Oh, I did see the fort! Bunch of barrels with nothing in them, empty weapon racks. Three folk inside, one of them being my first encounter with a blacksmith! I tried talking to all of them, but they gave me the same dialogue as before. I also checked their quests, but they were the standard “kill 3-4 hostiles in the area” quests.
Ahh ok phew. The fort was actually MIA a few patches ago - @thesparrow123 discovered this. I'm going to do a huge update on the villages/towns/cities/forts soon but I need to ensure I can have backwards compatibility with people's save games. Because some people are building like right into villages, so yeah it can't go nuclear on the world changes.
Does this post from thesquirrel123 help at all? https://itch.io/post/15770351 . Otherwise I can point you in the direction of cities