(this repeats the small bit of autumn that I posted above; in retrospect, I shouldn’t have published it at all. I blame it being nearly 12PM at the time).
Autumn.15th of Limestone. The home caravan has arrived; for next year, I ordered leather, cloth, yarn, silk, drinks, a few cats and sheep, and a bit of wood. The premiums for next year’s caravan will be crippling, but we are… swimming in fish. Heh.
Unfortunately, fish is not terribly priced by the mountain home. Oh, it is
prized, they do want it, they just don’t want to pay any decent sum for it. So I’m getting contrarian myself, and will give them just about anything except fish.
For the future, I’d recommend we cook the entire supply in lavish meals. That should force the cheapskates to fork over some proper cash.
So, the current trade goods are prepared meals, and whatever I can find. In exchange for about 16,000☼ (a quarter of which were crafts and discarded clothing) we get bars, wood, thread, a few clothes and armor, some decently-priced leather, and some absurdly-overpriced leather. The latter will get converted into shoes, caps and a few pairs of pants.
Once that’s out of the way, we go back to construction, and we slaughter a few of our animals. The third level gets some upgrades.
At the end of autumn, a web-spewing Forgotten Beast has found FishHeads. The caverns are no longer safe, but thankfully, they’re also well isolated from the rest of excavations; we are, for the moment, safe.
Winter5th Moonstone. The goblins have arrived from the west, with a spectacular siege, filled with all manner of interesting beasts - all of them war-trained of course:
The more reasonable species on display are jaguars, lynxes, giant toads, and giant saltwater crocodiles. The least usual ones are giant mandrills, giant walruses, giant anacondas, and... gigantic pandas? What are they going to do, eat bamboo menacingly?
These are the weirdest goblins I have seen so far. Did they get infested by some elven disease, by any chance?
Still, let’s not pretend they’re completely without teeth: they have a war roc. It’s currently sitting on the map edge as its master wishes, but I won’t expect this to last forever. The military is stationed by the animal pen; I’m gambling the goblin will go for the nearest targets.
11th Opal. The siege has… ended? There was no reason for this -- none of the invaders have died. They just... up and left, way ahead of schedule.
My term is approaching its end. Looking back, for a fisher I’ve done a lot of building; maybe I should look at that architecture thing.
The farming area is mostly unchanged since spring; the farm’s been producing large amounts of cotton, and a bit of brewing plants. Egg-layers were finally moved in their pod, even if they only have one nest box. The same place is also occupied by the soap industry, such as it is. I doubt any ash was ever made, but we now have an ashery, a soap workshop, and a dedicated kitchen that will only render tallow into fat.
Our guild, and by ‘our’ I mean fisher’s, is occupying half the southern room; the other half was given to our cousins in the fish cleaning business. Our guild rooms share a pedestal which displays the legendary kimberlite crown, DippedOrder, and they’re both classed as grand guildhalls with a total value of around 23,000☼
Animals in general have been culled according to species and abilities. Yaks were all butchered; in this climate, keeping them is tantamount to torture. From the others, the feeble beasts were marked for the knife, while the sturdier ones were left to breed.
One level above, cloth processing was assigned to the least happy members of our fort. The hope is that they’ll feel better after improving weaving and tailoring, and they’ll have first dibs on new clothes as well. Speaking of, most of the leather bins visible are actually empty (and leather clothes have been suspended), but lacking either a dedicated stockpile or a need for them, the bins themselves were left in place. Some rooms received coffers in which to place their clothes; I believe a few more were carved out, but not built. Should maybe dig out some microcline for furniture, not like it’s good for anything else.
The mayor’s rooms are fully kitted out, which should nicely compensate for me ignoring all his mandates. Somewhat related, 3 ropes were built on the tavern floor and assigned to justice; the so-called lawbreakers are mostly bearing the burden of nobiliary stupidity, so I see no reason to cause them harm. Said tavern also had most of the prepared meals hauled out of it, and in a dedicated space by the trade depot; we’ll be cooking a new batch of them anyway.
North of the mayor’s quarters there’s a large area for hives. The actual hives themselves were already carved from diorite, but not built. The most I know about bee-keeping is that it’s finicky, and that the mead resulting from it is considered subpar compared to wines and brews. Still, I made them a press to process honey combs, and… they need jugs too, don’t they? Dunno, I’ll leave it to someone else.
Lastly, the hospital has been completed and assigned 5 beds. It has no nearby water, but then again how many dwarves even required hospitalization lately? Oh, and I used a trick I overheard once in a bar: the hospital was not assigned any thread, but a small dumping area was made and used as a target for all spun hair in our fort. Doctors tend to pick the closest, so this is the best way to give use to some of the least useful materials around.
Above that, the trade depot was the focus of some expansion. Well, not the depot proper, not much you can do to a standardized building, but a stockpile of prepared meals was constructed by it. … I mentioned it before, haven’t I? The booze is getting to me; about time! Anyway, while the intended trade export is planned to be prepared meals, we’re also keeping a few other knick-knacks close by: crafts, old clothes, and armor and clothes we can’t use -- so troll crap, basically. They got small stockpiles by the entry.
