Yes, quite interesting. It does sound a bit like Dwarf Fortress only you are going at it from a different direction and interest. Still, you might be interested in checking it out. It's an Ascii game but you can get some graphic sprites to work on it. It generates a random map similar to what you have there only uses the ascii character set to indicate rivers, minerals etc. Dwarves have interests and jobs you can assign the jobs but you kind of want them to become good at something so you don't do it too much. Anyway, it might be worth looking at as I believe you can get the source code as well.

As mentioned already, this is an interesting project. It will be fun to keep watch.