of a vast dodge-pit trap.
Scratch that; forgotten beast with deadly blood just showed up in the entirely unprotected second cavern layer. He's not in very good shape though, and it appears that that was caused by his assualting an olm man tribe near that end of the map. Maybe the fact that it's dragging it's newt-y belly across the ground will give the thoroughly incompetent masons time to seal the caverns.
Nope. I missed a spot and it walked right in. I managed to seal off that shaft, but it had to be at the very end of it where it connects to a large chamber in the fort, because the damn thing wouldn't stop scaring the masons back until it found the future well grates to destroy.
It took quite a while to puzzle over that one grate, so I dropped a block on it's head. Unfortunately a miner and a vast quantity of stone and stone grates went with it. Aleswell that doesn't end in deadly, blood-borne diseases I suppose. Finishing up the walls around that cavern entrance and cleaning up the mess went well, gratefully.
But then one of my rangers died of thirst on top of the outdoor walls. How the hell did he get up there? I know now of the bug with dodging multiple attacks at once flinging a dwarf some distance, but there's been no combat or anything of the sort in that area for the duration of the fort, and I don't think that dwarf had ever seen combat, and it's isolated from the only other walking surfaces on it's z-level by 21 tiles.
Boy must have been so stupid he broke gravity/unknowingly learned a levitation spell, so nobody's going to cry for him.