Dwarf Fortress' Simpler, Prettier Cousin: Let's Play Gnomoria!

The Lurked Damages continue with their trainign demonstration on the hapless goblin, who quickly runs out of unmutilated extremities.




SuperJay seems thirst to pad out his goblin killing stats still further, but finds only the eye. Leriel ? She... really shouldn't be here. I didn't call the militia for this. This is exposing her to needless risk. Maybe I should do more to keep the non-professionals out of combat somehow...



Or not!

(How best to picture that - a two-footed flying kick to the chest, with the second foot smooshing through the ribcage, or as two quick roundhouse jabs of the same foot, with the second blow ending with the heart skewered on the big toe? Sometimes I wish I could draw.)

Anyhow, goblins down. That just leaves the ogre.



Everyone gather round!



The ogre does a lot of this. He can't seem to penetrate bronze, but he proves just as durable as the last one. Much smacking of hide follows, lasting several in game hours.

Thasero eventually puts the kibosh on further biting:



But he still has fists and a fighting score of like 43.



Still more people pile in, for lord knows what reason I get the feeling that anyone not actively order to avoid combat will involve themselves in one if they see an opportunity. Still, this should be a useful road test of all this yak leather. Can an ogre punch through it?



...inconclusive. Hmm. I start to be concerned for the leather-wearers who have involved themselves in this particular imbroglio. We need to end this ogre as a threat.



That'll do.

As with the first one, I begin to sympathise with the ogre. I am pretty sure that's nearly all the places you can bleed from.



Wait, no, I stop feeling sorry for the ogre right there. If it's still capable of provoking purple text in my gnomes, it still needs shutting down.



The troops corner it, once again. I should call that Ogrebane Corner. All that blood is the ogre's, by the way.

In the end, fittingly, it's the new generation who get to do the honours.



Nerys, Ogreslayer.

Maybe someday we'll kill one without blinding it, slamming it a corner and bleeding it half to death first. We can dream.



Everyone breaks up and scatters back to their tasks/booze obsessions. Me? I kick back with a tasty snack:


Yum.

But that's the entertaining part!

...a poorly crafted ogre sandwich that's the panicle of culinary art...?

I'm so confused.

Spring is here! Suh-per-ing is heeeere!

Life is skittles and life is beer!

I think the loveliest time of the year is the spring!





Spring means spring cleaning. The lovely new great hall is currently lousy with discarded rocks, but with the new patch I can order a sotckpile nearby that just collects rocks of that type, crank it to high priority....



...and voila, the hall is slowly cleared.



More or less everyone mucks in, as there's still not yet any trees and crops growing to give half this lot something to do.

Clearing all these rocks has no material effect on the value of the hall, but it makes me happier.

A new season also means new migrants! We've been averaging about five gnomads every time, but hopefully my glorious new great hall will have inspired...



...



...well, it has apparently inspired AWESOME HAIR.



Baring that AWESOME HAIR for all to see is xanomon. I assign him as a Farmhand, with general construction, farming and horticulture duties. He's not much cop at anything else - reasonably fit and handy enough with a hammer and dodging. But who needs talent when you look this good?



BuckTheStar is another woodcutter/carpenter type. Oddly, she's super unfit but very nimble, which is not what I generally expect from lumberjacks. She does have a 13 skill in the guns we still haven't yet invented.



These three arrive in a neat little rank, and they all prove to be soldiers. Gryff does axes, Minardii hammers, and Bram does swords. The first two will be immediate inductees into our underground strike force, the Lurked Damages. Bram I am less sure what to do with - as our eleventh (surviving) professional soldier, she's created the need for our third squad... but right now she'd be in it on her own.

NEW
GNOME
STATS
POST



NEW!
GNOME!
STATS POST!

That stockpile change is awesome. Now I can just set one stockpile of 64 of each type of rock and have all the building materials I would need, same with planks and logs.

Aww yiss, Hammers!
I am simply the best there is!

Bram's obviously the first member of SOLDIER, she just needs an over-sized sword now!

