So, recently I decided to set up a fortress in a very
interesting location.
I had set up within a glacier biome in the DEEP south of my world, far far away from any other civilization, at a volcano.
This seemed like a bad idea at the time, I was very correct. I hadn't thought about documenting this until my situation became worse and worse, and it's gotten to a point where it seems quite interesting.
When I first arrived here, at Witchplank, my immediate plan was to dig into the ground around the volcano as soon as possible, and set up a magma workshop to prepare, it turned out to be more dangerous than the wildlife as we lost two miners immediately to a magma "incident". However their work wasn't in vain, they did allow the other Dwarves to create the buildings to start production of defenses. There were a few yetis and giant albatrosses outside, but I decided it was best to ignore them and just make some doors to lock us in from the dreaded frozen wasteland. By this time I had already lost a hunter to a savage beating from some pissed Yetis, so we were down to only 4 Dwarves. Something immediately became apparent as I realized we couldn't start growing any food, since there was no clay, dirt, or sand layers. I decided to begin immediately digging down along the volcano to the first cavern layer to procure water and trees for irrigation and wood... But I got more water than I had hoped for.
When I burrowed in, I realized it was
entirely flooded, which served our purposes for irrigation for the time being, but stopped us from getting any wood, which was a very big problem, as Dwarves were just passing out whenever they felt the need, which made things pretty dangerous. We had created some buckets to begin irrigation, but food and drink was already getting low by the time we got the metals to start making buckets, so we needed to act fast. I had started production on a bridge in the caverns in hopes of finding some trees
not submerged in water.
After a
long time of digging and bridge building, we finally found some land not submerged, and no opponents... for now. I had set my wood chopper to work immediately as we hit "dry" land, and had already started irrigating some farmland, which wasn't much, because it took so long to move the water. And then we got migrants...
And boy did we ever get migrants. They sent us a whopping
20 migrants, which we could definitely not keep fed, so I did what only the most sensible of leaders does... lock the front doors. I had set up a double door system at the front door to let in only the most useful of them, and left the rest (Peasants and children) out in the cold, forever. With slightly increased numbers, we could irrigate more of the farm and produce things faster to keep us alive. Though as you can probably tell from the previous image, our safety was short lived. We got attacked by Troglodytes from the caverns, I knew it was coming, I just didn't know when. They messed up a couple of our woodchoppers, and killed one of our fishermen, so I sent down our one-man-militia to take them out in his full-iron gear with sword and shield. He made quick work of 90% of the force, but got pushed off of the bridge by the final Troglodyte as if he was in Star Wars, and drowned due to his poor swimming abilities and his full armor. With the lack of a militia, a true hero arose,
The Herbalist. This completely unarmed woman took on the final Troglodyte, and 3-4 extra Troglodytes that showed up after the Militia's death minutes later, with her bare hands. She did so by wrestling them by their arms, and crushing them with her hands. I know not how she was so strong, but she crushed their skulls with her hands and feet alone. Though it was not at a cost, she was severely wounded and couldn't stand or grasp with her left hand, having killed the last one with nothing but her right hand. We managed to keep her fed for a while, hoping she didn't have a spinal injury.
(Pictured is the location of his final stand, the corpses have been removed since then.) After a long while of waiting, he did recover, but her left arm would never work again. I immediately made her the new Militia Leader, and armed her up with new equipment. Not much happened for a while after that, time passed and more migrants came, who were thusly kept outside in the cold until they starved, or got killed, or froze, or all three. After a long while, the migrants stopped coming, and we never got any liaison to say hello, which was expected. We eventually unlocked the doors to go "dispose" of the corpses the only way I knew how, chucking them into the volcano to appease the gods, of course. This served little but to make the Dwarves not sad every damn time they walked outside, and also made me laugh a bit. It would have been wiser to bury them, but it was too tempting to do it. Many Yeti attacks and deaths later, we had gotten a
huge surge of migrants, and I had to do something about it. We decided to keep them all, and only then realized we were running out of food, so we needed to do something, quickly.
We constructed a platform to dunk the children into the volcano with the flick of a lever, as to appease the volcano gods, and bring us good fortune and crops. We have also begun expansion of the farm to keep producing more plump helmets. Since trading is not an option to get more seeds, there's not much we can do except hold out as long as we can. The strangest thing is probably that mostly everyone is happy, probably because of the alcohol.
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Topic: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter: Witchplank (Read 1004 times)