10th Granite - Elven diplomat, Dipane Derithele, has entered our borders.

11th Granite - Elven caravan enters our borders.  I have given orders that all green glass serrated discs and stone earrings and stone rings be brought to the trade depot.  We have hidden away the wooden items as we wouldn't want to offend the pretty little elves.

15th Granite - Trading finished.  Due to the accident with the trade depot last year, they didn't bring much.  The broker gave them an extra 5k urists of profit as an apology and in hopes that they will bring more stuff next year.

There is a new (old) feature (re-)introduced in DF2014.  The elven diplomat will now talk about tree cutting again.  Except that 100 tree fellings in DF2014 seems a bit too easy to say yes to.  In the older versions, that was only 100 wood.  In DF2014, that can often be 500-1000 wood if you fell 100 trees.  So for the moment, this is an easy demand to agree to.

And a spot of news from the elves.

1st Hematite - Start of summer.  The humans will be here soon.  In the meantime, I have started work on the road leading to the entrance along with trap mazes.  If the enemy dodges off the narrow paths, they fall down into the pits, and the only way back out of the pits is to come up in the middle of the maze of trapped walkways again.

The pits will be at least 3Z deep, possibly as much as 5Z to get into the first or second rock layer.  I will probably sprinkle cage traps around as well.  The goal with a trap maze is to suck them in, then make them run a fair distance in order to escape, with a high chance that they fall back in.

I have also setup DFHack "autobutcher" for the pigs, cats and dogs in the fortress.  I went with 10 or 20 babies of both sexes and either 10/10 or 20/5 adult females/males.  The first two numbers are baby females and baby males.  The last two numbers are adult females and adult males.

Within a minute of setting things up, the following happened.

16th Hematite - Human merchant caravan arrives.  Trade was 114k of goods, caravan got a 38k profit (33%) - human trader was "happy".  Not much news from the human law-giver.

Cave adaptation is a lot worse then previous versions.  Much of my fortress hallways are covered in vomit from various dwarves throwing up.  Fortunately, all of them are very happy or ecstatic due to the legendary dining room, meals, drinks, and fancy bedrooms with legendary engravings on the floor and walls.

The trap maze pits are now fully dug.  The only way up is a single stairway which leads to trapped walkways.

17th Limestone - The Dwarven caravan has arrived.  Some dogs, cats and pigs have grown to adulthood so the autobutcher has kicked in.

Not much news from the mountainhomes, it sounds like only two sites are left.  (Turns out this is a bug in 40.13, attackers always win when they attack a site in the background.  That is why so many sites fell in the first year.)

This dwarven caravan, I bought about 240k worth of goods and had to give about 100k in profits to the trader.  Lots and lots of leather bins this trip.