Right on top of the tavern, the main kitchen is built. It’s fed by 5 separate stockpiles, with two main stockpiles for meat and cheese, and fish set aside. The other three keep selected foodstuffs like royal jelly, extracts, leaves, eggs, and milled plants.
Speaking of: we now have more processed fish and meat than we can store. My advice to the next overseer is to suspend fish cleaning jobs, and let the cook work the kitchen to reduce the raw materials a bit. We have extended stockpiles for prepared meals for this very reason.
Butchery and tanning are both done above, out of sight of animals, and nicely aired. Three butcheries should be enough for most purposes, I think.
Oh yeah. There are six rooms prepared for guilds, four even get their own artifact, and none have been assigned. One should definitely be handed to craftsdwarves, there are 20-something in that guild.
--------------------------------
Welp, here we are. My grand plan to fish, fish, fish and get other materials only through trade got bogged down by the simple fact the fish isn’t worth all that much. Prepared meals are far better, and they also give me a justification to buy barrels -- we’re going to always sell them, and can’t rely on always having access to wood. And also, we can’t be arsed.
More stuff that differs from the play-through:
1. I never appointed a dungeon master; the rooms exist, but are unfurnished and iirc the position doesn't exist in the nobles' screen. And nothing of importance has been lost...
2. I never made a muddied room for grazers because I did make one in the abandoned play-through, and nothing spawned in it -- no grass, no vegetation,
nothing. I know from experience that any muddied surface gets these in mere days, so if they didn't spawn in the month and a half that had passed, they weren't going to spawn, period (and it's not like Minecraft, where vegetation spread needs a contiguous path to a spot with grass or mycelium)
There should be at least one nest box built somewhere -- we have the eggs to prove it. But I couldn’t find it.
Jet pots are one of my favorite things in DF; they’re even lighter than willow barrels, and on that note willow has long since stopped being the lightest wood in DF. The wood stockpile in level +3 is set to accept only the least dense wood types -- so: feather, papaya, kapok, custard apple, and willow.
I made an underground farm, but it’s only been used for pig tails. And to get the six underground seeds out of the way.
For the military, best get a magma smithy done first, and train two good dwarves as weaponsmith and armorer; some 60 fully trained, armed, and armored dwarves can turn a siege like that winter one into mince meat. And then we can turn their war beast into actual meat cuts; take my playthrough of Sil Kodor as an example: by the time the fort of HopeWork matured, it was mostly fed by beak dog roasts. K, shameless plug ended.
About the bee-keeping stuff: Sarvesh/Amara may not know how to handle it, but I do. The problem is that bee-keeping really is a lot of work for very little profit, and the work gets filled with frustrations - royal jelly keeps clogging the food stockpiles unless excluded, dwarves will stupidly store jugs of royal jelly in the same place as empty jugs, honeycombs get stored in bins while pressed wax goes in barrels, and other small weird details. And on top of that, mead really is worth 1 dorfbuck, while most plant and fruit brews are 2 per unit.
Still, if you want to establish the industry, get the hives built (b - alt+h). I’ve made some; actually I made a lot ‘cause I left the task on repeat. And they’re made of jet, too; I wanted them out of diorite, what even happened there?
Anyway: for a proper bee industry, you’re going to need:
- an un-roofed area where to place at most 40 hives. Check.
- a press to process honeycombs to honey and wax. Check.
- a dedicated stockpile for royal jelly, very close to the kitchen where you make prepared meals; you want the jugs emptied asap, and if they're placed in barrels in food stockpiles they'll stay there for eternity. Check. (create as Food > remove all > go to Extracts & choose only ‘honey bee royal jelly’ and ‘bumble bee royal jelly’; ban barrels, you don’t need them).
More optional, but still pretty useful things to have:
- a dedicated stockpile for
empty jugs, which must be set to Give to the food ‘pile mentioned above. Because, as previously said, bee-keeping is kind of a red-headed step-child in DF and dwarves will store full jugs in this stockpile, but not the other way around; so this ensures any full jugs get moved to the kitchen. Create as ‘Finished Goods’, ban all ‘Types’ except ‘Tools’ and all materials except stone. No bins allowed, let any extra jugs where they are.
- a dedicated stockpile for
honeycombs. Create as Finished Goods stockpile, then ban all ‘Types’ except ‘Tools’ and all materials except ‘Wax’. Allow as many or as few bins as you wish.
- a dedicated stockpile for
pressed wax cakes. Create as a ‘Food’ stockpile, then ban everything except ‘Pressed Material’ > ‘honey bee wax cake’. Bumble bee wax isn’t a thing.
One thing I didn’t know how to do was to establish
a ‘proper’ smithy, one powered by magma not charcoal (and over the water, of course!) I still have no idea how to haul magma minecarts from the bottom of the world to where I want it to be, and I’ve been looking, too. I know it’s been done in SmallHands with great success, but not how.
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Topic: Fishheads - A Succession Fishing Village - 47.05 (Read 30425 times)