I just finished my third year. There were some... Fun moments.
Right at the tail end, due to a mistake on my part for a ramp designation, I sprung a leak into the depths of my fortress. I caught it quickly, fortunately, and I hadn't made a voluminous cavern yet, so it could be contained.
So I had my dwarves start building walls to seal off the flooding portion, and I had my miners dig into the magma pipe to plug up the leaks. The walls didn't get constructed very quickly, but I did get to the magma pipe... and lost a legendary miner in the process. I then dug just enough to hopefully seal off both the magma and the leaking aquifer with obsidian.
But I dug too much. The aquifer stopped leaking, but then I had a magma flooding problem. That killed two more miners, and a few useless haulers who wanted to clean the solidified globs of stone. I tried a few things, and those killed the miners, but ultimately I settled on digging through the obsidian cast of the pipe and using the aquifer to seal it from above.
So that took a bit of time to deal with. There was a goblin ambush while it was flooding, but I ignored it. When I checked, all the goblins were dead. Good for my champions!
So that was fun. Now that I have a mess down there, I'm going to have to fix it, and that will be time-consuming.
I think I've got a good idea what my projects are going to be, but I'm sort of operating freely and liesurely in getting them set up. I've almost finished penetrating the aquifer in two other locations, one by the soil collapse method, and another by the pump method. I'm planning on trying collapsing the aquifer itself, but that's not so much a demonstration of breaking through the aquifer, since you basically have to be underground already to begin with.
My dwarves are starting to build my walls faster, so hopefully I'll be pouring out obsidian casts in no time. Building the walls, though, is fairly time-consuming, so if anybody has a better method for making obsidian molds quicker, I'm all ears.
Other than that, slow progress, once again. It will be epic, it will be amazing! It will also probably be unfinished!