So, I've embarked on a pretty crazy area. It's in range of three towers, as well as the usual assortment. The embark site has both good and evil biomes. The evil biome naturally has rain. It's a syndrome rain that causes the whole body to bruise, promptly followed by death. Considering that there are three towers to contend with, the necromancers will have plenty of corpses to play with.
Spring and summer were quiet seasons. Autumn was calm, too, but then I get an alert. "The dead walk." Two of them, in fact. So, I'm under siege by the undead, have been for two seasons now. They showed up right before the dwarven caravan was supposed to show, and I didn't embark with an anvil. So making weapons is out. I've only got 16 adult dwarves, so even if I did have weapons, I wouldn't have a sizable population to draft. As a result, I've decided to hunker down and start digging.
It's a good thing that I sealed off part of the first cavern layer at the very beginning. That's my only source of soil at the moment.
The plan is to dig out a few layers, then pump water from the third cavern layer to flood those layers. There's a ton of magnetite, and a ton of flux here, but sadly no fuel to speak of. Dig, flood, drain, grow lots of trees. That's part of the long-term plan. I'll next expand the farm plots I've got so that the (temporarily?) vegetarian fort has a diverse palate of meals to enjoy.
As frustrating as this siege is, I find myself challenged in a way that I never have before. If this siege doesn't go away, then I'll have to be extremely patient, and clever, to deal with it. I'm sure glad I have access to sand.