OK, so I wasn't playing for most of this week...
But in current events in Steamplains, it's now the Winter of the third year.
The current status is safe, prosperous, and annoyed.
My waterwheel reactor designs are generally failures. After expanding the mechanisms attached to the magma reservoir-adjacent pump to include some axles to send power to a millstone and wanting to have some extra power, I expanded my reservoir size and the number of waterwheels, and encountered a problem of the pump not evenly keeping all waterwheels working. Now, I am giving up on the dwarven perpetual motion device, and I'm using a different exploit to provide infinite power via using my magma drain to the edge of the map as a temporary water drain that should make all those tiles of reservoir a permanent flow, according to the wiki. I haven't tried this trick before, so hopefully I'm not going to wind up smashing my head into the desk finding out it STILL doesn't work...
My magma pump also suffered a notable setback when ITS (separate) water reactor leaked some water up over the walls, following the axle path, down the gears, onto the magma pump, and into the magma, obsidian casting my magma source. *FACEPALM* Now I have to excavate the whole thing, build a gear assembly to pass power UP, OVER, and BACK DOWN to make sure there is no horizontal path for spilling water to reach my magma pump.
Basically, this is my project for nearly this whole year, and it's just stymied...
In other news, I can't get my GCS to spit webs, although that's only going to be a problem when I have an FB I want to catch with webbed cage traps for now. I apparently need to send military dwarves, because civilians and chained keets just don't cut it, anymore.
I also have failed to catch anything in the first cavern traps recently. A giant toad (which would have made me a mating pair) refused to chase the bait for some reason. I'm excavating a new set of traps in the lower caverns, including a path through the magma to possibly catch some magma crabs. (Although I have yet to get magma industries up due to an obisidianed magma pump, so I have no glass cages to actually catch them, anyway.)
In other news, previously, I had stated that one legendary weaponsmith of mine had been hit by a roving dwarf-seeking log in what is such a fantastic coincidence of stupid behavior by dwarves I am forced to presume it was purposeful. After treatment, it turned out that she was hit in the lower spine, damaging the nervous tissue, and rendering her incapable of walking forever... or not. It turns out being paraplegic is for wusses, and my weaponsmith simply walked out of her own treatment before the doctor could get to her. The health menu quite clearly says that she's lost her ability to stand, and she's quite clearly flashing the red cross of a serious medical emergency, and she quite clearly doesn't give a crap, as she continues on her day doing heavy labor with a severed spinal column. In the months since, her wound has become infected since she didn't get full treatment, (causing even faster red cross flashing on her sprite) but she still doesn't care.