Part 7: by Keyboard Fox

Summer

Hematite

The nobles quarter is finished. The house berite representative is whining about it not being high-quality enough, but screw him.

Our legendary miner headed out to work on the elephant trap... and the elephants -ran away- from him.

Things didn't fare so well for the non-legendary miner, though, who got severely injured.

Malachite

Some more migrants have arrived.

... right into a herd of elephants. One dead, one injured.

Two dead, one injured.

The migrants lead the elephants right into the cage traps I set up. Six elephants captured.

Galena

The elephant trap is complete.

Things have been rather quiet recently... I'm starting to worry that something's about to happen.

I am worried about the future of our fortress, namely that the next rulers will not be as security-minded as I am. So I shall flood the chasm with magma/lava, and kill all the unnamed horrors within.

Construction has started on the second farm.

A metalsmith has been possessed! Since I'm doing heavy-scale lava flooding right now, building a magma forge isn't feasable. But once the chasm is filled, I have some spare steel bars standing by.

The chasm has enough magma/lava in it now. Construction can proceed as planned.

A note to my successors: Don't pull the switch near the chasm. It causes everything past it to die from magma.

Autumn

Limestone

I'm worrying about our possessed metalsmith. If we can't get the magma forge up in time...

Construction on the magma forge has started. Now it's just a race against time...

A dwarven caravan has arrived.

A thief has appeared!

And just as quickly was struck down.

Two more elephants have been captured.

A farmer has been trampled to death.

I traded some bone crafts and totems for some more food. Not that we need more food, though.

A fire imp has sprung from ambush! It threw a fireball at a nearby carpenter, injuring it enough so that it could go over and kill it. Then a peasant came up and wrestled it to death.

Sandstone

Unfortunately, the magma forge could not be completed in time, and the metalsmith went insane. It is currently running around babbling to himself.

Correction, he ran into one of the channels and kept running upstream until he drowned.

We have struck platinum! Good times.

We've caught a leopard. This brings us up to 5 mandrills, 9 elephants, and one leopard.

A mason has been struck down by an elephant.

A war dog chased an elephant into a line of cage traps.

More elephants have been caught while I wasn't looking. I'll have to wait to get an exact count.

Timber

Two more elephant related deaths.

And that marks the end of autumn. I need to take a break, and do some essential homework, and get some dinner. I'll probably finish up winter on Monday.

I suck at screenshots, so what I did instead was export a picture of the whole map, and copied out parts of that.

First. here's the overview of the map.

1. Here's one half of the elephant/mandrill/whatever traps I have set up. I have channels blocking off one half of the map from the other, so animals HAVE to go through these if they want to get across. Also, that's a platinum statue of me on that water-blocked island.

2. A look at the improved defenses. All of those ^'s are traps. The red ones are weapon traps, and the white ones are stonefall traps.

3. Noble quarter, recently expanded so that there's more room for... well... expansion. Also, a party is getting started in the statue garden, and one of our new pet elephants is in attendance.

4. The second farm and a small furniture storage. Also shown: Dwarves smoothing the main pathway.

5. The chasm with its beautiful red line of death. That's the lever you need to remember not to pull, by the way. A lot of weapon traps, three redundant bridges, a magma-blocking channel, and the beginnings of the strip-mining project.

6. Deep within the mountain... ore stockpile and magma smelter/forge. Also, the magma floodgates linked to the lever of doom. I put down some channels just in case someone does pull the lever.