Spring Part 2303 01.18 - 04-01The immediate effect of this adventure, besides bolstered spirits and a truly decadent amount of meat, was a new batch of tattered clothes. Our military doesn’t have proper armor, and had to make due with normal civilian clothes. So I now consider it a priority to get some armor out the door. There was a chunk of tetrahedrite mined out, best to locate that vein and all its friends.
… Oh no. We
don’t have any vein of tetrahedrite; the chunk we do have was clearly marked as bought from traders. We are in a terrible position: we have gold and silver to spare, but no means to keep others from taking them.
This turns the surface defenses from a low-priority “just in case” project to a critical requirement. Not only do we need to block out an invasion, but the invaders are going to be, paradoxically, the best source of iron and copper we are ever going to have. Caravans are the second-best source, and a very distant second at that.
All our pre-existing constructions (except the fishery and associated guild) will be surrounded by our first line of defense: a wooden palisade, with main access points controlled by drawbridges and invader access points covered in cage and weapon traps. We’ll add a tavern open to the public, just in the hopes of attracting adventurers with some semblance of good gear.
The military was slated for expansion anyway; the problem now is that I know for a fact I can neither arm or armor them in anything resembling good time. Four new squads were assembled, in addition to the Iron Fists. Two of them are swords-dwarves, in anticipation of obsidian blades; the others are for crossbows and have taken weapons and ammo from the hunters, and the last one… is a reminder of error. We have no maces in the fort, only war-hammers; conversely, we have very few hammer-dwarves in the fort; we have far more mace-dwarves. The mace-dwarf squad is waiting for weapons; making a hammer-dwarf squad is unjustified, because we don’t have enough people.
After we clean-cut the surface trees, many of the woodcutters can be retired as well; this should release enough axes for a sixth axe-dwarf squad.
Now if only the magic armor fairy would drop by to put some decent coverings on these poor guys…
The next step after that’s done will be to do something about our terrible traffic problems -- our crafting areas are far from raw materials, leading to even skilled artificers producing maybe one or two items per week simply because that’s how long it takes to haul. Ideally, the crafters would only craft, and leave all the hauling to others.
I shake off a vision of a surface settlement with towers dedicated to each craft category. We’re dwarves not humans. But we’re also on top of an aquifer, and there’s little worth digging for, so who knows what may turn out to be the optimal solution.
My idea with obsidian swords turns out to be less than grand -- yes, they have excellent sharpness… but they don’t work anywhere near as well as their sharpness would indicate. With this in mind, there’s no point in creating an obsidian generator. I’m glad I asked the swords-dwarves of the fort for advice before sinking so much labor in a sub-par project.
Alright; enough daydreaming. Step one is to cut all those trees on the surface. We already gave most of our axes to woodcutters, how about they get to use them? Incidentally, I don’t intend to waste wood all that readily -- I have to remind you none of the surface trees grow back, and caves are massively flooded. As plentiful as surface wood looks, it’s still nonrenewable.
Which reminds me: I should make a dug-out pit somewhere, and see if new trees will sprout in it. The current depot and barracks room seems like a good candidate; there’s plenty of holes in it already, and the troops can benefit from not being cave-adapted.
Another high-priority: clothes. In the long term, we may or may not have a Tailor's Tower; but this year all clothes get made in a corner of The Pit: a clothier’s and leatherworker's workshops have been placed in two nooks, and ordered to make the bare minimum: dresses, trousers, caps, gloves and shoes. All these items are getting claimed by dwarves the second they're made, too.
Plenty more looms were added in the cavern; this layer has turned into our primary silk collecting and granite processing spot. In the long term, I’ll probably add a mechanic’s shop to carve some of the local mica into magma-safe mechanisms. That, or I’ll run away from some forgotten beast.
Several more temporary stockpiles were laid down in The Pit; one is for occupied cages; another one is around a still (named the Desperate Donkey for some reason), which takes only plants and fruit. This stockpile exists because, despite appointing a dedicated brewer, our drinks are still being consumed slightly faster than they’re being made. I hope the shorter distance will allow this fort to have some positive booze production, for once. Lastly, the food stockpile as a whole receives its own farmer’s workshop, whose sole job is to process pig tails into thread; this will get weird come summer, but in summer I’ll probably have another round of micro-managing basic tasks.
Towards the end of spring, all three guild agreements expire in quick succession. I am slightly annoyed at myself for this; pedestals were carved out, and we have artifacts too; I could have met these demands with minimal fuss. But from this failure, comes opportunity: two of the expired guilds were placed on the bottom level of the guildhall, so now I have a decent reason to boot all three guilds from the ground floor, and move them to the (as yet unconstructed) second floor. The ground floor gets made into our spanking new public tavern, and receives some booze barrels for good measure. No tavern keeper until some schmuck actually arrives, though.
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Author’s note: the absence of copper was found at the end of spring, after the palisade was already built; this leaves only the ‘visitor’s tavern’ as post-discovery addition. But I chose to massage the narrative a bit…
And yes, traffic is even worse than I said initially. Especially vertically; there are 110 levels between surface and magma, but the block I wanted to use (to floor over the magma breach) was listed as ~380 tiles away. I’m going to refrain from my usual One True Staircase With No Ways To Cut Access To Portions Of The Fort Because I Never Get Security Breaches Anyway, but I’m still going to widen the existing stairways all the way to magma. At least have a 2x1 staircase, ffs...
More tid-bits:
The mountain titan was indeed butchered, and did produce a stupid-huge amount of meat:
Forgotten beasts: good for the economy? A new best-seller by Urist McDolt.
All fishing has been stopped; we are swimming, pun very much intended, in unprocessed fish; it got so bad that I made a stockpile and two fishery workshops inside the fisher’s guild, and left them to their own devices. They were clogging the entire food stockpile, and we had no room for any other meat.
All hunting has been stopped as well; again, we have food for years to come, and that crossbow squad had to be armed from somewhere...
Speaking of meat -- there seems to be a need for a slight clarification:
corpse stockpiles only take sentient corpses; for animal corpses, a
refuse stockpile needs to be created. I’ve done one after the titan attack, which is how I ended up with all that meat I mentioned above: dwarves collected and butchered all kinds of dead wild animals on the map, including the mountain titan and the muskox killed by the mountain titan (dead tame animals are never butchered post-mortem; the only thing you can do with them is to destroy them, by dumping them in magma or atom-smashing).
The hedgehog can’t be moved into the cage stockpile; it’s alive and well, but still sits in front of the wooden bridge that closes off The Pit. [Edit] Upon closer inspection, the hedgehog cage was not moved because it was built in place. Oops.
Lastly:
the full imgur album. I tend to take more pictures than I include in reports, so if you want a better overall image of the fort, it’s probably worth looking at it. On the other hand, it also includes pictures from unpublished portions, so… spoilers.
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Topic: The Colorless Home: Seaside Nightmare - Successor Thread (Read 23576 times)