I don't know, ahaha.

Hopefully I live long enough to see the invention of a gun.

Although it is spring now. Might I suggest maybe training your militia during the next winter when they have zero jobs to do. (ie: farmers/woodcutters) I am not sure how the training system works, but Bram could become your drill instructor for your militia. Would make replacing any fatalities to your main forces slightly quicker.

This is just me thinking about what I would do if I was playing and had a fair number of inactive gnomes during the winter though.

Another new patch has now made it so the quality of items is a good deal more significant. Allied to this, it now also allows you to select what quality of weapons and armor your gnomes should use. Right now though, I only barely have enough bronze to cover the soldiers I already had, let alone the three new migrants, so I can't be fussy about quality.



Those three new soldiers are going to need to be decked out in bronze, or they won't live long against the calibre of enemies we're now seeing on a regular basis. So I cue more bronze armor up. Right now we'll only get a few bits of this made before we run out of bronze, scavenged bars from crushed goblin breastplates notwithstanding; I need to reopen the mines.



New Yakland is now at yak capacity. No more yaks can be squeezed in. This ain't no battery farm.



So I make it bigger. Right up against the walls. The Puke may need to expand before long.



On a whim, I line up a Kiln, one of the few workshop types I don;t have yet. This bakes clay into... actually I have no idea what, I never used it before. Anyway, with the previous patch's introduction of stockpiles filtered by materials, it is now actually possible to have a stockpile just of clay clumps, which makes this workshop far more usable than previously.

As my last thing before I unpause and let the new gnomads filter in, I start to set up my big agenda for this spring: a new and comprehensive mining operation.

Fully clearing out a level takes way too long and mostly just gives me an excess of relatively useless lumps of rock, so I decide on a more streamlined grid pattern to hopefully sleuth out the ore veins.



Each of the squares in-between the thin corridors I'm mining out is 16x16; this should mean that with a torch placed at each intersection the whole grid will stay brightly lit, which should prevent undead/golem/beetle spawns. Once all the torches are placed, anyway...

I set this up on levels -9 and -10, above where most of my mining has been thus far; I just want to extract vast amounts of copper and tin, I'm not going for iron (and th commensurate risks of deeper mining) just yet.

I unpause. The newbies mostly make a beeline for the entrance:



I'm just leaving that door knocked down these days; it's that or repair it several times a day.

As usual, one decides to be original and take a longer route round:


The gnomes seem convinced there's a second way in over the other side of the walls, near the yaks and tree grove. There isn't, so BuckTheStar makes a full circuit of the walls before using the regular entrance like everyone else.

The mining begins. I should be safe from monster spawns for two in-game days in any newly mined out squares....



...and then a dirt golem shows up anyway. I curse, then establish it was my fault; I moved some torches to aligne them to the new grid pattern down here, and that left a long-ago mined out part of this area unlit for a little while. This dirt golem is the result.

Still, he proves to be little challenge, as always with dirt golems:



Not bad for the new guy, Gryff ! He hadn't even found armor yet before doing this, you can see him there with his fancy hat in the screenshot above.

Mining on levels -9 and -10 is already starting to reveal rich copper and ore veins. My hope is that I'll be so swimming in copper this year that I'll be able to experiment with mechanisms.



An abandoned breastplate at the Keeper's training ground. It appears that new, better breastplates just got forged, and seeking the best kit, one of the Keepers promptly stripped off their old stuff and went to claim the new hotness. I guess our new recruits are going to have to make do with hand-me-downs.



As the shafts get mined out, I place orders for torches at the intersections, which get fulfilled by my builders. Everything is going swimmingly and will continue to do so indefinitely, unless some ominous foreshadowing happens.



Spring means growth once again, and crops promptly start sprininging out of the ground in the late afternoon of the first day of spring. We grows them fast in the Puke. Must be something good in this soil.



