The elves come, and sink to new levels of worthlessness. What do they offer for trade? Five animals, none of which are trainable for war, including a moose and water buffalo. No bins of cloth either, which means they had little of value. I bought some thread, clothing, and berries, and to show my contempt traded nothing but worn out clothing for it. The elves have proven themselves unworthy of my crafts and roasts this year.
And of course their caravan of uselessness was followed by the usual goblin annoyances. The snatchers got snatched up themselves by the initial surface cages meant to snare thieves and animals. A pair of ambushes from the gobbos too. The first one was led by a lowly goblin recruit (wtf). That might have been a diversion from the second one which was led by a human swordsman. The human killed a mason that thought the civilian alert meant run as far away from the fortress as he could. The ambushes were unsuccessful though, my melee unit crushed half the invaders with the marksdwraves offering fire support and others ran like hell for the map edge.
The first cavern has been breached, and a small area is being walled off to corral any FBs that dare to approach the fort. There are some cage traps being set up to capture underground critters. We have already captured, trained and slaughtered a draltha, and some soldiers killed another draltha during field training.
A metalsmith got moody during the invasion, and finally cranked out a useful artifact. He made an artifact iron short sword which should serve us well in battle. It's been assigned to the militia captain in charge of the swordsdwarf unit.