Year 159, Winter(album)3rd OpalOur luck holds - the legendary armorer will be joined by a legendary weaponsmith:
10th Opal. The weaponsmith has assembled all her materials, and begun her work:
14th. A new artifact is completed; a good artifact on its own, but once more the dwarf is the real gain here:
15th Opal. With one and a half months until the year ends, I have time to complete one last task: either I breach and seal the third cavern, or I exploit the cursed forest. I’m more tempted by the former, to be honest; far too many times I said just how easy it would be to secure the final cave…
Cavern it is; one up-stair is all that keeps us from it, and it from us.
As it usually happens when sealing a cavern, construction is the great priority that dwarves have. I disable all other hauling jobs (except food of course). The cavern is occupied only with two hideous creatures, called molemarian; a freakish mish-mash of giant mole and mole man. They may yet live, if they won’t interfere with our operations.
26st Opal. Molemarians do indeed interfere with us; one attacks a mechanic who was busily constructing a wall section. The long dormant military is asked to kill both of them.
15th Obsidian. The third cavern has been sealed. Only one connection to the outside remains, and it was left on purpose:
Once the bridge will finish, it can be linked to its lever, off on the stairway; should unfortunate events happen until then, a hatch on the upper right can be locked off. The inside of this area should be wallpapered in cages, obviously.
I regret leaving work for my successor, but there simply wasn’t enough time. But if I’m going to hand work to someone, I’ll at least document it properly. Building the bridge cannot continue until the vast number of corpses on the edge is moved; for this purpose, I have designated a dump area in the landing zone’s proximity - specifically on this tile:
All non-critical dwarves can haul the years of corpses cluttering the edge; then the bridge can be constructed and linked, and the cavern will be ours, to open and close at will!
The vast number of corpses is another weight on his or her shoulders too, and the happiness penalties from all of them is definitely going to see my name cursed (at least in private).
On the up side, the military has plenty of masterwork armor and weaponry. They have yet to pick up most of it, though.
The armorer and weaponsmith have their work lined up; bronze production is still chugging along, and steel production is currently blocked by not having one single lump of coal. Even the two bars of coal built in the mystery wall outside have been reclaimed and used.
On the subject of the smithy, there’s a mystery lever visible there; it was labeled as “blocks access to pit”, but I have no idea what pit is being referenced. There’s certainly nothing obviously pit-like in the vicinity...
Clothing for the civilian population has been going on and off since summer - leather shoes, and everything else from cloth. Non-plant cloth & thread are not economically significant:
I leave the caged critters to my successor as well; do please keep in mind we have three necromancers as prisoners. Perhaps they should be executed, one at a time and far from any corpses; or perhaps they can be put to use. I am unscrupulous enough to consider them a scarce resource, more than a vile enemy.
Nobiliary rooms have been arranged; not always to the exacting specifications of nobles, but they certainly find themselves much better at the end of my rule than at the start:
In contrast, locations were thoroughly neglected.
The intended ‘new and improved’ tavern wasn’t even started. The floor still needs smoothing, furniture needs to be built, and the area itself needs to be defined. We have two instruments to build, too.
On the corpse processing area, I temporarily disabled the corpse stockpile while cave construction was underway; it should be turned back on. Butchers are slowly going through the backlog of cavern corpses, and as a result stockpiles for bone and crafting materials (skulls, teeth, horns, hooves) are overflowing. Mister sadface sword dwarf has plenty of work.
In the main dirt layer, the least has changed; i repurposed 2 old stockpiles of weapons and armor, to only accept excellent and master work pieces All those items visible here on the floor are in that category; so you understand why I'm miffed about the military not grabbing new duds.
For the under-surface, there’s not much else to do except unlock the hatch when elves arrive. The hatch was locked as soon as the work was done; something that my successor ought to keep in mind. There are also three stockpiles visible, one with crafts, and the other two with furniture of less than excellent quality - because the first one exceeded 121 items. Just fork it over to the elves, they don’t know what they’re looking at, man.
