Bay 12 Games Forum

This is the story.

I embarked with nothing to give myself a challenge. Half of the map is terrifying and spawns wretched creatures. Despite this I managed to get a good 14 dwarves and some cattle behind a wooden palisade... when giant zombie sparrows attacked.
I mounted a stand within the confines of the palisade and the dwarves slew 2 sparrows but were overwhelmed. Every single animal and all but one dwarf was slaughtered.

After the survivor had secured the fort, some 3 dwarves migrated to help out.
Unfortunately one of these has a pretty bad temperament. He felt terrible because he saw a rat, because he didn't have a proper room, was caught in the rain, drafted etc, etc.. so he murdered his wife.
I appointed one of the others as sheriff and the sheriff beat the murderer, though not severely. Urist McMurder went to complain to the expedition leader (sole survivor) but ended up attacking her instead. She went to report the crime but, since the sheriff was busy, she went to bed.
Urist McMurder walked into her bedroom and caved her skull in.

At the moment Urist McMurderer is locked up. He has killed 50% of the fortress population and right now he IS 50% of the population.

How would you do in this situation? If I leave him in jail he'll probably be so miserable that he'll die and all hope rests on one single dwarf... but if I let him out he might go crazy again and all hope will rest on one unhinged murder-dwarf. It's also a tremendous burden for the sheriff to do all the fort's chores on his own.

(figured this would be more appropriate here than derailing a DF questions thread so I copied it)....
I just realized I can make my dwarves drink venom.

TO THE LABORATORY!

Edit:
 I made a pocket world and embarked in a calm area. I didn't bother to look for helmet snake venom in the list of things to bring because I found giant cave spider venom and thought "even better!"
 I made a 1x1 pit and made a small tunnel to it. The pit was blocked off by a door so it remained a 1x1 room... the reason was because I wanted to move the barrel in and out of there.
 I tried using a bug to remove the venom from the barrel. I forbid the venom pool itself and designated the barrel for dumping and for moving to another stockpile. It didn't work ... I suppose the bug occurs when you tell the dwarves to put the barrel in the TRADE DEPOT and nowhere else. The forbidden venom gets poured out when you do this.

 So I had to wait for merchants. I left the game on and took a walk ... only to realize when I got back that I had left the autosave function on and only a month had passed. So I had to sit down and wait the rest of the year until finally merchants arrived.

 It worked. The dwarves poured the venom into the small room and left with the barrel. I locked the door before anyone could clean it up and immediately started filling in the room from above as a pond. I saw that the Z level above the pool showed that there was liquid ... WHITE liquid. I built a well over it and, sure enough, the bucket contains "water laced with giant cave spider venom"

 Now I wait ... the dwarves kept running there and pouring water into the well. so I turned off the pond option.. and now they start drinking!

 ... there are 8 units of venom-laced water in the bucket. So far 5 dwarves have drunk from it but no one is showing any symptoms of being poisoned.

 Fudge.

Edit 2: after a while the venom evaporated. oh well... atleast I got the dwarves to drink it and that's worth something.

Hey what's up.

Just thought I'd drop a little note here. I prefer to use the mouse to designate digging as opposed to raping the enter button and arrow keys. Now sometimes the mouse cramps up. As in it picks a certain area where it doesn't recognise my clicking.

 I found out today that this clears up if I just move the dwarf window around a bit. resize it and stuff. Hope someone finds this info useful.

I tried searching for this but the only thing I found was someone who was unsure.

Will melancholy or crazy dwarves respect burrows? I'm pretty sure berzerks don't.. what with being enemies and all. but I'd like to assign the suicide candidate crazies to some remote corner of the fort where their death doesn't have to be witnessed. Nothing ruins a good party like uncle urist starving to death in the corner.

I have learned that a squad of blind dwarves;

1. Can explore caverns and reveal the fog of war.
2. Can fight pretty well when being attacked. (stand in corridor, stab the enemy who lounges at your shield)
3. Is completely WORTHLESS when it comes to getting rid of the giant rat who snuck into the fort.
 Seriously they chased it through the waterworks, through the hospital, the statuary garden, a guys house, the storage rooms, the sheriffs office, the pastures ... I had to draft a civilian who wrestled it down and held it in place or they would never have killed it.

I've thought about what to do with captured goblins and, since I once saw blind cave ogres in the second cavern layer, I will capture some and make an ogre pit.

 I will throw the rotten and mutliated remains of the goblins into this pit and watch the ogres feast upon their bones! .. but I only know that the [BONECARN] tag allows them to eat .. well. the bones. What about skulls? partial skeletons?

Hey.

So I set up a hospital and everything, figured they need thread so I built a loom.

Now the weaver goes and gathers webs and makes thread. All's good, but then he's automatically set to turn the thread into cloth. I suspended this so I'd get a nice stack of thread for the hospital and then let him continue.

 Is this kind of micromanagement necessery to get the thread?