In which we follow the outpost Ringstaff.
And what better way to start the season than to have some visitors. In this case: kobold thieves.
The three ks in the upper left corner, as you might have guessed.
Kobolds usually run when spotted, and these boys are no different – and gone now. The workshop floor is slowly coming along:
From left to right: 3/3 craftsdwarf’s workshops, 2/3 mechanic’s workshop, 2/3 and 0/3 mason’s shops, 3/3 carpenter’s shops. Sodel makes barrels and bins for storage, Urist is busy with doors. I said that last week already, didn’t I?
The storage floor is coming along, and so does the memory layout for 0.40.24 – we finally have access to Dwarf Therapist again. I will now say some things about Dwarf Therapist:
It is the single most useful tool I’ve ever encountered, as it provides us with a detailed list of our citizens, their skills and abilities, their jobs and the opportunity the change assigned jobs in an easy-to-use interface.
This is the full job list. All of them. The higher the skill of a dwarf in a particular field, the bigger the black square in it. Vucar’s diamond at mining shows that he is a legendary miner, among the best of his trade. Legendaries blink ingame, which I can’t show you as I’m not planning on creating DF-.gifs.
One of the most useful grouping options is “migration wave”, especially after the arrival of one.
Here we see the dwarves of the second group of immigrants, and as we desperately need more farmers we assign the “farming”-job to Athel and Deduk. They both have some initial experience in the field (höhö), and they don’t have any qualifications needed elsewhere. Don’t forget to commit any changes made.
It is autumn, so our liaison from the mountainhome has arrived, together with a caravan (a wagon, drawn by two horses, with a dwarf on it). It’s time for trade and other business.
Unfortunately I didn’t take any screenshots of our stocks before the caravan arrived, and now the item they brought are listed there. They’re forbidden, but that doesn’t make the whole thing much easier to navigate. The reason we need more farmers is simple: all we’ve left are plump helmets, and our booze storage starts to run dry. But still only two fields are ready to use. More farmers will hopefully quicken the business.
We order our broker to show up at the depot and take a look at the goods we want to trade…
…DAMMIT! Right. We wanted some stone crafts to be ready, but we lacked a stone crafter. Sodel Idenodom, who arrived in summer, dreams of crafting a masterwork someday. Sodel, you’re a crafter now. Maybe we can get some things ready before the caravan leaves, or the brave citizens of Ringstaff will have to drink water. I just hope it’s not enough around here that the river doesn’t freeze…
In the meantime we listen in on the discussion between Bembul and the diplomat from home. The gallery is used to not clutter the post with 10 screenshots containing mostly one-liners.
“The world is the same as ever”: major events would be named here.
Requests for the mountainhome’s merchants and export agreement: we can request goods from home, increasing the probability that they bring some next year – at a price, of course. The higher the priority given to a specific type of item, the more it will cost us. The export agreement is the same thing turned around: the caravan will pay more for some goods next year. Up until now, not fulfilling caravan requests never led to repercussions, but this might be implemented some day. I dread this day.
And then I forgot to pause the game while typing this, and now the merchants are gone. Better luck next time.
But our miners finished all designated areas, so let’s construct the food preparation area and the finished goods stockpiles. The miners can get to work on the fortifications around the entrance.
We also need to order the cutting of more blocks, as we’re nearly out of stock – no blocks, no kitchen area.
I wanted the storage area to be a single one storage for everything stored down here, but it didn’t work out due to size restrictions for stockpiles.
The here-yellow pile is a block-pile for stone blocks, the other side is for finished goods, furniture and the like. We also remove the stockpile near the entrance, the room will be turned into a barrack in the future.
Another thing we want to set up is a source restriction for our stone-using workshops. We can set them to use only materials stored at certain piles, stopping the workers to drag around stones from another end of the fortress. Okay, this was wrong: we can set up stockpiles to supply certain workshops, but the effect is the same. We can also tell our stockpiles to accept stuff only from linked other stockpiles instead of everywhere. This can be useful for setting up a cross-fortress transportation infrastructure – the only feature I still miss is “take only from this floor/designated area”, but maybe this will come one day.
This is how it looks like for our wood stockpile, and that’s how it looks for our stone stockpile:
And we’re out of drinks. Luckily, the first still is ready, so we order the brewing destillation of some booze. Additionally we start digging for a well to have a steady water supply closer to the fortress.
A room with a hole in the floor, beneath it a reservoir connected to the river. Aaaaand some more migrants arrived:
There was a time when Dwarf Therapist showed all migrants of a season as soon as the announcement came in, but these days seem to be gone. I really thought there would be just one…
Our additional farmers weren’t lazy, so we now have all seven fields ready:
The crops are chosen, and now let it grow. Did you really expect a Frozen song here?
One of our new migrants will become a full-time mechanic, one a jeweller, another will take up masonry, and two more will start new careers as stone detailers. Stone detailing is the profession associated with smoothing walls, which a) increases the value of the area, making our dwarves happier and b) is necessary to b.1) engrave floor tiles and walls, further increasing the value and b.2) carve fortifications – which we need around the entrance.
The well reservoir is flooded by now, and as soon as we have a mechanism ready we can build the corresponding well, well.
The well, using a mechanism, a chain or rope, a bucket and some blocks, is the “o” in the middle of the room.
We can also see the smoothed walls and the areas where the ramps from the channels were removed in our entrance-mace. The way along there will be plastered with traps in the future, making it rather deadly. The channels also keep a minimum distance between hostiles and the fortifications which will be carved into the smoothed walls: when an enemy stands directly in front of a fortification it enjoys the same defensive bonus as the crossbowdwarf behind it.
Our newly appointed jeweller has finished building his workshop (don’t ask me how dwarves suddenly get basic training on any job we tell them to do), so we can start cutting our gems:
I usually go down the list of available gems, order to get them cut and set the job on repeat. This way, our jeweller cuts a gem, eg. a lapis lazuli and adds the job to the end of the queue – all gems end up cut eventually.
And then our Bowyer gets possessed.
I had hoped to finish this season, but moods require a good deal of explaining. See you next week.