At the start of autumn, things are going swimmingly. My carefully hoarded wood is being made into charcoal, chalk and iron are being forged into masterwork and exceptional armor in the flaming blood of the earth by our +5 legendary armorsmith. A lesser but still competent weaponsmith cranks out swords, axes and parts for steel weapons traps. A moderately skilled bowyer and carpenter goes into a fey mood and starts demanding silk cloth in addition to the wood and gems already claimed at the carpenters. Unwilling to sacrifice a potential legendary carpenter, I look around and cautiously allow the cavern to be raided for silk.
It goes well with nothing nasty or evil popping out at us and he starts work. Then.
Crap. Yes, I had the better part of a year to prepare. No, I'm still not quite ready
It isn't very glorious, but the first of two groups is on the bridge before it retracts, so I see no alternative but locking the doors until they go away or the steel production gets enough together to start a squad. Unfortunately, I never got around to moving the carpenters inside, so the moody dwarf is ruthlessly shot down from above, along with a woodcutter who was going to nail a couple of trees I had just noticed I missed. My timing is impeccable. The livestock are also wiped out to a beast.
It is at about this time we run out of wood. With steel production grinding to a halt for potentially a season until the caravan comes, I decide to risk breaking into the cavern again a trying to rope up 30-40 logs, which I figure should be enough. I also have doors set up which should hold against anything but a forgotten beast or troll, if worse comes to worst. I also have a couple of soldiers worth of steel.
It goes pretty well at first, but eventually I am spammed with talk about everything being interrupted by a giant toad. Now, I had gone through the units list and there was only a single giant toad on it, quite a long way away. My first instinct was that the dwarves had just caught sight of it somehow in the twisty cavern and so I looked around to try to figure out where they were seeing him and have them go cut wood somewhere else. When people besides woodcutters had the problem I looked more widely and
there was a giant toad not on the units list sitting in the central stairway 
Well, ok. We have a some steel weapons and is just a giant soft-skinned amphibian. Can't be that hard. I draft the migrants with best weapons skills, only have it presented to me that the weapons are at the bottom of the stairway and the soldiers at the top. Yeah. I sort of moved the weapons stockpile, armor, bar stockpile and a custom one for chalk and magnetite to a room just above the magma forges so that the smelters and smiths could work as efficiently as possible.
That's great. So they are punching it and it is chasing people up and down the stairs and toad and dwarf blood is everywhere. Finally I decide the draft the only people left with weapons ready to hand after my woodcutter got mowed down, the miners. Into the fray they go and soon the giant toad is slain. No dwarves are actually slain in the affray but the mechanic I had put on mechanisms and gotten several levels had a broken arm, two miners had broken legs and a random peon has another limb broken. I am down to only one reasonably skilled miner, which will make magnetite mining slow as I don't want to waste the precious iron ore by having novice miners carve it up. I set up a hospital where the old armor stockpile was, but with crossbow goblins camped outside I can't get water.
So, I turn on the waterfall. Last time the reservoir was 7/7 before anyone got hurt, so I am hoping I can get it running long enough to rig a well over it and save our wounded.
Not so much. I lost 2 more dwarves before it was 2/7. I shut it off. It is only then that I realize I can break open the floor and put a well over the plumbing which leads water to the waterfall. Sorry you guys who drowned, your leader is a ninnyhammer. At least the wounded have a shot now though.
Sometime during all this another migrant wave show up. They have been turning up in groups of 5-8 all year, none of them with particularly valuable skills. We have 4 level 10+ fish dissectors though, as well as a few master fish cleaners. I think the mountain homes are participating in some sort of watery genocide... The goblins chased them down and killed them, but somehow a miner manages to get himself close to the gate and away from the foe, so I let him in. He'll actually be pretty valuable now that our mining corps was gutted by that stupid amphibian and we need skilled miners to collect magnetite. I do get the wood and steel production up again though.
Eventually, the goblins give up and the caravan shows up. I buy all the wood, replace some of the slaughtered livestock with 3 cows and bull it brings and pick up some random metals. I also grab some cheap leather and cloth in case we need bags or get a mood or whatever. Only 1 steel bar but that hardly matters now. I buy it with the mechanisms I have been mass-producing for practice and, rather disturbingly, the clothes of dead dwarves drown by the waterfall in my time or my predecessors. I wonder if this will hurt our chances of getting migrants 'come to craftsthunder, lovely waterfall, lots of booze, lots of rock, excellent prospects of employment in the, er, textile industry. Yeah, that's the ticket'
That pretty much brings you up to speed on how far I have played. I've now got 4 dwarves worth of armor in high quality steel, head to toe and weapons for rather more. I also have half a dozen weapon trap parts of steel. I'll probably throw out some leather cloaks for them over the winter. I may wall off both sides of the brook canyon to stop them from shooting down at use again, and I'll try to have a few weapons traps over the entrance before my turn is up. We can pretty much produce as much steel as we have fuel for, though it does take a lot of manpower to move the magnetite and chalk from the odd corners of the map to the magma area. I probably could have placed that better tbh, I just put it under the central staircase already dug for me. If you dug down to magma below the magnetite and set up there it would be more efficient, but that will have to be someone else's project.
As far as clay barrels go, yes we have clay and in theory it should work for non-liquids. If we want to glaze them we need ash or cassiterite. I don't think we have the latter, though I never found the deep metal under the flux unless it is the hornblende I kept hitting. Unfortunately, from my understanding they are bugged atm so that if they are taken to a stockpile they will be ignored and if taken from the workshop directly they hold infinite stuff so I've been avoiding them.
That's everything I can remember for now. It just turned winter so I'll try to get this finished up tonight or maybe tomorrow.
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Topic: Craftsthunder, a 31.19-.21 Succession Fort [Strike the earth! Apply within.] (Read 25008 times)