Bay 12 Games Forum

What are the best weapons for dwarves to use?

There are several types of weapon that inflict overlapping damage types (mace and warhammer for example). I don't want to waste my time producing a weapon where another weapon is conclusively superior to it. I know there's been a lot of !!SCIENCE!! on weapons in the past (after all, they are one of the dwarfiest topics of study available to dwarves) but I've never seen the results aggregated in one place.

From what I understand, there are 3 basic types of attacks: blunt attacks (whacking stuff with a hammer/mace, or the pommel/length of a sword/axe/spear), slashing attacks (axe or sword blade) and stabbing/penetrating attacks (spear, sword jab). What weapon is best in each of these departments? Also, how would the rankings change if I add in weapons that dwarves can't manufacture? I'm planning to add in all the weapons that dwarves can wield but can't manufacture to their entity entry - flail, large dagger, morningstar, whip/scourge, scimitar and longsword. (from what I've heard, large daggers would be the most powerful penetrating weapon by far, and scourge/whip would be incredibly powerful as well in their default state)

After embarking with a leatherworker on my current fortress, it got me thinking about the meat and animals industry in DF. Leather is great early game because you can make armor with it (which you cannot do with pig tail cloth) but it suffers from being relatively difficult to obtain, because few fortresses will have the point count to embark with a wide selection of animals. You can only embark with so much leather and so many animals, and an animal only provides one tanned hide (I recently killed a pangolin that was harassing my dwarves and I didn't even get a hide because the stupid thing has scales >_>) As a result you often don't have many critters lying around to butcher for their skins, unless you get a random capuchin attack like I did a few days ago that generates a whole ton of free hide to consume. Plant fiber cloths cannot be used to make armor but pig tails are very easy to obtain and convert into cloth; leather is time consuming to haul and produce (since butchery generates so much stuff that your dwarves have to haul) and can create rot/miasma if left alone for too long. This got me thinking about how to create a thriving animal industry in a young (less than 5 years old) fortress.

With this in mind, what do you consider the best animal to farm for butchery purposes? Take into account:
- how much return the animal provides when butchered as a baby and as an adult (some young animals are big enough that they're still worth killing before reaching adulthood)
- how quickly the animal breeds (how many kids does it produce? ideally we want more of them to come out than we started with, so we can butcher some and keep extras to grow later)
- how long it takes to reach adulthood/mature fully if its baby form is unprofitable (most animals are not big enough to be worth killing as infants because they don't produce enough return for the trouble, so how long do you have to wait before it's worth it?)
- the pasturing space the animal takes up, if any (which puts them at risk of attack since they're outside and generally makes them more difficult to maintain)
- the value of its products (ie how much meat, bones, etc does it produce and how much is each unit worth? the more the merrier)
- any side uses the animal has if you don't need it to be butchered right away such as eggs (smaller poultry animals can produce eggs in their spare time, for example, and any trainable animal can be used as a weapon until you need its meat)
- how easily the animal can be obtained (crocodiles, for example, are quite challenging to get a hold of, where as dogs are a dime a dozen)
I'm personally leaning towards turkeys as the all-around best animal, or blue peafowls if available. They mature fast and produce a reasonable amount of eggs, while also providing meat and skin.

And on a similar note, what do you consider the best animal to retain for egg production - ie if you were never going to slaughter this animal ever and you were going to use it solely to produce eggs, and breed more of its kind to produce even more eggs, what would you choose? side note: does the size of the egg matter at all? It doesn't nourish dwarves more, does it? so the only thing that would matter in this case is how many eggs the animal produces.

quick question since I just discovered Isoworld (what have I been doing, embarking without use of this tool all these years?!). Is there a quick way to export ALL the detailed maps in legends mode, one after the other repeatedly? There are so many different kinds... not like it takes all day to export most of them (only the standard map takes a while) but I've got four worlds to go through so it'll be a bit inconvenient for me. Any shortcuts or keys I've missed?

It's been a while since I edited raws. What changes do I need to make in entity_default to add trade-agreement-forming behavior to other races, in 34.02? Will I have to add a noble position to the race in question to facilitate that behavior? And will I have to edit any raws other than entity? (i doubt it)

I have some weird problems with a recent double ambush during an elven caravan. The two elven spearmen alone weren't enough to kill the two ambushes, but I usually augment my military with judicious gifts of non-flowing magma from armok (dfliquids, thanks to peterix) and I killed like 20 kobolds. The problem is their corpses.
I have a BIG refuse stockpile on the surface. I have haul refuse from outside turned ON, save corpses turned ON. There are even a bunch of jobs in the job list saying Store Item in Stockpile -> Refuse Stockpile #9. If I view the job, it says "Blag's corpse" as the item in question. This pile has corpses and body parts on (due to their being incinerated by magma, the corpses are all intact anyway), all other refuse items (horn, shell, bone, skull, etc) off. But nobody takes any of those jobs! I have 7 or 8 idling dwarves with refuse hauling on, but nobody wants to drag around the (reclaimed, not forbidden) kobold corpses! What exactly is going on?

My miners and woodcutters keep dropping their weapons sporadically, storing them in bins and having to go pick them up again. I have some other weapons that they "could" use but I've forbidden them to force them to use the steel stuff I made for them, so why do they keep dropping stuff and wasting time?

If there are multiple suitable sites for a set of criteria after using the site finder, is there any way to cycle between them to compare them to one another?

I need to place constructions on top of a space occupied by muddy pools. I tried to use tweak to turn the space below the pool into soil walls, and the space above into soil floors, but it still marks it as "no access". What modifications need to follow to clear off the muddy pools? Must I build floors over the whole thing and block off all my walls?