Bay 12 Games Forum

No companions means I get ambushed by bogeymen every night until I complete a quest.
Min-maxing as much as I can with stats leaves me with +10/+5/+5 which is hardly impressive.
I go get gear from forts whenever I make a new character.
I take the majority of what meager scraps qualify as skill points in dodge for more survivability.
Yet still I die on the first quest every single time I play a peasant. Without fail. Once found full iron gear and got slammed by the first actual fighter I came across. Once I actually finished a quest and was coming home to report when I was ambushed and turned into a pincushion by about 5 archers. One time I was about to kill a peasant "night creature" after us missing eachother/him bouncing punches off my armor when he tackled me into a pool of water and I drowned because my novice swimming couldn't save me from the fall-stun.

TL;DR what are the best tips for surviving the first days as a peasant without grinding up throwing or something silly. Stat distribution and skill suggestions? I'm not a newbie, I just haven't played for awhile.

I haven't played DF that much since .07, so I have no idea how carts work. However, after reading up I want to produce a defense comprised entirely of carts filled with various (possibly humorous) deadly objects, maybe a small militia just in case. I have no clue how to get them to even deploy, however, so I need to know the following things:

-How do I crash a cart in a way so that contents will fly out?
-How deadly is the cart itself if going at high speeds?
-Does type of item matter? As in, will loading a cart with 10x *Steel Battleaxe* do more than loading it with 10x *Steel throne* (Of course, assuming that both items had the same weight)

So, apparently not only are buzzards a nuisance, but also a serious hazard to a young fort. My fresh embark in a .06 world was going well - the outer wall was erected, the meeting hall dug and the magma forges set (I'm playing with Fortress Defense, so I need a metal industry early). Suddenly, I see a combat report. Upon hitting 'r', I, in fact, see about a dozen combat reports, six dwarves and six buzzards.

Most of the reports are just a few attacks of bruising on both sides, but when I check my miner...

Eleven. Eleven pages of the buzzard shaking him around by the arm. Most of the results were just major bruising, but then, finally, shortly before my nearby militia commander whacked it once with his battleaxe and put an end to it, it manages to tear the skin. My CMD is busy hauling and I have no hospital. My bedrooms are still under construction, but I figure they'll be done; however, tragedy strikes. A mere two in-game weeks after the bite, I get the message "Urist McMiner, Buzzard Victim has been found dead from infection!".

Needless to say, in a fort that had been going for approximately twenty out of game minutes and about a season in-game, no dwarves were happy. One particularly wimpy planter who had been starving to death (Let's just say this wasn't my greatest fort...) snapped almost instantly and went stark raving mad. My farmer threw a tantrum and blew up my still AND my plump helmet fields, rendering my fort without food OR drink as the river was frozen over. I feel sorry for whatever reclamation party arrives.

And, so this topic warrants a bit more than a "Cool Story, Bro!", I unearthed a bit of possible !!SCIENCE!!... Apparently, the "doesn't care about anything any more." tag is rediculously easy to get. After simply being attacked by a buzzard and being hungry/sleeping on the grass, my miner attained it shortly before she died. She never even dipped to unhappy.

So, I keep having tigerfish skeletons in my non-evil tower-neighboring (barely) come to life, apparently a human necromancer is responsible, but there was no announcement and no necromancers are on the units screen. The only evidence is the combat log of Tulon Oklemeke, Human Necromancer, filled only with the reanimations of the skeletons.

It's really annoying my military to run out and stomp them every time, and I'm currently in the process of excavating a newer, more aptly sized fort so my haulers have their hands too full dump all the skeletons in time...

This a bug or a feature?

EDIT: OK, now some pangolin skeletons are being raised, this time by a completely different necromancer... What's going on here?

Maybe I SHOULDN'T have made my fortress right next to a necro tower. Halfway through year two and I'm already besieged. Normally it wouldn't be a problem, but I only have my miner with any skill in combat (Mining, coincidentally), and no other weapons or armor. Traps are out as well, even if I had some I think undead are uneffected, right?

So, short of building a wall in the next fifteen seconds (The undead just arrived) am I screwed?

So, I'm playing and stuff, building up my first wave of gear on my shiny new fort that has iron for the first time in forever. I'm getting set to forge some steel weapons and iron shields, when I get a message:

"The forgotten beast Aban has risen! He is a gigantic skinless alligator. He undulates rhythmically. Beware his fire!"

'Oh, no problem' I think, 'I have a wall set up down there, he can't get through'

My dwarves go about their business, smelt a few pig irons, etc. when I get a storm of messages.

"Urist McPrissypants cancelled job: Store item in stockpile. Interrupted by Forgotten beast."

Why? Because they can see him over the wall, through a one wide space. My problem is, now I'm stuck. I have gear, but only full armor without shields. Even if I raised a military using the stuff I've already forged, they'd get obliterated by fire and beat on it uselessly with their fists. I have Beak Wolves at my gates and it's late autumn, so I'm not getting dwarven assistance this year, and not only will my dwarves not wall off the area they can see through, they won't get close enough to wall off the staircase!

"Why not forge more?" one might ask. My forges are on the other side of the crossing, with no other way through to them. Any attempts to forge anything lead to more sissy-lala job cancellations, and even worse, my only spare anvil is being used in a suspended building that no-dwarf want's to finish! Argh!

So, Bay12, A) should I open my doors in the caverns and let the !!FUN!! in, B) build a billion traps, or C) just dig around it? (Hint, C is totally... um... let's see, reverse psycology... C IS TOTALLY NOT A GOOD ONE TO PICK, DON'T PICK C AT ALL!)

UPDATE: The caravan managed to squeeze in right at the end. I had enough for an iron buckler and a bronze pickaxe, which I'm now giving to my miner in combo with some of the other gear I've accumulated. Hopefully my dwarf-style lightsaber will put an end to this menace!

So, in the most recent attack I captured a whopping 15 Stranglers in my hall of cage traps, and I want to use them to train my militia. I know how to assign them and dump weapons and whatnot, but my dwarves won't transfer them at all. On the jobs list all the "transfer large creature" jobs show up as inactive, and releasing them still produces no results. I have 28 idlers who have hauling enabled, but according to the wiki they don't even need an enabled labor to do it.

So, what am I doing wrong here?