It's the westward journey to human lands and wool yarn.
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With yarn, Bim can finally outfit himself for the cold. He had been using silk, but would prefer more woolliness. Leather chafes and has a scaly feel (I'll never understand DF's preoccupation with leather). Plant fiber's weight is disproportionate. The way is woolly.
At the start of it, there's turkey hunting which proves to be good for encumbrance. These turkey corpses are 4-5r in weight. Once butchered they yield 8-9 units of meat and 1 unit of intestinal track. The meat weighs 2r per unit and the offal 1r each. Keeping whole turkeys in his quiver or pack saves Bim 14r per corpse on encumbrance. Quite a thing when you only have above average strength. Actually, quite a thing for any strength category.
Further along, in a cold swampy region called the Lone Mire, Bim is attacked by a 5-pack of wolves; an audience cipher wolf surrounded by his adoring harem. Bim's strength finally tiers over from
above average to
high; pretty much the result of multiple grip heavy combats with the 1 giant bear, 2 carp, 5 wolves (moose/turkeys were shot at range).
While none of the combats were prolonged, the additional grips, beyond the single latched grip you need to cancel the opponent's ability to dodge, add up.
Every time you grip, re-grip, release or have grip broken is wrestler/fighter/observer XP gain, and wrestler/fighter gain is strength gain. All the
superdwarven stats are from the crutch-walker/ambusher combo (not sure what tracker's contributed). Toughness had tiered to high by swimming (while drowning) from adequate to talented. At the most recent fort stopover, Bim added 2 levels reaching expert, though toughness had tiered to superior just a little over half way between talented and adept swimmer. Swimmer does help strength, but not by very much. A peasant who starts with above average strength will take around twice the number fights Bim had to tier to high usually—IIRC somewhere around 20, presuming a non-grappling series of combats which follow whatever looks good on the menu, and if no good targets are available, defers to block/dodge/wait the ticks until the menu offers something safe and sound.
At some point during the battle with wolves, the pair of XXelk leather glovesXX Bim had been wearing met their natural end.
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Now with that three stage devolution taken care of, Bim will hopefully log striker -> kicker -> biter in uninterrupted sequence, perhaps followed by misc obj user. May or may not happen. Would be nice if it did.
These wolf corpses vary between the average sized wolf's 44r up to the muscular wolf's 65r. Three of the five corpses are mangled and will be left for the wilds to reclaim. Bim butchers one of the two relatively unharmed wolves, and collects the meat/offal in a bag. He packs the other (44r) into his backpack for the trek. Jogging speed is now down to 0.277 or 0.273 in ambush. Bim had been making good time at 0.400-0.500 speed.
While the game's measure of a day's travel might be based on 1.000 speed, a well-supplied long trek will still have you leaning closer to 0.500. As previously mentioned, every unit of meat (muscle) is around 2r in weight, every unit of offal (organ) is 1r, as are fruit/veg/cheese. The lightest travel on nuts would still be heavy. Bim's slept over 7 times so far and is only three-fifths of the way west. ETA is probably under two weeks, but it'll be close.