#5: Excelsior!

And here we are:

I scout around and see a great natural opening for our fortress that just so happens to be right beneath to the tallest part of our mountains:

Here’s the whole region, so calm and inviting:

(click to zoom full size)

My chosen entrance site is well-centered in the region with nearby water, access to several types of stone, and it avoids all that barren claystone up north and instead has all that nice greenery outside. I’m a little concerned about all the rock salt immediately at the entrance (sounds bad for agriculture), but we’ll see.

I designate some digging for my miners, some wood cutting, some plant gathering, a stockpile and set up some farm plots.

I can’t build a workshop of any kind because presumably I don’t have any building materials (wood, stone, etc.). But that should change soon.

• Immediately, my two miners, woodcutter, crafter, and farmer take off to do work!
• The soldier heads off in another direction, presumably to hunt (and not just jump in a pond and die).
• Fatty just stands there looking stupid. And fat.
• I think the only animals I’ve seen in this region are some wild groundhogs to the far northwest. If Dastot comes back successful from that, that would be really cool.
• After a moment, Fatty realizes that stuff needs moving from the wagon to our stockpiles in front of our dig site, and moves her fat butt.

Action occurs!

• Dastot the soldier, I’ve nicknamed her Snipey, takes off over the hills like a total badass, instead of going around the long way on flat land, like I expected.
• A tree gets cut and placed in the stockpile.
• Fatty drops off her load and starts heading back. I assign her plant gathering responsibilities, too. All that hard labor gathering plants should help her over-indulgence and being self-conscious. And she gets responsibility for Animal Care and Animal Training, for those dogs, ox and horse.
• With some logs from wood-cutting, the crafter can start work on a craftdwarfs workshop.

Snipey is chasing a groundhog. Nothing but chasing seems to be occuring, as neither are showing any wounds. But then, the groundhog takes some wounds to legs and tail, and a spattering of blood appears.

A few moments later, a splash of blood across several tiles is all that remains and Snipey sprints off to her next foe, groundhog corpse in tow.  You don’t fuck with a dwarf that has eye-brows and a beard like that.  Especially if you’re a groundhog.

After a while, we have some progress.

• Hallways and a few rooms are designated to be dug deep into the mountain
• Farm plots are being planted with gathered seeds
• Trees have been chopped down
• Snipey is returning with her kills (2 groundhogs, 3 hoary marmots, 1 freakin’ mountain goat!)
• Fatty keeps hauling stuff around

We’re still kind of surface dwarves at the moment, but things are looking good. At least it doesn’t appear to be a total disaster.