New fort, new world. I wanted to play around with a more shallow (only one cavern) world, and while working on advanced parameters, I got this beautiful small world.
The randomly generated name is "the Absolute World", so, obviously I had to keep it.
My first fortress in The Absolute World, Atistathtat "Stakeplunged", was founded by Tholtig Garroth "The Barricade of Disembowling", a group branching off of Egstakalath "The Evicerated Bolts", which prior to our embark had only a single outpost, which can be seen in the north-western mountain range. Our first year didn't even have an outpost liason! though one was found by our 2nd year.
We embarked on the same mountain range, north east of the civilizations other site. The site finder said the location had shallow metals, deep metals, flux, soil, and no aquifer, it also has a brook bisecting the site. It is cold, and the northern part of the brook is frozen year round, the lower portion of the brook thawed in mid spring, We pulled what water from it we could divert, and made it into a well over a cistern that has lasted us the last 3 years. It is the only clean, fresh, unfrozen water on the map. There is no water in the caverns, and the unfrozen portion of the brook flowed off to the south and has been dry since. I may have to make a magma pool under the frozen part of the brook to try to melt it.
As for those "metals" ... well, it was technically not wrong. We have horn silver, native silver, AND galena! ... and that's it. No iron or even copper for armour, no gold or platinum for high-value trade goods. We do have a LOT of bituminous coal, though, so fuel has been a complete non-issue, and we've been able to pump out (literal) tonnes of silver and lead baubles, furniture, and weapons. Thankfully, dwarves are immune to the heavy metal poisoning from all the lead, so, this hasn't been too bad for the fort overall. Even the children seem perfectly healthy despite hours playing with lead puzzleboxes, boats, and hammers, while sitting on a pile of lead bracelets, crowns, and scepters.
All the silver and lead crafts are, at least, good for trading, and between the humans and dwarves we've managed to import bars of other metals, and various bits of armour and weaponry to equip our soldiers with, add to traps, or melt down, depending on it's usefulness. We're finally starting to get our own armourers to piece together full suits, though, the mix-and-match approach to the metals we ave means some soldiers are settling for mere copper coverings to some parts of their body. Better than leather, at least.
Seems we started gearing up our military in metal just in time, too. They've been training with leather, shields, and silver weapons for a while now -- the hammerdwarves and mace dwarves are firmly in the realm of competence, and one of the marksdwarves just reached elite status! -- but the lack of real armour has been a major worry. Turns out, this is for good reason. In the last year, we got ambushed by 2 squads of elves, and a siege of the walking dead. They were dispached quickly, but, those wooden arrows can pierce leather and we suffered some injuries as a result, and the undead managed to kill one of our dwarves. Hopefully, by the time they come back, we'll have everyone in at least a full covering of copper, with better materials where we can get them for the front-line dwarves, which I think will be sufficient to stop the wooden arrows of the elves, and soften the punches and bites of the undead considerably.
I didn't realize our civilization was at war with the elves. I can't say I'm too surprised, but it was unexpected. I also can't say I'm too worried about them.
We've had a pair of forgotten beasts -- a flea with poison spit, and a spider with a venomous bite. The spider managed to kill a manager, but, was otherwise not very effective. The flea accomplished nothing of note, not even an injury. These silver maces and hammers seem to be pretty good at cracking open exoskeletons. Still, would be nice to get some speardwarves trained and armed with decent spears, to speed things along. Right now I have a squad of speardwarves started and training. Hopefully by the time they're ready to be put into a fight, we'll have some decent quality spears... The miners said something about an interesting metal in the bottom most reaches of the fortress, beneath the cavern layer... perhaps we'll make some spears from it and see how it goes.
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Topic: What's going on in your fort? (Read 6188598 times)