Carpenters working hard at keeping us well supplied in torches. That's BuckTheStar getting her hand in there at the sawmill, and I believe that's Shake cranking out the torches themselves. I work out you need a hundred torches to fully light up a floor's grid pattern, so I need lots and lots. Anythign that interrupts this production line of torches could be a cause of ominous foreshadows.



Speaking of monsters emerging from the dark, some more goblins show up.




Some of them did remember to pack some bronze, like Axeblade here.



Still not suiting up their arms and legs, however. Although really, reinforced lungs would be the upgrade to seek out against the Keepers.



It amused me to note that this goblin wields an axe and a sword, and his best combat skill is in... hammers.

Looks like the goblins aren't the brains of this outfit either.



A second bronzed goblin carries a bronze shield. Oooh! I'll have that, I haven't yet had enough bronze to make shields with, we're still using copper.

Just the small matter of getting it off this goblin first.

The copper goblins don't last long.

The bronze ones also get swiftly disarmed of some of their weaponry. Should have invested in gauntlets and pauldrons, guys!

Minardii and Gryff end up involved in this melee, because they were close by and, as part of the Damages, are under orders to defend gnomes. However, they aren't fully kitted out yet, so it's a bit hairy for them:



Gryff proves resourceful, though:



Flixliber continues his rampage through the copper fodder:



However the prone Minardii proves a tempting target for Axeblade:


Ouch. Welcome to the Puke, Minardii, I hope we make you some bronze pants soon.

Gryff also gets some punishment thanks to his unprotected arms, but it grateful he managed to lay hands to a breastplate:



Flixilber's mad bloodlust continues as he wades over the corpses of the two copper goblins and gets involved in helping Gryff and Minardii out:



That's some dedicated targeting by the goblin, focusing on the less-armoured dude when his friend just cut your leg off. Still, that;s Gryff and Minarddi both prone before goblins with some bronze weaponry. They could be in trouble if the Keepers can't draw some fire or finish this quickly.

Sheppherder makes a good start:



That puts paid to one breastplate, and gets a lung to boot.



Now we just need Minardi to get up and get himself bandaged and Gryff to get up and not get himself injured.



Gryff continues to be thankful for the armour he DID get to wear.

Minardii backs off to the bandage crates and staunches his bleeding, the goblins having turned their attentions to the prone Gryff instead.




Gryff's managing to hold out under the blows.



SuperJay gets the other lung of the one with the crushed breastplate. Just one remains!

Minardii rejoins the fight and provides a distraction for her squad mate:



And then the Keepers close in:




Sheepherder again makes the breakthrough:



..and then Minardii demonstrates resourcefulness...



and some nifty dodging...



to set SuperJay up for the kill.

All done! I was genuinely worried I'd lose a gnome there, or at least some limbs: unarmored flesh versus bronze gets nasty.

All this action reminds me that I haven't set up squads for the new guys yet. Spare swordswoman Bram gets a squad of her own:



As ever, I don't reroll these names; this is what comes out first time. Sometimes I love this game.

We also need a cowardice squad for the two new noncombatants:



Apropos!

I'm surprised my gnome is still alive in year 2! When I play I cycle through gnomes like it's nobody's business. Congrats on the keeping gnomes alive!

It's usually that way when I play, too! Somethign about the way I'm playing for the LP is changing things. I have been pretty cautious with the Kingdom Worth and with my mining operations, and I think playing more slowly (due to taking screenshots and stopping to make posts) helps, as does the closer examination one makes of one's choices if you;re going to have to post about them.

Plus since I gave them all names after you people I'd feel extra sad if they die (MCKNIIIIIIGHT) so I work harder to avoid it.

Oh dear. Immidately knocked down, bleeding, getting kicked when I come back to help..

Then I use a door. GJ minime.

I almost followed Mc D:!

I had a bit of the hillside dug out so I could squeeze this extra training ground in next to the Keepers. I assign Bram's squad-of-one to it, so she can get on with earnestly training with herself.

She's also going to want accommodation, so I start tarting up the space I have near the Keepers' rooms.


