Year 1 (145)It is the beginning of year 145, and HopeWork is being reclaimed.
At least, after I look at the map for a bit.
I’m really glad to see all visited locations are visible on the map; except for the last and most important of the vaults, ShellsGrave, which keeps itself secret.
I also find that nothing stops me from embarking on a revealed lair or a cave, except terrain constraints; that’s particularly interesting, because both known caves are ‘claimed’ by our enemy goblins. For example, here is
JoyousGloomy; the lower two-thirds are perfectly embark-able; but trying to embark in the upper two-thirds is disallowed, because they’re all mountain tiles.
In the reclaim menu,
SwallowedShoot too is available to embark, as an abandoned fortress. Huh.
This is also the point where it finally dawns on me to make a backup, for Legends purposes.
ZenosDucim is selected, and the message pops up; familiar to others, new to me:
Well.
Shit.
I have questions. Why are there 6 demons in my fort? Where is my adventurer? (oh here she is, on the surface; storing something in some stockpile). Why are there 211 citizens on record? (A fuckton of merchants have emigrated in the fort; probably the former population of the tomb ButonedAmazed).
Ok; no rest for the wicked, and I suppose the rest of us should keep up. Time to see where the demons are:
Demon #1 is in a large gabbro mine; he’s killing his way through merchants. The mine is isolated with a door, but of course that won’t be enough; a 3-wide wall is ordered in the stairway.
Demon #2… is in the stairway. Shit. She’ll become the target of the military, because thankfully I still have all my squads, and they still have all their armor:
Demon #3 is in an old room; it was once used for gabbro cutting. It too is near Cave1. Ordering a wall is pointless; this one too is for the army to handle.
Demons #4 and
#5 are also in the first cave; to seal it away, we’ll need this one piece of wall:
Demon #6 is in the housing complex. Four, no, five pieces of wall can keep it contained.
So that’s the overall situation. It is the 21st of… whatever the third month is, and we’re taking HopeWork back. The army is ordered to assemble in the gabbro cutting room, next to demon #3; and I can only hope this numbering will soon become obsolete.
22nd of Felsite. Good news: two demons have ended; the stairway demon, #2, and the stone-cutting room demon, #3. The two who were impossible to isolate.
Next, the military will assemble in the living space, to take out #6. None of the walls have been constructed yet, though I suppose that’s to be expected; at least I can see all jobs are underway:
Uhhh… What’s going on? I can’t give orders to the military? I didn’t even notice; so these guys have killed two demons… pretty much by happenstance? Nice, but what’s wrong with you? All dorfs are listed as present in the military interface; but Dwarf therapist considers most of them off-site.
So… either the squads are a bit FUBAR, or many of my most lethal citizens have decided to go on a trip. Officially, squads Marks2 and Melee3 should still be available; and they are. Both are stationed in the housing complex, right by the stairway; actually, before I go any further, how about I save and reload?
And things get slightly better:
The newly-reclaimed squads get stationed in the first cave entrance; despite most members pausing to retrieve drink and food, Hopework marks down one more infernal fatality:
This was one of the two cavern demons (so either #4 or #5). There are now only three enemies left -- one in the bedrooms (#6), one in the first cave, and the third (#1) is putzing about in the very room that the marble door pictured above is closing.
24th. A bloodbath has taken place in the cavern (not least because three idiots from the unresponsive crossbow squad decided to fight a demon one at a time):
Below all those dwarves, there’s also the corpse of a white brute demon, the last of the cavern demons. These guys are tanky as hell.
In the living quarters too, there is now a demon’s broken corpse:
While two squads were piling on a demon in the cavern, Hammer Lady Alath went solo against a snakefly demon. She lost her left foot at the knee, but she’s got a demon kill to show for it:
Now let’s only hope the blood and goo released by the demon won’t kill her regardless.
There is a single demon left: #1, a white brute in the gabbro quarry. The extract it’s spitting has necrotic effects and causes severe tissue swelling, as shown by an unfortunate chicken.
26th. We are done.
The butcher’s bill is 34 dwarves, so far; most of them are traders, but the military has had losses almost amounting to an entire squad. It can only increase; the hospital is already full, and 5 doctors are removed from any jobs other than medical.
(The Walled Factions don't count; they're the cops).
It is now
summer. The death toll has not yet increased, but I did finally notice we have zero booze (which makes me slightly angry at myself; I
knew that reclaimed forts have all containers upended and therefore have no booze or sand of gypsum or anything else that can’t exist outside a bag or barrel). The three most skilled brewers get removed from any other jobs; we have two stills, so this should be enough until we run out of plants.
