In which we follow the outpost Ringstaff.

Happy New Year 126. So far, none of our 22 short and sturdy citizens has died for any reason, nobody tried to pillage and plunder our home away from home and everything seems to proceed according to plan. My only problem is the absence of any caravans other than the yearly visit from home – we probably wont have any other visitors. Which means that there will be no elves selling us whole forests worth of wood. We either can work with cactus wood, or we will have to go into the caverns.
Speaking of caverns, the floodgate has been installed:
The floodgate is the white x on grey, at the upper right end of the tunnel. On the other end, next to the staircase, is a lever which will be connected to gate. This way we can seal the entrance to the cavern, keeping out most vermin. Building destroyers are another story, but we shouldn’t encounter any in the first cavern.
We breach the cavern and mark the local trees for cutting.
As these are multilevel fungi and trees (we can see crowns and caps over the water), we should get a serious amount of wood out of here. Our woodcutter however is in no hurry, as he attends a party.
Parties fulfil the social needs of a dwarf and throw a very big wrench in the productivity of the fortress. At the time of writing, ToadyOne announced a rework of the social mechanics of the game, hopefully resulting in less month-long gatherings…
Nothing much happens until the party ends and some migrants arrive. We’re in dire need of at least one more brewer, an additional planter and maybe another stone detailer. And we really have to start building more bedrooms, as this wave brought us 20 new citizens, nearly doubling our headcount.
One of our new arrivals, a certain Rakust Eralgutid, has some experience in woodcutting and get’s to work in the cavern. Unfortunately, the yield is much lower than expected.
Another mood takes hold in the fortress. Another possession, another dwarf who will not end up as legendary.
Bomrek occupies a craftsdwarf’s workshop and starts gathering materials. After grabbing two boulders of gneiss, two logs and an assorted set of porcupine bones, he starts working. Let’s take a look at the difference between a fully smoothed workshop room and one smoothed around the workshop:

Leftmost row, the first and second room. This is why we dismantle the shops, smooth the walls and floor and rebuild them. I would have shown you this earlier, but the floors were cluttered with goods. Please ignore the boulders in the smoothed room, I assure you the floor has been worked on.
Our stone detailers finally finished the first set of bedroom:
Now we will bring in beds and doors – again, please ignore the boulders. They will be moved.
Bomrek finished his work: a stone flute called Ágeshmostod Stizashdugal.
Must be a great instrument to play on with its bone-spikes.
Our detailers finish the craftsdwarves’ and mechanics’ workshops and continue on the bedroom floor. The remaining workshops will have to wait.
Aaaand we finally create the first set of bedrooms. Currently without chests and cabinets, we will add those later, but we finally can give our citizens something better than the ten bed dormitory near the entrance. Additional rooms will be made available as soon as we have the furniture.
Another useful thing to be done while nothing much happens is setting some hotkeys. We can assign locations to the F1…8-keys to jump to when the corresponding button is pressed.
This saves us a lot of effort compared to scrolling through all the z-levels.
Our enclosure on the outside is nearly complete and our miners dug a tunnel beneath it. You can see the three sets of stairs, the >>>, near the middle of the screen. Or you could, one of the tiles currently shows a 2×2 pixel gray square – a dwarf carrying a block for the wall upstairs. Tiles with a dwarf carrying something flash between the dwarf and the carried object.
Two tiles above the lower wall is a row of nest boxes, two of which are currently claimed. You may guess which.
The black bars on grey next to the fields, below the brook, are placeholders for hives. They are planned, but not yet built.
Towards the end of the season some additional quarters were designated for digging, and we started placing the first chests and cabinets in the bedrooms. Both of this will be documented in the summer post, when it’s done.