Bay 12 Games Forum

I can imagine magic miasma starting a zombie outbreak, or undead preferring to congregate around rot and death. It'd lend more danger than unpleasantness to a common enemy of all fortresses -and I can imagine these mass burials and rot pits we call refuse piles would quite attract the undead, or at least become haunted. Fortresses constantly loosing miasma gas through a ventilated refuse pile would reasonably attract zombies hungry for rotting flesh or necromancers looking for havoc to cause, if or not the goblin skeletons themselves got fed up and rose again.

Something that interests me is how we have no 'active' spells yet. Only raising of dead, scripted effects, maybe curses. An easy spell to make would be a 'miasma bolt' projectile -a virulently rotting object that sprays obscuring, vomit-syndrome inducing, zombie-emboldening purple gas until it hits it's target and explodes into rotting chunks. Assuming spells make someone exhausted from casting too many, I'd like to see stuff like that.

EDIT: seeing how this is almost exactly how fire breath weapons and web attacks work, I don't see any reason this can't be done.

Try removing their mining labor and then re-assigning it.

They do combat training as well, sometimes, and sometimes they will do individual combat drills when off-duty. Try just giving up training and ordering your dwarves to run around and slay random wildlife instead. I had a dwarf go from dabbling to adept hammerdwarf just from chasing down a saltwater crocodile and bonking it with a crossbow for more than fifteen minutes. On that note, does wildlife seem a little more meek than usual to anyone else?

How do I like at a dwarf's toughness/strength/all the new ones in Fortress mode?

It's in the Thoughts and Preferences screen now. The values are a little harder to determine now, but to get a basic idea green text shows positive or high stats and red text shows low or negative stats. "Soul" stats are there too. Any stats not shown are neutral or average, I think.

For my own question, is it me or do crossbowdwarves not use archery targets for archery practice anymore? They seem to group up there for training, but just wait for presentations. I have all of my marksdwarves hunting and patrolling rather than training, because they actually use their crossbows on foes when I order them to(and hunters work) but it's a slow way to train.