Bay 12 Games Forum

Check your normal-weight barrels. They should say what kind of wood the barrel is made of. I suspect your problem is that you've somehow got hold of wood with a badly-defined raw that doesn't include a name (hence, "wooden") or weight information; the default weights for materials tend to be ludicrously heavy.

Are you sure they can access the bedrooms? Try stationing one of your soldiers in them.

As a general rule, dwarves that work all the time don't have sex.

That said, your fortress almost certainly has more than enough idle nobles to keep popping out peasant babies.

Someone's made an automatic orcsicle maker, but it works by pumping water directly onto the orcs, where it then freezes. The difference being that your suggestion involves death by crushing instead of death by entombment.

The problem I see with this is that pumps need to be supported on their output tile, which I think means that anything orthogonally adjacent to the pump's output tile will also be supported. That would include any blocks generated by freezing the output water.

It's certainly possible. You use a setup something like this:Top-down view
River is flowing right-to-left
..........    .: floor
~~~%%~~~~~    ~: water    =: horizontal axle
~~~%%~~~~~    %: screw-pump pumping to the west
~~~%%WWW~~    W: water wheel    *: gear assembly
....*=*...The screw pumps have to be resting on floors, of course. Once you get them pumping, the spaces behind them should be clear of water, so you can go down (dig a staircase into the side of the river) and construct walls behind them. At that point you can turn the screw pumps off; the water flow will simply stop at the walls and won't overflow.

Jancarius: just read the wiki article on pumps. They can be confusing when you're first figuring them out.

If you let the water melt, the items may not show up. If you mine the squares out they should be there though.