The Gamer's Quarter

[Scratchmonkey]

I just started up a new fort and am currently at the point where my initial "pocket" fortress is being invaded by waves of immigrants. I went from my 7 initial dwarves to 35 within two seasons and things are currently a mess. I'm left with the decision of whether to keep my jumbled and chaotic initial structure, which is absolutely not optimized in terms of space/walking time, or if I should create a second fort structure that's better set up in terms of defense and efficiency, with the drawback being that transitioning between the two might be quite messy.

Originally I was going to switch over once I found magma, which leads me to one of the new features that Tarn has added to the game: when picking a site for exploration, you can now request that there be several features that are or are not present, then the game will search and find you a site that matches your settings (if such a site exists). This is quite nice because I always like to have a site with both a brook and magma, both of which are part of the features you can search for. Fresh drinking water and a free energy source for making metal are respectively pretty essential and very nice if you're going to be doing any sort of military.

However, I haven't managed to find the magma yet (possibly because I may have specified a magma pool instead of a magma pipe, which is much harder to locate) and there's been at least two goblin child-snatchers that have shown up, which means that I can reasonably expect an invasion force sometime soon. I do have some iron ore and a fair amount of useless dwarfs like, say, the Animal Dissector or the two Gem Cutters, who will be far more useful armed than they would be otherwise.