I ironed out the reactions a bit and regenned a large 550 yr world (took about 75 min), also with no bogeymen. 2nd world without those little guys. More crazy NPCs babbling about the night. Mostly
Evans' fault Will sleeping outside be like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza along the roads of everywhere? Who knows...
Anyways I rolled axedwarf Fikuk Yarnspun the Good with an above average stat peasant build, nothing set to high.
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Endurance will likely advance to high first, given all the that steady state jogging. Second,
agility as he'll slow travel mostly with ambusher on, followed by focus/spatial as I'll probably play him mostly as a bowdwarf/rock thrower. Toughness will really only advance if he wears some sort of armor and uses dodging more often in melee. Strength is always last. He was rolled him as an axedwarf to avoid having to make a stone axe and to have a shield from the beginning. Good fortune starts him with steel.
Fikuk spends some time milling about the hillock mounds at Copperbores. There are no signs of production here. Apparently Fikuk has slept on the ground with these other layabouts his whole life. There is no furniture anywhere. Luckily, Fikuk is the extreme of austere and stoic or he'd be more like The Princess and the Pea—pretty much most other dwarves. Actually everyone complains about weather, food, and booze. There's no escaping it. Armok's world is a world of feeling.
Fikuk Yarnspun heads west to the hillock Helmedown. No furniture here either, but they're a manufacturing lot. All leather. No cloth. All strewn about. It's pretty clear where meadhalls take their cues from when it comes to furnishings and storage. If the world is your home, you leave everything on the ground.
The biome temp is cold, so no extended aboveground swimming. Fikuk heads to the fortress Whipbuds to do his swimming underground and to use their workshops. A short distance away from Whipbuds, while cutting down an oak tree, there's a wrestling encounter with a frail yak bull that involves some hacking, but ends in suffocation. When it comes to hunting and first encounters from an aesthetic standpoint, yak is up there with carp, muskox, elk bird, pond grabber and wolves.
Fikuk has to travel a slight distance from the fortress entrance along the great dwarven superhighway to find a safe location for swimming.
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He could rack up the XP and combat the giant olm or the cave toad he spies, but that just has a quality of needlessness and excess. He first swims from
novice (level 1) swimmer to competent (lvl 3) at standard speed, before increasing to maximum swim speed, only switching downward when tired, until he reaches talented swimmer (lvl 6). Competent swimmer affords the smallest margin of error for negative status effects like drowning from becoming tired.
Talented swimmer allows a character to survive being stunned while in the water. This is the largest margin of error. Stunning cuts stat levels in half and at talented swimmer, Fikuk would now only drop to competent if he ended up taking a stun penalty.
Procedural gen is the lottery. The fortress Whipbuds only had a magma smelter. No other workshops. Fikuk will have to seek out another fortress in order to make a sewing kit.