Hi!
It's been a while since I've played my fortress, but I'm by no means done with it yet! I have to say while the whole plan in this fort was quite ambitious, I'm into year 10 and I'm only in say 1/8 of the construction process. No matter I'll have my dwarves toil away but atleast I should get something more exciting to do!
finally set a foot in the caves, my first time to! I've been meaning to harvest that spidersilk anyway since all my pig tail seeds have misteriously disappeared and three dwarves now have gone mad by the lack of fiber. Damn fancy dwarves keep asking for fiber for the mysterious constructions. Anyway I finally connect the cavern to my deepest mining tunnels and pray for some fun!
And answered it was! The moment I step foot in the cavern A forgotten beast appears! It's a great feathered moose! And it undulates rythmically! I have no idea what undulating is bit an online dictionary tells me it's a wavelike movement. I don't even want to know how that thing looks like.
My miner rushes to safety through the tunnels and the moose furiously makes it way to my fortress. I deploy my squad of recruits that had been training for the past year or so, surely the task was perfect for them. They make their way towards the main mining shaft as the moose furiously makes it way up to the tunnels. Tragedy! Or nearly, one of my kittens found the deep shafsts a good place to explore and the moose thing is chasing it outside. One of my recruits hears the whole thing and rushes to the rescue alone.
She begins to fight the monster hacking it in the legs with her axe, bringing the great beast to its knees as the twists her axe deeper in the wounds. The moose gets up and makes a desperate charge towards her, but my recruit dodges and strikes the thing in the neck as it bleeds to death. I was rather disapointed, but oh well there's an entire cave to explore, onwards!
Well, I'm not going in details as to how I explored it, but suffice it to say I found about two troglodyte or whatever they're called nests, and left a lot of blood and gore. But man, are these caves HUGE! I've had my squad return to the fort three time to pick up supplies of food and water before they could return to exploring.
Let me just post a few pics showing the layout
(the miasma are the trog corpses I left
Note that these are single z level sections of the whole thing, so the cavernis larger still! Also I've not yet managed to discover everything because I suddenly got interrupted, I'll show you later by what. Anyway note that I've found no less then 3 magma pits so far (in addition to the main one that makes up the volcano I made my fort in)
Also perhaps most curious this here.
What seems to be a incredibly deep shaft leading straight to a second cavern level! Looks like some plantlife all the way down there to, I'll have to explore those dephts aswell!
However like you may have noticed on the pic, it's siege time! Yes first a forgotten beasts and some dozen trogs to kill, now that I've begun exploration of te caverns the goblins want to play! The fun just won't end!
Yes that's 4 giant toads and 7 bats, ontop them are a bunch of hammergoblins! Now the hammergoblins have proven them to be quite weak since the last siege, stil they did manage to kill two dwarves. One of my dwarves was wounded severely with nearly half his bones broken. He has though made a full recovery and is as I speak rallying the recruits for the battle. It's payback time and for him it's personal. Wish me luck
I <3 Dwarf Fortress
PS: I meant to ask, are all the caverns so incredibly huge?
Also no underground river, was hoping to find one as compensation for the lack of an aboveground one, lack of shells is my second highest death cause for mad dwarves.