The hardest part of my fort has been the lack of wood. There were half a dozen cactuses on the map at embark and new ones weren't growing in. I had to be very careful about rationing my logs toward beds and ash and leaving everything else to other materials and buying as many logs as I can from caravans.
I was training up a military squad to protect woodcutters to farm mushrooms in the underground caverns when I noticed that the surface exploded in cactuses! The wiki says trees take about 3 years to grow naturally so maybe that's it??? Anyway, wood problems have been resolved!
My gem exports have launched me to Count status which is.... cool but also I'm super confused because the wiki says this requires holding settlements being economically linked and I am on a barren abandoned island and have no ability to connect to any settlement. Not sure how this works! I have mostly just enjoyed no goblins and no kobolds 
I have 136 dwarves as of this morning and spent last night kitting out 40 of them into military squads to go and fight the 4 giant black {{FUN}} that showed up in the caverns. Total causalities for the whole fort so far is 1 dwarf and 2 pets.
I've also had an explosion of kittens and puppies that would make Bob Barker blush.
Don't ask what's in the meatloaf for a few weeks.



