Sure thing Ram, in fact, last update, I accidentally said WD was making all our mechanisms, when it was really you, sorry!
With our newfound heat source, now it's time to find a way to harness it. I just realized I can't use the copper because I don't have an anvil to fashion metal into useful shapes. So I'm gonna have to make do with wood and hope for the best.
I've never actually built a fort on a glacier before, so this is my plan:
1 z-level below this area is the magma. The red square is where I plan to channel open the ground and gain access to the magma. The green rectangle is where I plan to put the screwpump. The Large green square is where the magma will go, and the orange square is where I plan to put all my water.
This picture is directly above the last picture, this z-level is entirely ice. The blue square is where all the ice will melt and the red square is where I plan to put the channel. Once melted, the water will follow the blue line and fall into the channel, into the orange area designated in the previous picture.
Constructing all this has taken some time, my food stocks have gotten even more miserable.
No, I can't have my dwarves starve, I must perservere. I didn't want to have to do this but...
Sorry horsie, sorry donkey, but you were free, and that makes you free food.
If I can't get these farms in time, I'll have to turn on my dogs, good thing I haven't assigned them to anybody yet.
Wait, oh no!
Miasma, It's everywhere! I don't have time to dig out a proper butchering area, so I'll just have to live through it.
Alright, it took two months of work, and it's almost Autumn, but the water melting machine is almost done, all I have to do is make a channel to get the magma, and start pumping.
Workerdone has the least useful set of skills (gem cutting and bone carving) so he gets to be the pumper. If something catastrophically bad happens and the pumper ends up dead, then we won't be horribly impacted by it.
*a minute later*
Success!
I didn't expect it to do that! Heck, I didn't even know that big cavern was there! Hmm, whenever I try to mine it out, the water just instantaneously freezes again. I didn't expect this, I expected the water would retain some of the heat I gave it, atleast enough to flow to the channel I made. I'm gonna have to contrive a way to get that water out, put it to use, or atleast null it out enough to get at the sweet sweet mud that's underneath it.
And Autumn hits, and I think we're gonna make it. Maybe.