What if it was actually 00:39?

It was when I started writing this post, anyway.



Welp, I've had an excruciatingly long day during which I trained my replacement, and I've had an approximate 10 hours of sleep. This week, that is. You know what this calls for? If you said take a sick day and get some sleep, you're entirely wrong. Instead, it's time to play some more Dwarf Fortress since that's exactly what normal people do at this time of day. Why? Mostly because my general manager just sent me an email (yep, at 00:30) asking me to come into work. Might as well not sleep at this point. Anyway, onto things that are far more fun. (If you're lost and confused, you can find my last post here.)



Well, I'm going to survey what it is I have in my fortress (I don't really remember), which appears to be... A massive pile of rocks in a hole surrounded by a massive pile of wood from the trees I cleared. Excellent! I'm a little concerned for the safety of my fortress (not so much the dwarves; those scarcely appear in the same sentence as safety) so I'm going to simply build a wall around it, probably out of wood since it looks a bit nicer. it doesn't really make a difference what I build it out of, but I need the wood less anyway.



You'll note the black 'O's highlighted in white, those are the wall segments I've designated for building. Why the corners first? Dwarves are so ingenious with their building patterns that if you build the rest of the wall first, they'll try to build the corners while standing on them. As one might guess, this doesn't exactly work very well. Not shown in the image is the drawbridge I'm building, which will serve as the gate to the fortress. On an unrelated note, I've just noticed there's hamster blood on my wagon. That's always a good sign.

Since my miners are currently busy digging out the main area for my fortress, I'll take the time to assign labours to my dwarves (basically tell them which jobs they should or shouldn't take). To do this, I'm using a tool called Dwarf Therapist; this is something you can do directly in Dwarf Fortress itself, but the utility is a lot faster.

Spoiler: Dwarf Therapist in action

Well, my miners still haven't finished their jobs, but it should go faster since they won't do anything except digging from now on. My farmers still haven't actually planted anything either, which is a problem (there's still a bit of gathered food left though) and most of the food and relevant good I brought have been moved to their own stockpiles at this point. (Shown below is the farm plot, still, and food and seed stock piles).



My dwarves are now slowly becoming unhappy because they've had to drink water (dwarves essentially require alcohol to live), ate raw plants all the time, and have been sleeping on the ground. I think I might address the first of those issues as soon as my farms actually decide to yield something, the rest I'm sure they can live with. My dwarves seem to be running around like mad, doing nothing in particular so all must be well. Also, I finished building the walls around my... fortress pit thing, before my miners finished digging it. Why not assign more miners? I don't have any more picks. I will however assign some more trees to be chopped down, specifically, all of them. Every single one. Quite literally every tree is now designated to be chopped down.



And now I'm probably going to end up at war and eaten by elves (they're religiously carnivorous), but who cares about that anyway? While that was happening, my miners seem to have finally finished doing something! I'm now setting down a bunch of workshops around the perimeter of the cavern they've dug out; there's going to be a stockpile for finished goods in the middle of the room (which I'll probably have feed into other specialized stockpiles later). Is this the most efficient design out there? If it is, I want a cookie, a glass of milk, and 12 puppies, because that's what it's going to take to make me believe that this is. Also because I like puppies. Speaking of, one of my dogs just gave birth to a couple, but I'm no longer sure where I'm going with this, so have this image instead.



Now before now, this room (and most of my fortress) was full of random chunks of stone. Where has it all gone? It hasn't, because my dwarves has decided that dumping garbage isn't something they wanted to do. However, had they done so, it would all have gone into the garbage dump. The 1x1 garbage dump. All of it. I'm not exactly sure how dwarves are able to compress matter to such an extend that they can fit all of the material that makes up the entire world into a 1x1 square, but they can. Only if it's a garbage dump though. I don't know either. However, the walls around my fortress are now... Kind of complete?



Now with the workshops complete though, I can actually convert all the milk I embarked with into cheese. Why is this good? Well, for starters, cheese is delicious (especially two-humped camel's milk cheese) and I also get the cheap buckets the milk comes in (milk costs 1 point and comes in a bucket, a bucket alone costs 10). Right, now to dig down a bit further and...



I breached through the cavern layer, and as you can see, am rapidly trying to seal off access to my fortress before some manner of unspeakable monstrosity decides to charge into my fortress and preform deconstructive surgery on my dwarves. I'm at a fair bit of risk of being attacked from below so let's see if I can divert some workflow to getting these walls up. Now, I have a couple of dwarves that aren't currently doing anything so they can...



It appears that my fortress is currently being attacked by ravenous parrots which are coming in from above. Parrots. Parrots are what is attacking my fortress. What is this? I'm glad I embarked with a bunch of dogs, since they can quickly kill weak creatures like these. So now that that's done, I'll just...



Sweet Armok, there's more of them.

That's it, I'm done. Future Winter can clean up this mess, because present Winter wants to throw his computer into a fire. Till next time, do whatever it is you normally do.