Group Name: IronbrowKronosTalon said:snip
Week 4 of July, Year 767 of the Fourth Great Count
The promise of a grand hall, with victories and great deeds of your clan carved to its walls as they are done, makes their picks swing all that much faster.
They begin by carving a set of double stairs, sloping upwards, from the main hallway. Then, they begin digging a two-stories high, wide hall, with your mason hammering, grinding and chipping to rock into smoothness. The project will take time yet with the hard rock, but the start is good and once done, it'll be a grand sight indeed.
Every evening, the dwarves sent out to gather the plants return with buckets and arms full. There is some soil attached, but not that much;it'll get you started underground with a fairly small farm, or you could plants most of these closer to the forest, into the hills where bare rock is not the dominant visible soil type. Mostly the plants are of the outdoor variety, though there are Quarry Bushes that don't as such need light among them.
Your own seeds and mushrooms spawns, albeit meagre they are, would be with standard harvests enough with these to keep your clan fed and happy with varying plant foods. You've even heard rumours that some of these herbs are used as secret ingredients by the more brewing-oriented clan of Mountainhome, to give their drinks an exceptional taste. But this might as well be misinformation, as clans rarely talk of such secrets openly.
The dwarves sent to examine the small river return after a two days. The stream continues west towards the plains, getting stronger as the elevation lowers, but ends in a very small pond at the western edge of the forest, where vegetation gradually begins to turn more into a grassland. There is no way for water of those quantities to form barely a dwarf sized pond, so it must lead to an underground reservoir of some kind, or flow into an aquifier. The pond itself is roughly half-a day of brisk walking away, and there are no other streams going to it, or exist holes for the water to flow out of, visible anywhere near it.