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« on: February 25, 2013, 05:59:42 pm »
tl;dr to get your vampires to stay long enough in traction benches to heal, lock them away from any other dwarves as soon as they are put in traction.
The story is, I was lucky enough to get a non-useless queen sent to my fortress, great metalcrafter, furnace operator and professional weaponsmith. Also, a vampire, which was announced first thing when she arrived. Unfortunately, spending a lot of time with dwarves has made me a bit greedy, so I felt like capitalizing on the vampire part, drafted her into the military in hopes of getting a pretty unstoppable dwarf. Since I wasn't aware of the bug that made military dwarves not wear armor, she went to combat wearing mostly full steel armor, except for the wool shoos she preferred for some reason. So the next time there's a siege, her combat reports show most hits glanced off the armor, but eventually a voracious cave crawler nearly chewed off her foot. That's where the trouble started. Broken left lower leg, overlapping fracture in left ankle, left foot cut apart.
Initially she got taken away to a hospital like any other casualty, got cleaned up and her left lower leg dressed and sutured. Then after spending a while in hospital bed, she split, went to sleep in some other dwarf's bed. She spent over a year in there, before I decided to deconstruct the bed. Doctors took her back to the hospital, started fixing her lower leg, then after a while she was gone again.
My first attempt at dealing with this was to burrow the doctors over the queen vampire, so they'd get the work done before she walks off again. This worked for the lower leg fracture, which only required splints and a cast, but wasn't enough for the overlapping fracture.
Next attempt was to lock them in the hospital, that is the chief medical dwarf, the bone doctor and their lame queen. This worked pretty well, she got evaluated daily, so by enabling the diagnoser labor on the bone doctor he built up a decent skill in the three weeks it took him to get tired. Just after the bone doctor went off to take a nap in one of the hospital beds, the queen crawled out of the traction bench and got in bed with him.
That's the point it all clicked - I've found her in some random beds by that point, so this was a perfect explanation - as soon as she sensed some dwarf went to sleep, she targeted the bed and crawled over to feed. By the time she got there, the target was long gone, so she just crashed in the bed and got stuck there.
Armed with a solid theory like that, I put together a tiny hospital room with just a traction bench and chests for supplies, deconstructed all other traction benches, and waited for the queen to be brought there. I found her at the other end of the fortress, chilling in some fish cleaner's bed. Deconstructed the bed, she got brought to the only traction bench available, I walled her in and just left her there for a few months. Without the temptation of fresh blood, she would finally stay put long enough for her ankle to heal. Success!
What I learned in the process:
1. To ensure vampires stay put long enough for bones to heal, they have to be locked away alone.
2. Dwarves in traction benches generate obscene amounts of evaluation requests, good for training the skill in dwarves. The fracture rebreaks fully when leaving the traction bench early.
3. Vampires with this bug can't feed, become effectively deactivated once they crash in someone's bed.
