On to Autumn...

One thing I hadn't noticed -- we lucked out with our draft animals, and got a breeding pair of cattle.  They gave birth to a male calf (which I slaughtered for food) but we could have a beef industry if we can keep them pastured and safe from goblin archers.  

The Giant Badgers moved on without pestering everyone, but the outdoors are definitely going to be dangerous, with a Giant Eagle circling overhead and a herd of Yaks moving through. (Miranda, is there anything that can be done to make the war goggies breed faster?)



About the time the bedrooms for the initial settlers were finally furnished, the first wave of immigrants arrived -- seven adults and two children, along with a kitten who is busily filling up the outdoor refuse pile with vermin carcasses.  A few needed skills in there -- a High Master cook, a gem cutter, a hunter, an axedwarf (who is also a low-but-still-better-than-what-we-had weaponsmith), and another mechanic.  They entered the map and just stood there like idiots (well, even bigger idiots than dwarves normally are) until I realized I had forgotten to designate the dining room as a meeting hall.

I set our new hunter to hunt.  He targeted a fully-grown yak bull; since he was only a novice marksman to start with, he emptied his quiver and crippled it, but it wasn't anywhere close to being dead.  I put him into the military and ordered him to bludgeon it to death; he had a bismuth bronze crossbow so I figured he could club it to death, and this would get him some hammerdwarf experience.  But it turns out that the yak was Enormously Fat, and therefore nearly immune to blunt damage (but could be knocked unconscious by it).  After 20 pages of flailing, I ordered Kenneth the Woodcutter to become Kenneth the Militia Captain, and go out and assist.  Unfortunately, Kenneth the n00b safely stored his Copper Battle Axe in a stockpile before going out to assist in battling the evil yak .  Meaning he was pummeling the creature with his fists. His little, blunt, completely ineffectual, fists. The combat went on for a week, before the poor beast finally bled to death from one of the arrow wounds it had received early on.  Here's the most important part of the combat log:

(I should have gotten the other axeman to get the axe and join the fray, but didn't think of it until after.) The two dwarfs did gain a couple skill levels from their bovine punching bag, but unfortunately by the time the yak finally succumbed, the other yaks in the herd were making belligerent moves towards our duhnamic duo, so I had to send them back home (to get some wooden bolts made as well as his frigging axe) without the yak corpse to butcher.  Once that axe is picked up I will try and retrieve the corpse before it rots.

New bedroom digs and furniture were ordered to accomodate the new migrants, a jeweler's workshop was set up (since we got a gem cutter immigrant), and exploratory tunnels were dug to find coal underground.  The only coal struck so far are small lignite deposits, and those were close to the river source tiles (be careful digging around there, I suspect it would be very easy to flood the whole fortress with one bad dig instruction!  Might want to build a few doors just in case.) but a wood furnace was built to provide the first charcoal bar, followed by three smelters and the one anvil we brought was placed in a metalsmith's forge.  Any dwarves who were idling (including Bill the Doctor/Bookkeper and about half the immigrants) were given the Furnace Operator labor and set to processing lignite into coke, then a little hematite into iron, then a little pig iron, and the first (of hopefully many) steel bars were created.

Summer became Autumn around this point; the trade caravan will be coming soon.