Trading went well. We bought ever scrap of armour-quality metal they had (even down to puzzleboxes and flasks) and marked it to be melted, which is currently underway. We also got all the leather and cloth, and traded away nearly every excess item we had stuffed into bins, and all the worn-down clothes. About 90,000 dwarfbucks was gifted as an offering just to get rid of it and clear up space.. There wasnt as much metal as I would have liked, but, we'll take what we can get, and requested more for next year. We also got every gem they had to help keep the jewelera busy. They brought the coke and coal I asked for, but, we don't have any flux so we requested some for next year too so we can make more steel. In the meantime one of the smelters bas been set to full-time melting only (to help keep track of tenths of a bar I keep it to a single smelter -- it's slower but we need every bit we can salvage right now.)
Hopefully we'll be able to kit out at least one or two squads in decent armour by the time it's all processed. The copper armour has been great practice for our armourers, so, they can consistently produce top quality items with whatever metals we can get for them to work with. The traders seemed more than happy to buy bins full of the copper armour our smiths were practicing making, though we might start melting any non-masterworks as we're running low on tetrahedrite veins it seems. (3x3 embark on a one cavern world, so a small map with only about 40 z levels, many of which don't have any copper ore at all in them.)
Update: Our queen has arrived, with her full entourage! This is surprising, because we weren't even a barony! We're skipping from just having a mayor straight to being the mountainhome, apparently!
Hopefully, this is a sign of progress towards bringing our civ back from the brink of extinction... but we weren't exactly prepared for her arrival, the smiths will have to make her furniture in a hurry.
Update2: Luckily, we had about 60 bars of platinum still laying around, so, we managed to get the queen and outpost liaison's rooms set up to sufficient quality fairly quickly... We din't even need to engrave any of the queen's rooms to get her to stop complaining. it's a wonder how far 8 masterwork platinum chests go towards shutting the noblility up...