Yo, this is Stuffman! I was a bit surprised when Totaku said he wanted to hand control of the fortress over to me for a while, but then, I am responsible for digging most of the thing out anyway...
Anyway, it's just as well, because I have a bunch of infrastructure projects in mind for our bustling little fort. Alright! Let's make this a good year! There's gotta be more Suikas out there, so let's make sure we have room for them!
I decided to write down my goals for the year. I heard it helps in terms of self-actualization, or something like that:
- Traps! With our low population, it's dangerous to send our suikas out into battle. Let's get a line of traps near the entrance to keep out any enemies.
- Forging operations! To do this we'll need to channel some lava. Dangerous stuff, but I've personally got plenty of experience working with it.
- Irrigation! One way or another, I'd like to figure out some method of getting the rest of that water to the fortress.
- Mining! Towards the end of the year when we have enough space in the fortress, I'd like to get started on a mining shaft to go find us some ore.
First things first, I have to finish mining out these living quarters. Now, since I'm not quite done digging it out I'm considering making some changes because there's a couple things that bug me about this layout.
First, the entrance to the dining hall is on the north side, when we come in upstairs from the south. The food storage is also to the south, so I'll put the entrance there to save some walking time.
Second, a bunch of bedrooms are too close to the magma for my liking...I'm worried some fire snakes will worm their way in and set fire to the beds. I'm going to dig out the west side first, and make a single test bedroom to the east. If nothing bad happens, I'll finish mining out the rest of those rooms.
Here's my new layout. Instead of the triple wide hall for the dining room, I made a pair of double wide entrances so we can put doors on them. Should look pretty snazzy. Also, I noticed the big room to the upper left meets at the intersection of the hall above, so I'll stick in another set of stairs, which leads to the north workshops.
Now let's have a look at our entrance for defense purposes.
The entrance to the fortress is six wide. I think this is a bit overkill since trade wagons only need three wide, and we need more traps to cover the area. So, I'm going to construct some walls to reduce the width to four wide, and then have Chaore get started on the traps, since we conveniently already have some mechanisms made. I'll just stick to stonefall traps for now; when we have forging operations up, I'll have some components made for some dastardly weapon traps. Gwahaha! Here's the blueprints I laid out for the construction:
Taking a look around for other immediate improvements I can make, I think about where it would be best to build the forges. I decided to make a map of our current workshop layout:
At first I was thinking Totaku didn't think this all the way through; the magma's closer to the northern workshops, but the only open spaces left are to the south. However, since we're going to need to channel magma underneath them, that means the southern work areas are preferable, as they do not have our bedrooms beneath them! I'll start ordering the stone in those rooms dumped to make room for the forges.
And with those plans made, back to mining!
While I was stopping by for a drink, I couldn't help but notice we had a bunch of dead vermin (hunted by our chenkurris) lying around in the food stockpile. Disgusting! I'll designate a refuse stockpile somewhere.
This looks like trouble...I notice a pack of yugikkuris roaming around by the northern lake. They're normally docile, but boy howdy you don't want to make these things upset. Those horns hurt! I cancel the logging designations we'd made and call Xan back inside to avoid any incidents.
They eventually wander away, thankfully, but a pack of Yukkouseis wander in after them. They don't have horns though, so I'm not afraid of them...
Anyway, we plug away for about a month, and finally start clearing some space for the bedrooms. Thank goodness, I was getting pretty tired of sleeping in that drafty cave. While I'm at it, I find myself wondering how our food stocks are doing. When I asked Serpentarius about it, he said he could do the bookkeeping but he would need a place to work. I'll make it a point to stick a table and chair in his room so he can use it as an office. While I was at it, I decided to assign a broker. Purvis begged me to let him do it, and I didn't see a reason not to, so I put him in charge of peddling our wares.
Speaking of which, there's no sign of those Parseekkuris I've heard are supposed to come around here...feels kinda lonely out here. Hopefully we'll get an envoy from the human village come summer.
Since we've got the doors at the entrance in place, I decide to set up the security mechanism Totaku had described to me earlier.
It's a simple mechanism controlled by a lever next to the main staircase. When pulled, all doors surrounding the trade depot will lock, causing a full security lockdown - Suikas stay in, enemies stay out.
We continue to see new wildlife around the fort. Here's a picture we captured of a Yukkuri White. Judging by the their only attempt at communication, they really like spring.
Oh! Looks like the Parseekkuris decided to come after all! I scramble to get the wares out to the depot, and boot Purvis off to go negotiate with them. Most of the goods that the Parseekurris had were wooden equipment (decent for training purposes, but we don't need it yet), crafts, and cloth, so I just decided to buy up their stock of booze and berries to pad our supplies. I bought up about 1500 suikabucks worth of goods; Purvis tried getting them to walk away with a 500 suikabuck profit but they wanted more, including our gems. Purvis managed to cut the gems from the deal and threw in some more crafts, so we would up losing about 800 suikabucks in the deal. It's just crafts we've made from the stone here, so it's not a big deal. We'll need to start stocking up for the human caravan, though.
Just as the trading is finishing up, the official start of summer is here!
