Utterly Mad

After 6 or 7 years of in game time, I have retired Vesselfountains. It has a military of around 60 fairly skilled fighters, most of whom are mercenaries, led by very skilled or not skilled at all dwarves all trained via conventional (non-danger room) means. It sports a library featuring a pair of imprisoned necromancers to poke at and ask dumb questions of. An in with 4 floors housing what is probably the cause of my low FPS: and ungodly number of poets and bards. The chapel is entirely non-denominational, and I never bothered to get real ones built. The main entrance is guarded by a magma crab turret that causes a majority of civilian losses during invasions, a line of cage/weapon traps, and a vomit covered retracting green glass bridge suspended over the mouth of a volcano. Under the fort (inside) is a functioning obsidian caster (because why not) and (outside) a man made lake. Our main exports were lead childrens toys and obsidian figurines of animals. Also, giant vultures. I had about 6 tame vultures and had butchered the semi-wild ones. I was trying to get giant anoles, giant leopard geckos, horned owls, and ibex going too.

The FPS became impossible before I could finish, even with DFhack fastdwarf I couldn't keep going. I used DF hack to finish the lake off and then I pulled my special lever. The lever that would stop everything and preserve vessel fountains forever. The dog switch. Mere seconds after activating this most potent of game ending levers, the cage it was hooked up to burst, unleashing a flood of around three hundred war dogs taking my FPS from 6 to 3, down to 0 to 0. Time stopped. I hit escape and retired the fort. Good bye vessel fountains, I will return when some of those lazy ass poets have left. (gonna found a new fort to draw dwarves/poets out of vesselfountains and then reclaim it.

By the way, in this world that vesselfountains exists in. All of the dwarven civs have no access to iron. I've been getting iron from melted down human anvils. Somehow the dwarves have steel though. My military is equipped mostly with copper/bronze armor and there are a few steel weapons lying around and in use.

Another side note, you can order/buy mugs made from bone and gems but you can't make them yourself.