My very first fort is in its third spring and going much better than I expected, I think watching a bunch of tutorial videos has helped a lot with that.
Lovely embark site. Abundant natural resources, iron/coal/flux just inside the hillside, a brook just outside my gate, and to ice the cake my wagon animals were a matched breeding pair.
I'm actually a little disappointed with the lack of action so far, and sort of wish I'd selected Wilderness rather than Calm for my first go. The sum total of my casualties are a guineacock that broke both his legs when I cut down the tree he somehow got stuck in shortly after getting off the wagon, a pair of hens that started brawling with each other after a minor birdsplosion overcrowded my hatchery, and some guy's pet dog that was devoured by a cougar.
According to the combat reports a weretortoise killed some wild boars out in the woods at some point last year, but none of my guys ever actually saw the thing.
Filled my rather splendid cistern after this year's thaw. It has two separate inlet floodgates - one straight and one diagonal - for fast filling and topping off, a vertical kink with a floor grate in the intake pipe to help keep out any nasties, and a dozen taps with prebuilt floodgates around the bottom of the tank so I can connect more pipes off it without draining it or risking my miners.
Also just completed the overhang on my perimeter wall that I've been building since I got here. Now I need to either conscript or otherwise train up all the lye makers, animal carers and other useless peons I've had from my migration waves as they no longer have hundreds of hauling and building jobs to occupy them.
Current to-do list, in no particular order, includes:
An aboveground milking/shearing barn and seed silo.
Steel gearing and training my army.
Trying to dig out a fancy multi-level meeting hall to replace the wretched soily hovel my dwarves are currently drinking in, hopefully involving a controlled cave-in without turning any of my miners into paste.
War-training the lion I bought off the elves.
Figuring out how to get someone to clean the badger vomit off the main drawbridge.