I also take the opportunity to temporarily remove the statues and torches, as I realise I never replaced the floor underneath them. It'll help boost the wort of their rooms a little, leading to more-awake Keepers.



I also need yet more bedrooms for the general population, so I set orders for those. Unfortunately all my masons are busy being miners, so I'll probably run out of marble blocks for this halfway. But it's the thought that counts.



Torches are still being produced, but I'm worried about the ominous foreshadowing I mentioned earlier, so I establish a new pine grove on the roof above the front door in an effort to keep the logs coming fast enough. Here's Jacquelle and Fargull working on the planting. All my woodcutter gnomes are now doing horticulture (i.e. tree planting) as well, even if they're no good at it. How hard can it be?



The animal situation is completely out of control. Dodging rogue newbrorn emus and yaks all around the puke has become a fac tof daily life. At least we're eating well.

And hey, that kiln finished. It can make... bricks, and statuettes. I promptly do nothing at all with it.



Here's a yak playing at being a trader.



And here's one helping with the horticulture. I think that's BuckTheStar in front of him, cutting pines. Pines that grew in less than two days. No wonder I only get one plank per log...

Then, something I have been dreading....



Mants are man-sized ants. Since they were introduced to the game in a patch a few months back, they've become notorious as the number one source of mass gnome slaughter. This was partly because of a bug causing them to appear in much higher numbers than intended at low levels of Kingdom Worth, but also because they're just pretty tough.

Supposedly if you manage kill the first one you see, a squad doesn't then follow - get the scout and then there's no attack, sort of thing. But this is actually my first time seeing mants, so I'm not sure how it works really. Is this the scout, or the actual raiding party?



Given the ant theme, I guess it's a good thing this is only a worker, rather than the presumably tougher mant soldiers I am now going to assume exist. But then, it already has 177 fitness and a fighting skill of nearly 50, making it easily the rival of my best-trained soldiers in raw stats terms. So is this the scout? I don't know, whatever. It's biting down my door, so the Keepers are going after it whatever I do.



In fact they burst on top of it right as it was biting the door, so in this pic the mant is actually under one of the Keepers there. Let battle be joined!

"Poking" and "cutting"? My breastplates? Yie. That doesn;t destroy them, thankfully, but its not exactly reassuring that its penetratign them so easily with its bare mandibles and stinger.

And if you have less armor, well:



Poke poke. The chitin is pretty durable thus far, but hte Keepers do manage to smack the mant back a bit. So much so that I actually get to take a look at it:



It's.... actually kind of adorable? KAWAII~



The Keepers aren't much for sentiment.

Bram's insufficient armor and missing shield leave her in trouble, though:



Cutting through it or not, the breastplate may just have saved Bram's life there.

Blackadar manages a timely intervention:



And Flixilber cuts off the possibility of pursuit:



So Bram can safely retreat to bandage up.



And then, suddenly, Mirriam finishes the job:



With the shield, no less. It continues to surprise me how deadly the Keepers are with those.

As is traditional, I immediately check to see if mant meat is edible. Sadly, it does not appear in the butcher shop menu, so I must assume not. I guess the corpse will just lie here then, as a warning to the future mant armies...

Make a wall around the settlement! My gnome begs for it! (i'm not sure if you've done it, I'm a little behind).

We're well walled in, never fear. All surface enemies can attack only via the gates, which means they hit the Starry Keepers first.

Aww, that little Mant is adorable!

Hmm... can we make things from Mant chitin?

Go, Mini Gryff!! Tis only a shame he can't sport his Monacle and Top hat while buttkicking!

Incidently, that was a Mant attack, rather than a scout. As long as the food and kingdom value doesn't get too out of hand our defences should be able to handle the Mants.

I begin ordering the mining out of some of the seams my miners have exposed. This has to be done carefully to ensure that the light from the torches still reaches the new areas - I generally end up mining out boxes in a radius around the torches. In this shot the torch hasn't actually been placed yet, but the thought was there.



