12th Limestone, 100. Early Autumn.
The caravan from the mountainhomes has arrived. We hear tales of the nearly-forgotten outside and away, and make some requests:
and receive some as well:
(It’s remarkably unlikely that we’ll have spare hides, this time next year. Tools are a possibility, but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.)
We also make an exchange.
We take all the meat and drink they have, a stock of leather, and an assortment of bags, ropes, and useful items. In exchange, most of the crafts we have made out of limestone and mussel shell–including a number of masterworks by our legendary bone carver.
[Ed. note: apparently the skill applies to shell carving, too. We caught a nice break there.]
We offer the remainder of our crafts as a gift to our homelands, which our broker Vabok (a talented appraiser as well as miner) estimates to be worth a measly 392☼.
[Here is my first major gripe with the UI: trading. More specifically, bringing things to the depot. Items are sorted by type on the left (fine), but by material and then value or distance on the right. The issue is, what I bring to the depot is ~always bins or barrels, and nobody cares about the material of the container! And I can’t even see into the container to tell what’s in there. There is no way, AFAICT, to change this behavior. And the text filter does not seem to work, or at least I cannot figure out how what I type in it relates to what shows up in the list.]
Otherwise, life in the fortress proceeds apace.
We’ve laid down the beginnings of a smithy:
The workshops are wood furnace (bottom), smelter (top-left), and smithy (top-right). I accidentally forgot to leave a space between the smelter and smithy. Oh well.
We then reworked the corresponding stone stockpiles:
The stone stockpiles are, from left: non-ore stone, lignite (raw coal), refined coal (bars), limonite (iron ore), malachite (copper ore), and bituminous coal (raw coal). At some point we’ll separate out the flux stone from the non-“economic” stone, but for now limestone is still a key part of our stone furniture, crafting, and building.
The hospital is coming along:
I threw a couple traction benches in there, despite never having needed one. I should have requested gypsum plaster from the caravan, but it’s not all that hard to make ourselves, just a minor hassle. At the bottom you’ll see one tile of limestone block floor amidst all the smoothed floor (side note: one thing all those migrants have been good for is mass-smoothing operations). I had initially thought to put the workshop stockpiles
below the workshops, but… I hit the aquifer! So instead the fortress expanded horizontally. But I thought to dig a channel in the hospital to use as a well. Turns out, the aquifer does not reach that far south, so I bricked over the channel. We did, however, explore the boundary of the aquifer:
That roughly traces the border of the forest on the surface, by the way.
We still need a well, and I haven’t yet decided how to proceed through the (light) aquifer. Any suggestions?
Autumn is upon us, and the forest is littered with bayberries, pecans, apricots, and pears; lettuce, leeks, muskmelons, and red beans… now is the time to harvest the bounty. We shall have enough for winter, I believe, but who knows what comes next?
