Added in Mononoke-like wooden masks for woodcrafting to mess around with; needed to regen. Rolled Bim Fieldpebble anew.
Between the choice of starting in a mountain hall, fortress, or hillock, fortresses have the highest settlement politics/power struggles, and Bim wanted to avoid the retirement issues that come with inheriting a noble title, so chose mountain hall Boltoak.
(click thumbnail to expand)
Bim began drowning while swimming from
lvl 3's competent swimmer (pretty much the earliest to safely perform) until he reached legendary.
(click thumbnail to expand)
Interestingly enough, professional swimmer was where endurance (which began as above avg) tipped over into superdwarven.
I had given him above avg recuperation, hoping to see if there'd be that rollover to high. Had read a post where Fantasticdorf had mentioned training recup. Swimming, tracking, and ambusher are awful auto-gain skills. Probably the 3 most uninteresting skills in the game as they have zero interactivity. But, eh, why not.
Bim sought out a few cave crocs to Dragon Ball/Kisat Dur as they meet some good early game requirements for best training dummy. Being aquatic, they're slower than your character and only have a single attack using teeth. The combat pattern was:
grab teeth to interrupt its attack, then punch/kick lower body to induce the
nausea penalty to make it easier to get the KO shot to the head. Never strike upper body, to avoid causing death due to suffocation. Once unconscious, punch teeth, reducing the cave croc to push and grab attacks
(I never grind wrestler on an unconscious opponent, as the constant grabbing and grip breaking done through a run quickly develops wrestler from dabbling on upwards. Biting also tends to fast track wrestling. Wrestler is an overpowered skill that really doesn't need the extra help). Wait for cave croc to revive, then begin striking limbs/lower body to work those dabbling skills to novice. Once that was done, Bim would sleep 1 hour to offload the crocs, given that they're not historical figures. Aside from the scattered teeth and blood trails, it's as if they never existed. Inherently monstrous.
Edit: Couple of things I forgot to mention. Punching and kicking limited to lower body (at first) will minimize escalation as the encounter remains a brawl until nausea is induced (which debuffs by 50%). Once nausea is achieved, punches and kicks to the head may eventually cause the encounter to escalate, but at this point, it's not important. Biting will bring a fight to lethal levels and is best saved for once the NPC threat is neutralized (teeth removal). A benefit of training encounters on larger critters (as opposed to say a wolf) is blunt force attacks like punches and kicks won't eventually pulp the critter to death, when trying to bring dabbling skills up to the useful novice level; or in the case of bites, lower body bites will only bruise due to critter thickness, producing no lasting significant damage.