Dwarft Fortress V: The Ageless Realms, Part I

The Dwarf Fortress philosophy ensures that you never get too frustrated with the untimely and inevitable demise of your fortress, but it also has the unfortunate side-effect of desensitizing you. You no longer worry about their feeble little lives when they start starving to death because you've had them all building a doomsday device instead of farming, or when the lower levels get flooded and drown all the patients in the hospital, etc. What's more, with their esoteric dwarvish names, remembering who's who becomes taxing and you soon lose track of which Urist you admire and which you're trying to kill.

Henceforth, this new fortress is featuring friends and co-workers. The doomed dwarves setting out on this expedition are: Kevin, myself, Eric, Mariko, Roxy, Emily and Bex. If you want to join this suicidal expedition, let me know and I'll see to it that you're part of the migrant groups that arrive.

Granted we survive that long, of course.

So the first thing I did was generate a new world.

Behold, the Ageless Realms:

(You can click on all these images to see a bigger version)

A vast and beautiful land, as you can see. I asked Eric for advice as to where we should settle and he proposed the mountains of the eastern range. I scoured around for a suitable location and eventually decided on this:

This location had, ostensibly, everything we needed: thickly forested hills, protective mountain slopes, and a life-giving brook around which we could build our defenses. The brook, according to local lore, was called Nightmarestruck.

Not at all ominous.

After exhausting all our supplies, we arrive at the location and strike the earth!

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Day 1: We're Already Fucked

So, it turns out this vast and beautiful mountain range is also a desolate, snow-covered wasteland. Looking around, we have trouble finding the so-called Nightmarestruck brook when it suddenly becomes apparent that we're standing on it. Not only is the river frozen solid, it's also covered in snow so as to be hidden. The only current proof of its existence is the erosion in the rocks that surround it.

Well, that's great. It's Spring and the river is a block of ice. Unless it thaws in the Summer, we are completely without water from this river. There's only one thing to do: dig down, dig deep, and dig fast. With any kind of luck we'll find some underground caverns where magma keeps the water nice and liquid.

With a bit more luck it won't be filled with monsters that want to kill us.

First things first: I set Kevin to mining straight down while Eric fells some trees. Acquiring logs isn't going to improve our situation, but it's good to keep the others occupied and not thinking about certain doom. I notice there's a few hoary marmots slinking around, so I set Emily to hunt them (or try to, at least). She's our resident Fisherdwarf, but since there's no real way to fish right now, she might as well learn to catch land-dwellers.

At the very least, I don't have to worry about my dwarves being killed by killer carp this time.