Status report: All's well.
Mostly.
The fort was attacked by two werebeasts, with rather negligible casualties (only one per attack), and we killed the first beast.
And we cleaned up every last body on the surface! No necromancer fuel here, no sir!
Look at all them 41 happy dorfs!
And we successfully secured the aquifer breach, so we're free to pass from surface to stone and back again!
And now we're working on individual bedrooms, with all the bodies cleaned up, a mountain of wood stockpiled, and all the slabs engraved (with a few to spare). I'm also working on making a large underground farm in the stone layer, just because.
And NO DAMMIT, GO AWAY, I'M NOT DEALING WITH YOU, EITHER
I'm enjoying this story. I love the idea of the fortress surviving, don't dig up the circus just yet.
...By the way, what's a Triggat?...
Triggats are a race I modded into the game. They are very shrewd and paranoid creatures bent on being completely secure and safe (thus choosing highly inhospitable climates to call home, where no one else would dare to live, except for ambitious Armok-led dwarves). They believe in a powerful government, but do not trust anyone, and even go as far as to hide their facial expressions with masks. They also believe in the heretical notion of sciences (as opposed to !!SCIENCE!!).
They are as tall as a dwarf/treehugger/child-rescuer, and they have unique weapons. They also have some unique common clothing items (like masks and turbans being practically mandatory).
They have a unique shield called the Curtain Shield, which is very expensive, and over 33% better at blocking things than the standard shield (as in, regular shield has something like 20 block chance, and curtain shield has 35), but otherwise have no other unique pieces of armor.
Their unique weapons are:
The Hook Hammer, a slightly inferior edged war hammer.*
The Battle Gavel, a slightly superior mace.*
The Inert Pylon, a pike which can be wielded by short races, and comparable in power to the normal pike.*
The Scythe, a very large "axe" which is seemingly superior to the standard axe.*
The Tree Cleaver, a rather large sword which is nonetheless one-handed, for the sake of avoiding certain bugs.
The Pump Gun, a "crossbow" that fires small pump darts, and comes with a bayonet for melee combat, making it a particularly dangerous, but not necessarily overpowered weapon.
The Tanto, a dagger weapon designed solely for stabbing.
And the Baton (my favorite), which is a... blunt sword. It's a blunt sword. I made an edged hammer and a blunt sword. Anyway, it's an amusing weapon, and combined with the curtain shield, the triggats essentially have riot police.
And they have a trap weapon (yet untested) called the Caltrop. Which is "pointy". And very cheap to manufacture. No word yet on how weak/overpowered/balanced it is.
*According to my arena tests
Other facts are that they use both underground and aboveground crops, can work with steel, are incapable of the mannerisms of laughter and smiling, settle mostly in deserts and tundras, use the same site designs as dwarves, have pink blood, have ONLY_IF_SANCTIONED for the majority of their ethics (including TREASON), have armed guards on their caravans, and their "friendly" color is
red, so it looks rather menacing when they are conducting trade deals with your triggat fortress.
Oh, and they are "innately psychic". To a small degree. What this gives them is a special attack called the MINDGRAPPLE... which, in literal application, is like a blunt, quicker-than-normal bite with higher priority. With their eyes. It's not good at all at dealing decisive killing blows, but when targeted at unshielded flesh can lead to some torn arteries.
I think that's mostly everything... I haven't published them or anything because I'm not sure I'm done fiddling with them quite yet. I MIGHT be, but I also might want to add unique crops and such, or unique armor.
Might I recommend a few dwarves put into segregated living quarters, isolated via drawbridge from everything as a safety measure?
I've often found that no fort ever has to crumble. You can wait almost any problem out with sufficient sacrifices to Armok migrant waves.
I've honestly had very few forts crumble. The ones that did were either by undead birds (and soon after, undead pack animals) in the first few days, or by
the combined powers of tantrum spiral, forgotten beast, angry ghosts, and goblin invasion pure
☼fun☼ over the course of several very amusing years, yet coming together seamlessly in the end to finish everything off.
I abandoned a few in the past, due to not knowing any better. Nowadays, I fight till the last, and usually "win" and restore the fort to elevated glory.