Captain's tablet, stonedate 435.23.89.1 I have been assigned to take temporary command of the fortress Murderedcoppers. It appears to be in the middle of one of the most barren deserts imaginable, the only living things to be seen being the occasional camel and some bees that somehow manage the thrive despite the total absence of plant life. Better not to know I expect. It's probably just as well we are far, far underground.
We have a magma pipe conviently nearby and a gob of tetrahedrite if no other minerals, so I get the smelters up and running. The copper is better than no metal and silver is heavy and can be made to hurt. I also order the construction of new bedrooms for the wave of migrants that will surely come.
Sure enough, it takes about a week. In one wave we go from 18 to 42 dwarves. For some reason none of the bedrooms dug out seem to have had beds put in them, so I fix that and keep chipping away at new ones. I also mean to do something about our undefended front door. We have some walls to hopefully keep out some of the nasties in the cave, but the front stairs just lead right into our open base. Little good metal means a hall of weapons traps is out, but most of our cavern is flooded. I dig down a few levels to re-route the entrance below the waterline and make it floodable. I also have all the spider webs we can find turned into bags. We may not have much metal, but there is an ocean of sand above us and we have magma, so we should have the makings of good glass industry.
My initial plans for the drowning trap are thwarted by unexpected geography. My original plan was to go 3 z-levels down, make a tube leading to the hall and another to run it off the side of the map, with bridges to hold it in when I wanted it there. I hit a new cavern level 2 down, so I decided to get creative and make it more of a flushing trap.
The hole leads to a several z-level drop into another cavern with 7/7 water at the bottom
One z-level up. When the floodgates are pulled down all the water falls into the upper staircase in the previous picture.
The water runs down fast enough that anything standing there is basically carried down and flushed out into a cavern, usually with broken limbs in very deep water. Blub, Blub. That's the theory anyway. I have one lever for the flooding gates, another linked to both the lower floodgates and the bridge to make it a flushing chamber right away and a third that controls the bridge so you can make it a drowning chamber or just flood the entrance as a denial tool if that works.
This sucks up most of my attention, but I expand the farms a bit and smelt huge piles of copper, though I never used it for anything. I trust my engineering more than copper weapons.
Bad idea, it turns out. Stonefall traps apparently do not notify you of an ambush when triggered. Yeah. Live and learn.
You can't tell since the invaders are little blue squares that look almost exactly like the fungus, but 5 ambushers came and 3 of them got through before I could trigger my system. The rudimentary military I inherited gets them eventually, but we loose 3 dwarves, including, I am sorry to say Vladimir and Puddingstone.
The good news is, the two that were caught by my trap were flushed down exactly as planned. I also put out a watch animal to make sure I know before they get through next time
The rest of my turn is spent polishing bedrooms and making huge numbers of glass spiked balls. They try to get us again, but the watch animal proves it worth this time. Two are horribly maimed by my dozens of glass spiked balls and the rest, well.
Unfortunately, they got our liaison when he was on the surface, long before I could do anything and so we won't be getting much iron or steel next year, which isn't cool. I did buy up a bunch of the stuff this time though.
Not much else to say. It went really fast since I got great FPS and spent most of the time fiddling with my flushing trap without much pausing, so it was my only real accomplishment. We got a couple of useless craft moods. Most of the immigrants were some of the worse waves I have ever seen, but we scored a level 8 axedwarf and a level 10 armorer in the last one a few weeks before I quit. We are in a bit of food crunch since I though the warmbulbs or whatever couldn't be brewed for some reason and it turns out they can be, so we have about 600 units of booze and almost no food. I'm cooking seeds until the next plump helmets come in. You could probably kill a few surplus animals too. I have almost everyone in a bedroom and a bunch of bags, but otherwise it was pretty fast and uneventful aside from the one raid. Here you guys go.
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