Bay 12 Games Forum

As far as I understand, the answer to this strongly depends on the material of the floor you have them fall on. The denser the material, the stronger the impact, the fewer z-levels you need. Slap down a metal floor if you want to be sure, avoid wood:

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Density

I have a 15+ drop pit with spikes on the bottom in my current fort, and things are skewered quite nicely usually. However, I'm fairly certain that occasionally a falling unit will actually dodge the spike and that seems to negate their falling velocity as well. They seem to end up standing on the floor with no ill effects after that. Kind of strange, but the only way out is back up and across the pit again so it doesn't really matter that much.

You could try to enable diagnosing on a different dwarf, to see if the problem is with your current medic or not.

I'm not sure whether it matters, but are there enough beds? Maybe patients on the floor can't get diagnosed.

Also, floodgates connected to levers work wonders for water control. Strongly recommended testing your setup and removing any loose items from the channel before you introduce any water to it though. It's quite annoying to accidentally flood a fort because some boulder is blocking your floodgate.

You could dhannel out a moat around your containment area, but keep ramps on both sides of the moat intact. Pump magma into the moat from one side, and create a drain on the other side. Monster goes in the middle, surrounded by the channeled moat. As long as the pumps are running, the moat should be filled with magma and the monster can't leave (unless they willingly path into the magma, would they do that?). When the pump stops, the moat gradually drains and the monster can cross.

Connect your magma pump to a gear assembly and that to a power source. Now connect a lever or pressure plate to the gear assembly, so that the power to the pump can be interrupted from the outside.

The last section in the starting scenarios mentions the relationship between the fort and hill/deep dwarves. Will we get to see the dwarves living around our forts demand things in return for their tribute? E.g. will they come to the fort for justice in disputes, or maybe as temporary refugees fleeing from an invading army? The theoretical idea of being surrounded by farming hillocks and have the fort focus only on government, mining & warfare could be really good!

I'm unsure. From what I can find killing a certain animal type on your map will increase the chance of a new group wandering in (could be the same animal though; https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/6is0nx/science_on_wildlife_spawning/).

That thread also mentions that there is an upper cap on the number of animals, which implies that you can kill all of them and never see another again. However, the thread says that is specified by the [POPULATION:CAP] tag in the raws, which as far as I can see doesn't exist for [CREATURE:GIANT_WREN]. The most similar tag is [POPULATION_NUMBER:15:30] which specifies "The minimum/maximum numbers of how many of these creatures are present in each world map tile of the appropriate region" according to the wiki. Unfortunately I can't tell you whether that means "if giant wrens appear, you won't ever see less than 15 or more than 30 per map tile, but there might be more breeding etc in other map areas", or "Every world map tile with the right biome will generate between 15 and 30 giant wrens and that is all the giant wrens this world will ever see".

We got attacked by a Roc. It slaughtered a couple of dwarves as I tried to lure it into a cage trap. Then it got wrestled to death by a few militia stragglers who were on their way to the burrows behind the cage traps but got overtaken by the roc. Oh well.