Otherwise, the fort is in that chaotic state that follows a reclaim: all bags, bins, and barrels are upended, nobles got changed, rooms need reassinging, stocks are uncertain, many pieces of furniture have been deconstructed, all pastures have lost their animals, and on top of that all bags in the fort are shown as worn for some reason. For the next few months, the fort will be hauling; especially since the human caravan has declined to visit us. Then we can look upon the future. And I can make a Legends export to see where those demons have come from.
The mystery is resolved very quickly -- each of those six demons has started their career by killing a Forgotten Beast in the Underworld. Despite being invisible, this made them named entities. Presumably, they then sat around in the underworld for years and decades, doing nothing of importance.
The interesting part is after that, when the fort was retired. This is further evidence that the game makes little difference between Forgotten Beasts and demons (with kills); because these six got ‘teleported’ into the fort, and have been active while I was out and about with my adventurers, even scoring a kill.
You all probably know this already, but the game just loves to throw shade:
Legends has also revealed a few interesting tidbits about the world at large:
Something very odd has happened in BadDabbled; it only has a skeleton crew of 75. It still has the resident demon, and Sil Kodor's strategic reserve of trolls and beak dogs:
The in-game civilization map lists
JoyousGloomy as a location of theirs, and is a valid target for attack.
The second goblin civ, The Ivory Monsters, are not under the protection of their demon; they have 3 holdings, and their demon is not in any of them; their demon is in the ‘abandoned’ dark fortress of FountainTorment:
There’s a good chance of completely annihilating the Ivory Monsters as a civilization. They have, from right to left:
1. A dark pit named ScorpionMasters. It looks like a walk-over, with 6 goblins and 11 necromantic experiments.
2. A formerly-human hamlet. This one’s weird, because it has 12 humans, 2 dorfs, and only 10 goblins.
3. The dark pit of StealBand; nearly 800 goblins, but not much else.
With this excitement out of the way, the fort is left to its internal maintenance. The rest of the year is mainly occupied with hauling; there’s plenty of crap around. And nobody died of horrific syndromes, either! A single trader perished of thirst; a demon had torn out his leg, and while he was technically mobile, he was also extremely slow. Eventually, he couldn’t get to either a booze barrel or a water source in due time; he perished some time in autumn.
There’s a large number of horses and yaks from the merchants; they’re all listed as ‘Not Tame’, something which at least can be easily fixed:
We missed the autumn caravan; it did arrive, but it decided to spawn on the south edge without any wagons; our depot was “not accessible”, despite using the same trade depot since 128 (we may need a new depot entrance). Then, while the draft animals were making their way towards the gate, some skittish horse ran into a badger, got scared, and the entire caravan turned tail.
The army was remade, for several reasons: firstly, there were those two bugged squads that were beyond salvaging. Secondly, the melee uniform was further refined; before, there was a single uniform version, which allowed each dwarf to choose whichever melee weapon they wished. That’s nice in theory, but it also resulted in dwarves who switched weapons over time, thus obtaining some skills in 2 or 3 areas.
(at least I can’t complain about kills)
That’s why there are now five new melee uniforms, all with metal armor and explicit instructions to use either axes, or swords, or spears, or war hammers, or maces. Which also brings me to the third reason: there are all those traders, who don’t really know how to do anything…
HopeWork now has a spectacular thirteen squads, with 129 of 173 dwarves under arms, and only 44 remaining civilians, each of them having some highly important job in the fort. One of the axe squads has an honor place reserved for Lokum the goblin most-certainly-not-a-necromancer, to be filled as soon as she petitions for citizenship. In total, we have three squads each of axe-dwarves, spear-dwarves, and swords-dwarves, two of crossbow-dwarves, and one each of hammerers and mace-dwarves. Four of them are lords and ladies of their domains, two (axes and marksdwarves) composed of both legendary veterans, and barely-competent beginners, while another seven are composed of complete neophytes.
There were, of course, problems with the armor and weapons -- the old "look at the masterworks lying about not being picked". It was resolved very thoroughly, by a combination of removing the old stockpiles, and dumping then reclaiming all their contents. We still have to make new armor; there was a lot of it, but nowhere near 130 full sets. Luckily, there's plenty of steel, and a Legendary +5 armorsmith. Speaking of, Hopework will make itself some backup armor- and weapon-smiths; two of each, chosen from the ranks of those who already had some skills in the subject. There's too much copper anyway.
And here we come to a time skip stretching over several years, while we wait for these n00bs to get themselves a passing level of martial prowess. Next in HopeWork, we conquer the world; a suitable capstone to any player fort.
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Topic: [Completed] [SinglePlayer] The Doomed World of Sil Kodor 125-184 (Read 26601 times)