The yer 1080 in Silverywhite. Took a reclaim and close to 28 years for my dwarves to get this far. Still planning on quite a bit of stuff, but damn its hard to get anything done with invasions turned on, and migration switched off.
The outer walls are constructed from native silver blocks, with marble blocks used elsewhere. The fort was constructed on top of a small hill, with a 2-tile-wide trench dug around the perimiter. This prevents invaders from hugging the walls and avoiding archery fire. The trenches themselves are full of war dogs and connected to the surface through the courtyard. That way any invaders are lured in through the front gates, where most of my defenses are set up.
The surrounding biome is a good, wild, black sand desert, with the corner poking into a mountain biome. Highwood, Feather Wood and Saguaro are all over the place, but it's very very unsafe to send dwarves out there to get them. What has turned out to be most dangerous are kobold ambushes; they tend to bring archers more than any other attacker, which can critically wound my dorfs before anything can be done to stop them. The reclaim itself was also very challenging, since my fort was full of ogres and goblins, not to mention an angry ghost which almost immediately tore the legs off what I had intended to be the expedition leader.
The original cause for the first set of dwarves' death was an unlucky encounter with a band of kobold archers. They had made their way into the courtyard, and a that time the curtain wall didn't cover the forward approach, so they sat there taking potshots at my dwarves. There was a retreat to the underground, but two of the starting seven died, causing a couple tantrums. I had used a webspitting forgotten beast to trap several others in cages, which had been placed as decoration in my main hall, and unfortunately one of the tantruming dwarves released a particularly nasty one. This was around the time a sieging army of ogres and goblins showed up, several of whom were riding flying creatures.
I've had two adventurers visit the fort while it was abandoned. The position of the fort places it on an otherwise uninhabited stretch of land between two sets of civilizations, so it was a much-needed pit stop when attempting to travel between the two. One adventurer, a dwarf necromancer, managed to sneak into the underground and raise the corpse of another FB, which in turn was used to clear out most of the fort's inhabitants, making the reclaim possible.