Ghostproblems, Episode 5

(Still no ghosts.)

This is a written log of my game of Dwarf Fortress. If you have no clue what that is, scope out Episode 1 for an overview!

With almost seventy citizens, the budding fortress of Ngotolbatôk is quickly becoming difficult to manage. Why, we have three Dorens now (girl Doren, guy Doren, and other guy Doren), along with two Monoms, two Vucars, seven children, and six babies. Just last week, I read Deduk the riot act because there’s been a work order for thirty mugs sitting in the queue for a month, and tavern patrons are drinking peach cider out of their hands, and she told me she couldn’t even get started because she’s been so busy hauling furniture around.

So, I’ve decided to start working with a therapist from some foreign country I’ve never heard of, who refuses to go by anything except “DT”.

Well, DT is a real piece of work! They showed up for their first appointment, and asked whether I thought red or cyan was easier on the eyes. I was confused, but replied, “Cyan, I guess.” They nodded, and then proceeded to shun me completely, instead demanding to interview with every single citizen in the fortress. They managed to finish in almost no time at all, and handed me a scroll full of spreadsheets on their way out.

I gotta tell you, I’ve never seen such clean work. Not even from Asmel! They gave me a detailed breakdown of what everyone was doing when they were interviewed, their gender and sexual preference, how they’re feeling, whether they were missing any tools for their job, what their profession was, and a log of every single skill they had, along with a shockingly consistent quantitative rating for their mastery of each one.

The skills each dwarf understood to be part of their responsibilities to the fortress were highlighted in bright, crisp cyan.

That was impressive enough, but DT also somehow managed to find the time to survey everything that particularly bothered or pleased the citizenry through the last season up to now:

I asked DT how much I owed for this incredible service, but they told me that no payment is required. “You didn’t have to pay the Mountainhomes for your outpost charter; why would you have to pay me just to keep your fortress from imploding?”

I stuffed a few coins in their hand on the way out anyway. In scarce months, the Mountainhomes survive on the charity of their outposts, and good work deserves compensation. It was easily worth it in time and stress saved! DT just nodded and told me all I have to do is holler and they’ll come back to help reassign jobs and update the sheets.

What a mensch.

Politics

Apparently we have a mayor now.

Great news, I guess!

Surely, Mayor Cattenlar will provide some much-needed guidance, without making any unusual demands…

Oh, brother. And she wants a Captain of the Guard with their own office and fancy apartment, too?! Fine, fine. One of the Vucars looked bored recently.

Well, it was about time to start expanding the apartments anyway!

Ain’t nobody got time to do all of this by hand, so I’ll use Macros. That’s jargon for recording your keystrokes and playing them back. I’ll hit d-d to begin designating the new apartments, and Ctrl+r to start recording. Then I’ll flesh out one pair of rooms, from upper-left to lower-right, move my cursor to the upper-left of the next pair, and hit Ctrl+r to finish recording.

Now, I can just hammer on Ctrl+p to play the recorded macro back, saving time and valuable wrist tendons!

We’ll need a whole bunch of furniture, so I’ll have the miners dig out temporary storage for that, too:

And since our new nobles seem to have expensive tastes, we’ll forge golden furniture for them to admire when they turn in after a hard day’s work of doing absolutely nothing:

Growth of the Fortress

Notoriety comes to Ghostproblems

With a steady stream of migrants and visitors, it’s time to expand the military with a second squad:

Just like the first squad, I’ll set their schedule to train six at a time, so they’re not always on duty:

Whole performance troupes have come to wow the citizenry with their antics!

Some of the visitors so enjoy the offerings of Ghostproblems’ culture that they have petitioned me for citizenship.

Meanwhile, the furniture stockpile filled up basically right away:

Ah! Our first mayoral mandate.

Pray, Mayor Cattenlar, what would you have us build?

A pick.

One pick.

… Sure.

Death

You mean no one had died yet!?

I awoke this morning to sobering news: one of our newest recruits died in a training accident.

I canvassed the other militia dwarves, and they told me Onget strolled into the danger room without a scrap of armor. The more experienced soldiers could manage a feat like that, but for a new recruit, it was certain death. Onget was cut to ribbons by the wooden training spears!

Now, this introduced a few compound mysteries: for one thing, why wasn’t this recruit wearing their armor?

But, more immediately:

WHY DIDN’T ANY OF YOU SOGGY WALNUTS STOP HIM?!

When I posed this quandary to Fath, she just shrugged and replied:

“He seemed to know what he was doing. I mean, he wasn’t SOBER or anything!”

After further sleuthing, it was revealed that the armor stocks misled me. Not only were the new recruits not wearing armor, but the Typhoons (Squad #1) weren’t wearing half of their uniforms, either! They had laid claim to their boots and greaves, but chose to go without them.

When I checked the armory and saw piles of gleaming, un-used boots, I figured they had just been forged for the new recruits. But, no: they were the original equipment forged months ago for our first squad, which no one had ever bothered to put on.

Of course, when the newbies started putting them on, the veterans gave them all the stinky eye and chased them away.

Can you believe, reader, that I had to order everyone to stand in the armory and not leave until they had put on their goddamn uniforms?

The hijinks weren’t done, of course. After everyone grudgingly put on their life-saving metal armor, I noticed that a few of them were walking awfully funny.

“Kivish,” I ventured, already wondering if I should ask questions to which I really, really do not want the answers:

“Are you… naked under your armor?!”

“N-maybe.”

I deactivated the danger room long enough to peek inside, and saw a mountain of civilian clothes half-skewered on the spears.

Apparently, when Fath relayed my order to “GET IN THE ARMORY AND PUT ON YOUR UNIFORMS”, she put such a mighty fear into the soldiers that they all forgot you can fit your regular clothes under metal armor, and stripped stumbling through the still-active danger room on their way out.

Sigh.

Better get to work on some armor for the newbies, assuming I can convince them to wear it.

Art and War

An engraver hears the muse, and then we have a giant problem.

Something came over Dodók today! She abruptly stopped smoothing the wall of the Mayor’s bedroom, and locked herself into one of our craft shops on the main level.

After a few days, we tried to convince her to take a bath and eat something, but she just kept hollering about cloth, cut gems, and rock.

We didn’t have any gems and couldn’t figure out what to do, so I asked DT if any of the recent migrants knew their way around a jeweler’s shop. One enterprising dwarf offered to help, and just as Dodók was beginning to froth at the mouth, we delivered a few tasty cabochons, which she ripped from our hands and told us to Kindly Leave Now (that wasn’t how she phrased it, though).

Huzzah! The first artifact created in our fortress, depicting the first Queen of the Dwarves:

Well, that’s great. Oh, and I hear we have another visitor! Who has come to sample our wares?

Oh.

I suppose this would be our first armed conflict involving something other than our own incompetence, then, wouldn’t it?

I ordered the Cobalt Typhoons to engage, but they seemed ambivalent. None of them had seen real combat before. All of them balked, except one… a swordswarf with piercing turquoise eyes by the name Id Ònulèrith, who migrated here with her husband after a string of goblin abductions plagued their hometown of Bridgesalve, to the north. She shoved past her squadmates, saying, “He’s not that big.”

The rest of us just watched with our mouths agape.

Two strokes. After dancing with the giant for a short while, barely suffering a scratch, she felled the thing with two strokes of her sword.

After the deed was done, she cleaned off her blade and brushed past us, insisting she was fine, but with her jaw set, and a thousand-mile stare in her eyes.

DT advised us to give her some space, and the other soldiers complied, but not before dubbing her “Giantslayer” first.

Back to business as usual, then!

Or not.