Amaranthine is caught outside the gates by a goblin attack. Amaranthine is decidedly not a military gnome. I'm not even quite sure why he's out there, unless he was gathering clippings to plant pine trees? I'm losing track of which gnomes have what jobs. Whatever the reason, he's been caught out here, though fortunately not far from the Keepers.



Despite his orders to avoid combat, Amaranthine can't manage to flee in time. He's going to have to hold out against these two by himself until the Keepers show up.



Eeep.

Both sides see reinforcements:



...but Amaranthine doesn't flee!



The Keepers are here, but with the way that the least armored get targeted,Amaranthine could be in real danger.



He's hurt but not bleeding, but he really, really needs to not be around if there's goblins with bronze...



...or an ogre, goddamnit. Flee!



Or, you know, that.

And that's all there is to say about that.

Racist.

A swirling melee takes place, featuring the Keepers and some of the newer soldiers, with Amaranthine vulnerable right in the centre of it. It becomes very difficult to keep track of precisely what's going on. Somewhere in there, though:



Bram gets into trouble.



This is really my fault; new bronze armor production has only reached as far as pauldrons, leaving the legs of my newest soldiers unprotected:



Fortunately Bram isn't bleeding, but being prone before an ogre with unarmored anything isn't a fun place to be.


Lest we forget, Amaranthine's walking wounded too:



Fortunately the fight is made less complex by two of the Keepers in concert:



That was the last copper goblin, and the Keepers rank up to face the main foes. By our powers combined!



Amaranthine status?



...yeah.

Amaranthine is having a full-on berserk.



Gryff is the latest of the new inductees to have his unshielded legs fall victim to the ogre:



Bleeding too. Hopefully he can back off to the bandages...



Good thing the new guys DID get pauldrons.



He successfully backs off to the bandages.

Amaranthine: still crazy.



SuperJay finally puts the bronze goblin out of action:



And this is apparently enough for a special event:


Yup, SuperJay's hammer has now killed so many goblins that it is now a thing of myth and legend.



The Dressed what now?



Sweeeeeeeet.

Another ogre, cornered. Let's see that legendary hammer, SuperJay !



...underwhelming.



I amuses me that the Keepers still do so much damage with their copper shields these days. And yes, Amaranthine STILL hasn't retreated.

The other eye goes to one of the miners, who have shown up by this point, even though I should probably tell them not to by now.



And it's only at THIS point that Amaranthine, apparently not seeing the sport in fighting a fully and permanently blinded ogre, finally gives up and goes back to his normal life.



The rest of the military continue to demonstrate their poor grasp of ogre anatomy:



Bleeding copiously, they proceed to... knock the ogre back repeatedly. And I mean repeatedly.



That's ALL ogre blood.

At long last they start to locate vulnerable areas.



But even blind and on the edge of death the damn thing remains a threat:



Get that man some metal trousers already.

Metal trousers or no, getting knocked on his ass only seems to enrage Gryff:



I seriously didn't imagine this ogre could bleed any more, but ogre biology is no match for an an angry gnome. I'm quite sure Gryff would happily open every artery this thing has, but Blackadar apparently decides this has gone on long enough:



AND ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST. That should help to pad out Blackadar's lackluster kill stats.



BEER!

(I actually haven't brewed any beer yet, because wheat's been too scarce to use as anything other than bread. Maybe I'll change that.)

(The pile of weapons and armor there appears to be because, at the moment the battle was over, some gnomes detected that better armor was available and immediately stripped off to go claim it.)

Time for a Kingdom Worth update:



Another 5k or so of total worth added since the end of winter, about four days ago. Most of the gains are in stock. I imagine that's partly down to the gems my miners keep hauling up, which are being cut by Dan Lawrence; and also the new armor getting made, plus the newly valuable status of SuperJay's hammer.

Now the mining works on floors -9 and -10 have been open a few days, we should start seeing monster spawns in unlit areas. Hopefully I have been torchlighting them quickly enough to prevent...



...yeah, you knew where that was going.

