The next caravan has arrived and Year 5 is complete!
A farmer went into a secretive mood and decided our civilization's first Queen deserved immortalization as an artifact hand-held figurine. Of brimstone!
For whatever reason, an elf diplomat just appeared (no warning, just suddenly bam there they were in the middle of my fort) on DAY 1 of Spring. They 'gave us a warning' about disrespecting the trees in this area (but did not give us a tree-cutting quota) and left. Well, okay then.
The regular elf caravan arrived about 2 weeks later at the usual time and with the usual alert. And... they had grizzlies!! They were super expensive but I happily scrounged up enough to buy two female grizzlies, who were promptly pastured with the wounded male grizzly, and trained for war. Here's hoping for cubs next year. Then I was very intrigued to see snapping turtles and alligator snapping turtles and I thought... hey. Shells for moods someday? So I bought a pair of each and stuffed them in with my peacock, pig, and pet chicken. I managed to catch an alligator snapping turtle laying eggs in a nest box, and forbid the eggs, so hopefully we'll have some of them hatching eventually too. With the trade goods I had left I bought all the clothes I could. I've definitely seen quite a few warning thoughts about worn and missing clothes so hopefully this will help.
As the elves were leaving, I got a HUGE wave of migrants. Yep, 15. Filled us allll the way back up to the new popcap, and I most definitely don't have beds set up to accommodate them, lol. But... I don't understand. FIVE of them are children. As per the challenge rules, I DO have the child/baby cap solidly set at 10%. I already had one child in the fort (Endok) so I shouldn't have been able to get more than 2 or 3 more at most. So getting 5 (for a new total of 6 children in a 35-dwarf fort) has me totally baffled (and also pretty annoyed). They're mostly younger children, too. The oldest two are 14, the rest are all under age 8. Ugh. Well, whatever.
Here's the list of migrants (nobody with notable skills unfortunately):
iton is the only single, and he brought along his pet bunny.
Dodok and Kivish are married but childless.
Tobul and Solon are married, Logem is their daughter, and they brought Solon's pet kitten.
Datan and Kib are married, and Cog, Catten, and Kivish are their children.
Tosid is
kinda another single, in that he came alone, but he does have a wife and 7 kids that he left behind (he brought his pet chicken)
Dobar and Litast are married and Adil is their son (they left 2 other children behind)
Three non-pet animals also arrived with the migrants - another kitten, a goat, and a llama.
Time passed pretty smoothly gathering up the items for the next tribute. The shields were taking the most time, and more wood had to be cut for them (sorry not sorry, elf dudes. You didn't give me a quota so...). The human caravan came and went, nothing special.
But maybe getting those snapping turtles was a mistake because...
HE WANTS BONES (or maybe shells).
Either way it doesn't matter because I don't have a butcher to obtain them!
There's a bunch of reasons why I don't want this guy to go crazy. There's the impatience penalty. There's the point of pride that throughout three forts since I've started playing, I've never failed a single mood. And there's the fact that this workshop (like most of my workshops currently)
can't be closed off from the rest of my fort. If he goes berserk or something I will likely have even more impatience penalties if other dwarves die too (and he's a miner, so he has a pick...it could be a slaughter). Plus this guy has what I think are some pretty nice stats that I'd rather not lose.
So I look for options.
Per the wiki, "sometimes" if you fight a butcherable animal and knock a limb off, when it rots it may turn into useable bone without a butcher. I've never seen that happen, but can't hurt to try. So I checked my map and there were some wild turkeys running about. I sent my wrestler squad after them, and somehow one managed to knock off a wing (I think kinda chopped it off with their shield, lol). So I gathered that in to see if it'd turn to bone.
If that didn't work (and it didn't look like it was going to -- all the other bits turned to skeletons eventually, but the wing stayed a wing) my only option seems to be to get a Butcher. Which means hoping to draw one as a reward from the Fall caravan, or going for the caverns and hoping for a workshop draw as a bonus tribute. It was already mid-summer, so I decided to wait for the caravan.
