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[KazumiPierce]

I recently undertook a large project creating a new race and civ to play as in fortress mode with a lot of differences from the vanilla experience, with a carnivorous race with no metalworking.

I've been enjoying it so far, but one frustrating thing has continued to make life difficult. I modded crossbows out of the entity and replaced them with bows (largely for aesthetic/thematic reasons), but the 'dwarves' won't use them to hunt. This is quite an inconvenience for a race that doesn't farm or eat plants. I'm trying to figure out if it was some other mistake I made in my modding, or if it's simply that 'dwarves' refuse to use bows to hunt with? I'm thinking it may be similar to mining, in that any weapon can be used to mine as long as you give it the [SKILL:MINING] token, and from my experience [SKILL:AXE] is required to cut wood, so hunting may require a weapon that fires with the Marksdwarf skill rather than the Bowdwarf skill. I just wanted to check and see if anyone can confirm it's the bows, or confirm it isn't, before I go digging around in the raws again and have to restart my fortress.

And while I'm here, I might as well ask the potential follow up question of whether or not you can mod the skill ranged weapons use to fire? The skill token for crossbows and bows in the weapon raws are, respectively, [SKILL:HAMMER] and [SKILL:SWORD], so I'm not sure where changing them would occur.

[scamtank]

Hunters of all races up their CROSSBOW skill when they practice their trade during worldgen, so I'm pretty confident that it's a fixed limitation.

And yeah, you should be able to stick those changes to a running world. The SKILL token on those weapons just calls what the melee attacks fall under. The actual shooty bits are dictated by the RANGED token. It first says what skill it uses for shooting and then which AMMO item it eats.

[milo christiansen]

Last I knew any ranged weapon could be used, simply make sure you set the hunters to use the correct kind of ammo and it should "Just Work (tm)". If not then something changed since 34.11 to stop it from working and it should probably be reported as a bug.

[AceSV]

To change the ranged skill, you're looking at [RANGED:CROSSBOW:BOLT]  CROSSBOW is the shooting skill, BOLT is the ammo class. 

The Furry Fortress mod uses all 3 ranged types and citizens will use whatever weapon is handy to hunt.  I have noticed that if your civ can produce multiple kinds of ranged weapons, hunters will not be smart enough to distinguish which kind of ammo they need and spam job cancellations while they try to load javelins into their crossbows, or archer squadrons will stand around not shooting because they have the wrong kind of ammo in their quivers.  But luckily, you can assign specific ammo in the military screen to fix this. 

That might be less of a thing in .42, I haven't noticed as much problem, but I've also started to work around it by producing only a single type of shooter and ammo and not using ranged squadrons at all. 

[Grimlocke]

An alternate approach would be to just rename the crossbow skill to 'bowman' or something.

Might get a bit weird with there already being a bow skill though.

[Starweaver396]

An alternate approach would be to just rename the crossbow skill to 'bowman' or something.

Might get a bit weird with there already being a bow skill though.

As far as I know, you can't rename skills, and even if you could, it wouldn't change anything.

In this situation, it would be advisable to change the bow skill to the
[RANGED:CROSSBOW:ARROW] token if you just want them to SEEM to use bows. As far as I know, hunters will refuse to use bows and always have. As you said, the skill is tied to the weapon. Woodcutters need axes, miners need picks, and hunters need "crossbows".

[AceSV]

I have definitely seen Furry Fortress hunters use javelins and slings (blowgun skill) for hunting.  Maybe hunters are not enabled to use any foreign ranged weapons by default. 

[Starweaver396]

I have definitely seen Furry Fortress hunters use javelins and slings (blowgun skill) for hunting.  Maybe hunters are not enabled to use any foreign ranged weapons by default.

I actually can't find anything that says hunters have to use crossbows anymore, so it was either fixed or something I made up to explain stupid dwarves to myself, lol. It's been a few years, you never know.