Things have perked up a bit since I wrote about the syndrome issue. I'm not sure whether it's the mod, or just strange luck, but this has been a very odd embark so far.
Couple of things I've noted:
I managed to kill a couple of kobold thieves so built a creature lab to unpack their treasure bag. The creature lab seems to have an automatic "make a skill container" job that it keeps spamming. So far as I can tell. I'm not going to need one of those until I kill a megabeast, and I certainly don't need more than one of them. Unless I'm missing something, it probably ought not to be an automatic job.
When I built the creature lab, it looks like it took a caged white tigerman corpse I had nearby (courtesy of my local necromancer tower who thought it would be fun to send a wave of them against me in spring 132. The dark stranglers picked a bad moment to make their first appearance. They never reached me.), and built it into the fabric of the building. For a while I thought it was doing something with him, but I guess the poor chap is just a building material. T'was puzzling though, but I'm happy for him to stay there so long as he doesn't manage to escape. Which I have no doubt he will eventually.
Speaking of the Dark Stranglers, on arrival, they ignored my fort, and marched into a strange structure that I was sure was not shown on my embark screen. I'm guessing it was a tomb, as there were mummies present on arrival, which made for a quite panicy first few minutes. The tower undead who arrived shortly afterwards marched in after them, wiped them out, and marched back out. I don't imagine it's anything to do with Mastercraft, but it has certainly caused some weirdness. I can't see the tunnel in it all the way down, but it seems to hook up to the caverns, as your slime creatures have occasionally emerged from it to do battle with the mummies. Not been able to snag any of their special drops before the local thieves swoop in. Apparently a named Putric Blendec woodcrafter managed to get himself killed down there too, and I've NO IDEA what those guys are doing here already. Some sort of underground camp maybe. So far down that they don't show up in my unit list apart from that one. I shall investigate the structure eventually, once giant slimes and mummies are a little less terrifying.
Something down there is killing the mummies. I don't know what it is, but I fear it.