If you have a waterfall, the fortress is not exactly screwed, just challenging.
You need to mine out then muddy some rocky subterene tiles. It doesn't take a very bit spot to subsist on nasty plump helmets, unless you have a migrant rush.
Wood is more challenging, but you should be able to trade for it with all the silver and copper you will be cranking out. You can store food in copper barrels. Most your traded-for wood is going to go for beds, which can't be made out of any othher material.
After that, make a deep descending series of up/down stairways until you hit an underground cave. Even if you break in on top of a big chasm, this will turn on spores for shroom trees. After that, your muddied tiles can host herbivorous animals, and will produce shroom trees.
The cold issue is harder to deal with. You need to keep underground, and exploit homeothermy of your dwarves and animals. Carnivores like dogs don't need to eat, and produce homeothermy. "Pen" them in a grid pattern to exploit the homeothermy, and to keep them from killing each other when they overcrowd the community hall. They also reproduce prodigiously, which is good. They multiply faster than dwarves, and as long as you keep from making cavernous rooms that need ridiculous amounts of 4 legged bioheating units to keep livable, and keep doors shut to control heat loss, you should be able to pull it off. (Bonus. Dogs are edible and make leather for clothes.)
If you play it right, this fortress can stand. Just use the silver to make smashing weapons, instead of cutting ones. Makes good shields and maces/hammers.
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Topic: My map has 200,000 tetrahedrite and nothing else. What should I do? (Read 10082 times)