Bay 12 Games Forum

images upload


post images


free upload image

Any idea's as to why this dorf wont take a workshop? He just sits in my dining area. I've got at least 1 of every type of workshop (bar magma), I've tried cancelling all the jobs on each, saving & loading the game, forcing them all to a burrow (he wouldn't join them). Ran out of ideas now. His skills are wood cutter, bowyer, stone crafter.

So after months/years of training 2 squads, one of archers one of melee fighters, (and then figuring out the whole schedule system) I decided to finally enter the cavern I found. How I approached the actual entrance (more out of necessity due to digging down positioning) is to have a short corridor off of my main stairwell, before the final stairs down and another short corridor to the dug-out entrance into the cavern. The final stairway I put floor hatch’s on as I read building destroyers won’t be able to get past these when forbidden.

Anyway – to my story & questions.

So upon entrance I set a few nearby jobs up to mine gems out, which my dwarfs happily got on with. A few other dwarfs come down and started collecting spider webs. I was quite anxious at this point and checking “other units” very often. After a short while, a giant toad appeared, but it seemed to be quite far away. This led me to constantly check its position to ensure it wasn’t getting too close.

Eventually I panicked so sent my melee squad down to sort it out. Upon arrival, it ran away! I can’t remember the specific words but it basically said it was terrified or something like that. Problem is at this point, all my squad came down, some must had been hungry/tired/thirsty from being on or just finishing there patrols so I sent them back up to my fort. Strangely the giant toad on the “other unit” screen was highlighted blue, perhaps because it was scared? Anyway I went back to regularly checking the “other units” screen regularly whilst letting my dwarfs do their thing down there.

This is when things got really interesting.

After a while the Giant Toad come back, and there was a giant spider lurking around. So I sent my squad back down there. They easily killed the giant toad. Then I forget the name but some monkey type creatures started pestering the other few dwarfs that were lurking around. Of my dwarfs ran away into deeper the Caverns. I sent my squad to sort them out and ended up with my squad scattered around chasing after monkeys, more dwarfs came down to haul the toad corpse, it was quite a mess. Some of my squad were getting down arrows too, again probably tired or something.

Having the giant spider hanging around which I didn’t like, so I sent my squad to kill it, and quite simply didn’t expect it to do what it did. The first 3 soldiers (of 6) turned up first and ran at the spider, to which it used some crazy web attack that paralysed them & they all died. Bear in mind these were not amateur dwarfs, 2 were hammerlords. The rest of the squad turned up shortly after and quickly killed the spider. Really wish I had my archers down there, hindsight is a great thing. As I was focusing on this, more of my dwarfs had come down to the cavern to collect some things, got into a fight with a creature I didn’t see, and one had died in the fight, the other killed the creature (forget its name). so I had 4 deaths on my hands. I seemed to have about 10 dwarfs in the cavern running around picking up various dead monkeys, dwarfs, dwarf clothes, spider webs, everything. It was chaos.

At this point I was quite annoyed, perhaps at my own naivety. Other than a werebeast disaster in a previous fort, I’d never really had dwarf deaths on my hands. I preceded to send my archers down to assist but other than that, once my men had got the corpses of there dead comrades for burial - I issued my “safe room” alert to get all the dwarfs out of the Cavern and forbid the floor hatches, leaving everything else behind.

So, my questions, sorry there a bit scattered -

1)   Looking at risk & reward, I can’t see the minor spider web collection & odd gems collection being anywhere near being worth getting good dwarfs killed. Would this be true?
2)   How do Cavern visits usually go about, should I just be basically having a “fresh” squad (not one like I was using who were actively patrolling) only enter the cavern to kill things?
3)   I never really get any danger on the surface, so is it worth setting up a burrow for my entire fort & the surface for all my dwarfs so none of them go into the cavern?
4)   I was thinking if I captured something like a giant spider this would be great for defending my fort, but how would you even go about this, I’ve only ever captured Kea’s because they always go through my traps into my fort

I'm struggling with making use of the whole butchering world (bones, meat, ect) due to not being able to propery stockpile.
I read the starter guide on the Wiki which said the following ..
 

Outside your fort entrance, use p followed by r to create a stockpile for refuse at least 5x5 in size. This should be outside in the open or you will have problems with Miasma. You will probably have to expand it later as it will fill up with vermin remains rather quickly. If you are seeing refuse appear in your general-purpose stockpile instead of the refuse pile, use q on the general stockpile and check its settings to make sure refuse has been disabled. "

Which, as it turns out, makes you're dwarfs put the good stuff aswell as vermin out there. I've tried putting it inside near my butchers, but then they put vermin there. I try to manually forbid vermin from the inside pile and "dump" it outside but "dump" seems to be a low priority action as it can take them forever to do it on top of the fact that they still continiously put vermin there too. A few times i've had some strange purple smog fly about inside my fort near the rotting vermin that's been there too long.

Basically - I've given up and use fish/plants for food since its simpler than this conundrum but help would be muchly appreciated.

Another question on the topic of butchering - Should you ever butcher your own animals? I fence off a big area around my first stairway and just make the pen the inside of this, and then I get more when they come with immigrants - but don't actually do anything with the animals at all other than the dogs I start with.

I'm fairly new to the game and have only managed to get so far, either realising i've made serious design errors, or one time I was doing pretty well - a werelizard turned my fortress into a ticking time bomb and caused me to start over. Therefore, I havent completed a full year yet.

On my longest save, I think I was visited by 3 seperate traders. The first, told me what has been going on in the world, asked me what items I would like in the future, and told me what items they want me to build (I think?)

But after this occurance, the next traders didnt do this. So my question is, is there some sort of annual dwarf trade visit that always spawns those questions, and are the rest just random visits from elfs and such?