(ooc: Yes, I habitually sell shitty furniture to elves. I picture them near-breaking their mounts’ backs hauling dozens of stone furniture pieces each, thinking it to be friggin’ awesome; while by dwarven standards, those same pieces are at best meh. That's what they get for not working with stone).
Lastly, the surface is closed. We have no immediate need of it, nor will the trading caravan need it now that I’m done with the new trade depot. Undead can come and visit all they want, they’ll only find cages.
------=oOo=------
But seriously, notes to the future overseer:
The
military is effectively benched. I needed a lot of people to do a lot of crap, and I didn’t want to keep one third of the fort removed from all jobs while they’re training. The uniform has a small oops, that I never noticed during my turn: it was defined with leggings instead of greaves, and I made greaves on the ground that they're a little better than leggings.
Clothing is genuinely approaching criticality; there was a round of clothes-making, until we ran out of cloth; tailors outpace weavers. Plant extractors, weavers, and tailors are some of the fort’s most important people right now. Until the cave was breached, they were all exempt from hauling jobs.
On the crafting level, the corridor was supposed to have a
choke point - a place to cut off the fort in half; I didn’t make that, didn’t even build a lousy pair of doors.
The
third cavern - my unfinished project:
On the up side - a new source of logs, and it’s one bridge away from sealing. Or locked hatch, if something dangerous spawns before the bridge is done. Happiness penalties from the corpses were a great deal more merciful than I expected; most dwarves in SmallHands feel nothing when seeing dead bodies. Happiness was barely even impacted; before the cave was breached mid-winter, I had one unhappy dwarf. At the end of winter, I had four.
Another up side - there are all sorts of fantastic beasts roaming the third cavern layer; this past summer, we had a cave dragon roaming around. Caging and taming these beasties may be a worthwhile endeavour - if the goblins can do it, so can we; then let’s see who goes a-razing enemy strongholds with a coterie of jabberers, cave dragons, rutherers, and whatever other deadly gribblies we catch.
On the down side - all the corpses; processing them is going to take for
fucking ever. In my ‘other’ playthrough, the butchers had been working non-stop, and had yet to finish by the time summer rolled around. Hauling all of them will take a lot more time than sealing the cavern proper.
Happiness is doing rather well, in fact. The saddest of them all is ReignedAxes, who keeps getting only bad thoughts:
Bad thoughts which the little blighted moron shouldn’t have, because we do have lavish meals, and he did pick up brand new masterwork armor, and I honestly can’t do anything about his absent family. While we’re on the subject, his military status is still present - I tried to remove him from his squad but he was the leader; so now he’s in a bizarre limbo state where he’s still the captain, although he’s no longer the captain.
Looking through recent thoughts, a lot more dwarves are bitching about lack of decent meals; there are 1029 units in the stocks, so I recommend you forbid all meat, and all plants in the ‘master’ stockpile (thread plans aren’t edible in the first place). I’m leaving you with 860 booze, which should last a significant amount of time for 60 dwarves (860 / 60 = ~14.3, but I’ve had a pain of a time finding how much each dwarf drinks in a year - in DF2012 it was 2 units every 3 weeks for a total of 32; but for newer versions, the wiki is silent, and a reddit post claims ~18).
I wish you luck with the miserable dwarf - in my own play he went melancholic in early spring, just as he returned to crafting. He died at the start of summer.
Lastly:
the cursed forest. It would in theory be possible to send only the dwarves who are already afflicted by the neverending fever, to cut trees and dump everything on the surface. It would also be possible to send these dwarves through a pit or trough with only a bit of water - at most 3 - so both they and the items they bring will be cleaned.
Save file - 'smallhands 160' -
http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=15102
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Topic: Smallhands - nearly 40 years and still tiny! (Read 441116 times)