I know the trick of 're-setting' the madness timer on the mood by forbidding one of the items he grabbed (though I've never had to resort to that trick before), so I kept doing that to keep the dwarf going. It wouldn't last forever though, and he was getting very unhappy being unable to attend to his other wants (though fortunately, not hungry or thirsty yet).
Finally the fall caravan came. We were elevated to a county! (great, lol, her rooms aren't even good enough for a Baroness yet). We turned in 59 walnut logs (base + bonus), 48 bars of billon (base + bonus), 30 bars of lead (base + bonus), and 48 highwood shields (base + bonus). The fifth goal (cut gems) we were unable to do because we don't have a Jeweler.
The bonus rewards netted -6 impatience and 1 bonus workshop. Rolling the bonus workshop gets me
Well it's not a Butcher, but I'll take that Loom! We can at last make cloth (and take the next step towards clothing and bags).
For the 4 base rewards... I'm truly desperate for a Butcher now, so I will take 3 workshop draws and +1 rep. So here go the workshops...
First -
Jeweler. Now we can handle cut-gem goals if need be.
Second -
Got all those already. Rerolling -
Clothier. Now we can make clothes! Nice but... still no Butcher. I'm kinda sweating bullets now after not just taking all 4 workshop draws...
Third -
WHEW. Gosh. Okay, obviously, I am taking Butcher.
Now time to roll goals for next year:
Well... that's a mix all right. Hm. There are certainly five+ do-ables, though I definitely won't be able to do all the bonuses I think.
Goals for next year:- 77 prepared meals -- -1 imp for biscuits.
- 18 rough semi-precious gems -- +5 popcap if I can get the right kind.
- 21 pedestals -- +5 popcap if I make them all out of metal. Eesh.
- 20 short swords -- +5 popcap for 2x.
- 16 metal bars -- -2 imp for 2x.
Final Status for Year 5:- Impatience = -5 (was -2, +3 for failing a goal, but -6 for bonus rewards, so nets out to -5 final)
- Reputation = 15
- Population = 35 (cap 35)
- Available workshops =
trade depot, still, farmer, magma kiln, magma forge, craftsdwarf, kitchen, carpenter, smelter, stoneworker, wood furnace, soap-maker, siege workshop, screw press, regular forge, mechanic, magma glass furnace, quern, ashery, loom, jeweler, clothier, butcher
The caravan hasn't left yet. Once it does I'll check my exports and see if I get any more reputation from that. I traded them quite a lot in order to buy out their clothes and fuel stones, plus they had some steel gear I really wanted to grab, and a couple instruments I plan to put in my dining hall/tavern. I also bought a couple more peacock hens since my one from embark is getting kinda elderly. Bought some gypsum plaster for the future hospital, some food ingredients (esp since I have food for tribute again), wood, the usual.
So, I'm not out of the woods yet with mood-guy, but at least I have a way forward now, when I next continue.
*edit* While waiting for the caravan to leave, I built the Butcher. They immediately grabbed the old turkey skeletons and chopped them up into bones! I didn't think they'd do that with old skeletons, but this is awesome because I didn't have to slaughter anything and waste the hide since I don't have a Tanner yet. And yes, the moody guy accepted the turkey bones and started working away.
He finished before the caravan left:
Two more historical nobles from my civilization. I must have a fort of history buffs.
And also (I assume because we're a county now) we gained a couple more holdings:
Once the caravan finally left, I was able to check how much I've exported (not counting tribute) to the Mountainhome, and we're up to 48k! That gives me +2 more rep.
And I realized also that I'm supposed to earn rep for creating artifacts! Counting this latest one, we have created four artifacts so far: the mug, two figurines, and the coffer. So that's +4 more rep. I've edited the 'Final status of Year 5' info above to reflect this. 15 total rep! I'm halfway to beating the challenge!