I...cheated. I get bored of the initial setting up phase in DF, it's cake once you get used to it. Dig in, set up farms, set up workshops, get ready for the first caravan and immigrant waves, yawn. So I used Just Embark and stole a deserted human fortress made entirely of Limonite
. It's a 1000X700 in surface area (counting the empty interior court, the walls are 3-4 tiles wide on each side) and 6z levels high. I'm just slowly deconstructing the useless parts of the fortress and melting them down. Theres also fireclay 1z lvl down and a bunch of trees outside the walls, so I'm going for an almost totally surface fortress. I have enough iron to never make digging necessary (theres a bunch of marble flux stone on the surface, so some quarry digging). I may eventually dig some crypts into the stone layers so that I can engrave some of the fort's history at least.
Oh and I also cheated by initially sending in a miner/engineer suicide squad who's only purpose was to dig deep and set up a pump stack to bring magma -2z lvls right under the fortress before sending in a reclaim team. Fck digging for fuels or burning trees down, takes too long.