As we'll all remember, a zombie was responsible for the sole fatality thusfar seen in the Terrible Puke. And it looks like noncombatant Linoleum, who mostly makes armor and does odd jobs, will be the first in the firing line.

I immediately summon the military, but floor-9 is exactly as far from both military squads as it is currently possibel to be, so the miners down here will have to cope on their own for a bit.

Linoleum is indeed cornered by the skeleton. Let's see how she manages:




Lumps of raw rock have proved useful anti-skeleton weapons before...

Linoleum is fortunately relieved by the somewhat more combat able malphigian, one of the Stretching Candies of Bunch, who does at least wear a helm. Linoleum follows orders and absconds. malphigian has a dual-wield hammer-and-tin-pickaxe thing going on:



Tin, capable of poking bone. The more you know!



Meanwhile by the stairs, terror of unarmed combat flatsinki... isn't wearing any armor for some reason? And.... has engaged the zombie. With dual hammers.

Fortunately the naked flatsinki isn't actually alone; there were a bunch more from the floors above coming down just behind her. The amateurs make it first, and seem to have a good grasp of basic zombie facts:


Okay, no killing blow, but they did AIM for the head. And Fishbreath tore out its eye with her fingers.



Then the professionals show up.

At this point there's two fights going on: nearly everyone versus the zombie, and poor malphigian trying to hold out by himself versus the skeleton. We'll come back to malphigian in a moment; first let's focus on the zed.



The trouser famine strikes again. This time Minardii falls victim to her lack of shinpads.



Nerys tries her best to distract the zombie from the prone Minardii. That heart slice should have ended it quickly... but this is a zombie.



Eeep. Minardii is lucky not to get the zombie virus.

Gryff comes in with a strong but equally worthless body shot, and pays a cost for it:


Double eep. That's two bleeders on the ground. We need an end to this.

Fargull has the right idea:


But Mirriam is the one to finally bring the goods:



DESTROY THE BRAIN.

..and with Minardii on her feet, she can hopefully get bandaged in time...

With the zombie down, everyone makes a charge for the skeleton, except Gryff and Minardii, who stumble off in search of bandages.

@malphigian's been holding off the skeleton by himself. Here's how that was going.



Lots of comedic pratfalling, essentially.

It momentarily becomes more serious:



I get the feeling that raw marble might have stoved his skull in if he hadn't been wearing a cow on his head.

Just then, the relief arrives.



Thasero keeps it stunned while the militia get their licks in.



Mirriam disarms the skellie again, which promptly kicks the prone malphigian in the guts in a fit of pique. He's okay, though, and extracts a modicum of revenge:



Sheepherder gets it nearly right:


and then...

...Rosper, that one miner nobody named, gets the kill. Oddly.



Minardii makes it to the bandages okay.



Gryff does too, eventually, but there ain't no cure for the zombie virus. I think that's five people we have floating around infected now. If we ever suffer a serious incursion and lose a lot of people, things could get very messy.

I decide to look into why we aren't getting the torches out fast enough to prevent this undead showing up in the first place. Checking the stocks screen suggests that we have plenty of vocal but absolutely no wood. I suspend use of the furnaces and order trees at the grove to be felled with more alacrity - I think some of the woodcutter shave been distracted planting trees in my new supplementary copse on the roof.



Jacquelle gets to some logging. We'll soon have more torches.



Not soon enough.

First to engage this mobile hunk of earth is Fishbreath. He's ALSO in no armor. I still haven't realised why this is at this point; if you've been paying close attention than I did, you may have realised how my incompetence has put all the Bolted Dancers of Brunch in unnecessary danger



Nevertheless, Fishbreath proves resourceful enough to avoid serious damage for a while.



(Gut crushes never seem to cause the serious injuries you'd expect.)



I actually don;t know whether he could have beaten it alone, but I decide to send the attack order out anyway.



And eventually:



Score another for Thasero.

This fourth day of spring has gone on ridiculously long. After the goblins and ogres attacking in the morning, and the undead incursion in the afternoon, and the golem just now, I have had altogether enough of combat.



