Bay 12 Games Forum

are you cooking any meals? The eggs may have been collected and cooked before you realized. [...] dwarfs are very fast at collecting them [...]

Hahaha, indeed. They love them eggs.
"What? I am to finish that wall to ward off the pending siege? Hell no! There is important egg-business going on in the basement!"

If you have absolutely no options, you could use DFHack's 'slayrace undead' command [...]

Damnit. Getting the feeling that my initial estimation of being screwed was right. 
Ok then, before I resort to cheating I might as well play the joker card: SEND IN THE MINERS!

Now concerning the miner-civilian-uniform / miner on military duty problem, I only see one real solution:

* Take out the mining labour on both miners -> wait until they dropped the picks -> assign them to squad -> equip them with picks -> wait until they pick up the picks again -> slay zombie!
Would that work? Or is that "can't use the same picks for military"-problem actually referring to specific picks, so as if those picks get tagged as "civilian picks" forever?

if that solution shouldn't work for technical reasons:
Is there any way to trick those miners into "accidently bumping into" the zombie while they are carrying their picks?
I mean as regular civilians they would normally run away from the zombie right? But often enough a civilian still doesn't make it in time or whatever happens there when they get involved in wild brawl with something ... how I love those fights some wild animals pick with my woodcutters getting busted as a consequence. There must be some way to arrange such an event with my miners and the zombie?

Question:

So I started a new fort. Things are going smoothly and its the first year, end of autumn.
The liason arrives and ... appears to be dragging an undead dwarf with him. The undead is actually following him, being like 30 tiles behind.
I have no squads yet or no weaponry for that matter. Just the two copper-picks, the miners are using (and should be using to keep mining right now) and a willow-training axe. The biome is "wilderness".
What should I do?
And related here: Are stoneswords made at a craftsdwarf workshop a viable weapon that I could quickly churn out to bash that undead back to his grave? Will severed bodyparts rise again even though I am not in an evil biome?
 

On the upside of things: If those bins need to get carrried around over 100 z levels, there is at least something to do for those 150 dwarfs on hauling duty, while a select few dwarfs actually run the fortress. The last thing you want is to have 150 bored haulers getting drunk all day in your meeting-hall. 

g2knee, concerning your squad-problem it sure sounds as if their schedule is not active. The two guys "training" are apparently not actually training as you commanded them but just doing individual drill in their free time because they are the most motivated.

Try watching this awesome tutorial on military scheduling. It should hopefully solve all problems.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"He admired a fine restraint lately"? This disease-susceptible speardwarf is not accidently a notorious criminal?

You need to toggle "Exact matches" and "replace clothing".

Once they are actually wearing all their gear you can switch "replace clothing" back to "overclothing" ... this way, they won't fail putting on certain armor because their civilian clothing gets in the way.

Another way to assign armor is to assign "specific ..." (weapon, armor etc.) to each soldier individually.

That having said, my squads are currently standing around with only one boot or no boots at all as well.
Guess I will have to try to set them inactive and then active again. Hope this will help.