DAMNIT POGO

I hope they'll just leave it alone, but in the end the Keepers and Damages emerge in Pogo's defence anyway. Highlights?



Job done.



That's finally it for this longest of days. People return to their regular lives for a while, and finally, day five of spring dawns.



A green shirt, yet red arms? They're doing layering in the Iron Kingdom? How... fashionable.

Can't argue with those muttonchops, though.



The alpacas seem unimpressed. I like to imagine that the merhants end up getting drizzled in the runoff from the alpaca fields.


Especially when this is all they bring me of worth. I sigh, and take it.



In exchange I offer up: TONS of worthless soil and raw marble, a bunch of seeds I don't need, five hundred emu eggs (I have over a thousand, and they'r enot even all that great a food source, at least not until like, cakes get implemented or something) and a soupcon of yak milk (which I'm drowning in.) In short, I load him down with junk I barely realised I had. I didn't even need to sell a necklace. Not bad for some badly needed logs and a bunch of useful metal ores.



Flogging all this crap clears out the great hall pretty nicely. Eventually my true vision shall be realised.

I should probably throw the jewellery in here, into some sort of ostentatious treasure hoard.



Oh, and decide to throw in some more yak milk to grab some more breeding animals. I really don't need them, but I may as well speed up my breeding even more.

Torches are getting out faster now, but we've far from plugged all the gaps in the lighting network. I think next time I embark on a mining projetc of this kind, I'll build up a large torch stockpile first.



The golems are really more annoying than lethal, but it only takes one getting a luck shot for me to lose a valuable miner.



In this case, Rosper held out until the Damages made it up.



Dirt golems are complete trash, and clay are just about a match for a leather armored nocombatant... but there are much more powerful golem types, made of actual rock. I haven't seen one yet...



Still, all the mining work is paying off. Once I have sorted out my current lumber troubles more permanently and I'm no longer diverting all my coal and wood to torch production, we should have more metal than we know what to do with.



An emu checks out the great hall. Sad to say, as magnificent as it is, my gnomes almost never use the great hall. There's another dining room that's closer for basically everybody to eat in, so it just sit here gathering dust. And also, emus.



More goblins show up. The Keepers have got it, though. Plus Bram, who trains on her own next to them and is a regular addition to the defences these days.



She's doing well.

Some copper goblins are mixed in here. They don't last.

With the bronze goblin disarmed and the copper goblins dead, this battle is already over.



Oh, nope, there's an ogre too.


Did I say ogre? I meant punching bag.



Sheepherder and Bram team up to take down the gobbo, Sheepherder taking out the breastplate leaving Bram open to skewer the heart.

Ogre torture commences in earnest.



The Keepers back this one right up into their bedrooms, possibly for use in some sort of sick ogre-baiting contests.



And then the ending.



I want mining to go quicker, so I order more statues to be installed in the miner's rooms on floor -19.



I'm honestly not sure why there are leather helms in so many of the miner's beds.

More golem. kerzain is the one who has to hold out this time.



First militia person on the scene is Fishbreath. It emerges he's first in because he was in the process of carrying a basalt statue down to the bedrooms of the miners, as ordered. He promptly decides to demonstrate the strangest form of warfare yet seen in the Puke.



Yes: not only is he using a statue as a combat weapon, successfully, but he also has an axe in his other hand.

He's dual-wielding with sculpture. Made of stone.

With such an absurd armament, there's only one way that fight could end.



Fishbreath: you win all the awards.



A second invasion of d'awwwww.



Lookit the widdle fella with the cute face!



And the adorable armor piercing stings!

SuperJay's legendary hammer doesn't seem to be doing spectacularly much better against the mant chitin. He seems to agree:



Starting to feel it's that shield that oughta be legendary.

Big news!


Aw yissssssss!

THIS IS MAH BOOMSTICK

Still not as awesome as dual wielding a statue.

Statue warfare should be a mandatory martial discipline for every resident of the Puke.