Bay 12 Games Forum

Bolts and ranged weapons in general were MASSIVELY nerfed in a recent update. You want to stick with all metal bolts now.

I was really outdated on my info. I just tested this now.

He is right, stick to all metal bolts right now when going into fights. Bone bolts only bruise the skin and bones right now when hitting unarmored elf/goblin parts. Bone bolts are as useless as Wood now.

Anything heavy that uses a bin should have wheelbarrow (armor/weapon/gems/bars), this is because they drag the heavy bins to the stuff and then haul it back to the stockpile. If they haul a bin full heavy weapons from level 100 down to level 0 and back up to 100 again, they might just die of dehydration.

One way to avoid this, is to do a dual stockpile. For example, use two weapon stockpiles next to each other instead of just 1.
X - Max Bins, accepts from links ONLY, takes from stockpile Y
Y - No Bins allowed, accepts from anywhere, gives to stockpile X

XXXX      YYYY
XXXX <-  YYYY
XXXX      YYYY
XXXX      YYYY

This way, your dwarves will bring all weapons to stockpile Y without dragging bins around, and stockpile X right next to it will gather these weapons into bins.

Also, always use *wheelbarrow on stone. If a dwarf halls pitchblende w/o a wheelbarrow he might die of thirst as well.

Yeah, always use "replace clothing" by pressing 'r' I think. Make sure you have head/body/legs/hand/feet armor for the entire squad, even cheap ones, before doing this though. You should actually do this to your entire population so everyone is armored. You also won't get a problem with tons and tons of used clothing slowing down your game.

Once you assign stuff to a dwarf, I found that not worrying about whether they equipped it or not is fine. Just check back in a season and check who is missing armor pieces using Dwarf Therapist. Re-assign different armor to the pieces that dwarves refused to pick up, and re-check in another few months. Usually by the second season everyone will be using everything you have assigned.

I just updated the wiki on what I found to be a working setup on archery targets. If you have 5 targets, you need to make them into seperate rooms, and assign the marksdwarves squad to train in each of them. After that, I create a barracks with the targets inside the area so they can train in discipline sometimes too.

If you assign two kinds of bolts, it gets kind of buggy, so just use one kind of ammunition. A good setup would be to a have a dog/cat/pig ranch to get a steady supply of bones, and just make thousands of bone bolts for both training and combat. Bone bolts are effective enough for goblins (not so effective against forgotten beasts). Unfortunately, only 5 bolts are produced per bone and a squad of marksdwarves will burn through a thousand bolts before they even hit level 5 in skill.

EDIT: Actually, DO NOT armor up or assign weapons to your dedicated miners/woodcutters/hunters because they will strip down and remove everything after you set them to inactive. Assigning picks/axes/crossbows also makes them unusable in actual dwarf jobs so don't do it. Also, make sure you deactivate these three jobs on all full-time militia members.

My goblin neighbors still appear on my neighbors list and we are at war. I have not received a siege in years so I decided to check them out in the legends viewer.

It turns out, my dwarf civ attacked and took over 4 out of 6 of their caves, which is the complete opposite of what usually happens. Their civ is still listed and have a goblin master (a random dwarf executed their original demon master). The legends viewer however, doesn't list their population anymore so I think they are all wiped out (other goblin civs have their populations clearly listed in the legends viewer, all 0-site goblin civs does not).

Do I need to abandon my fort because goblins sieges wont come anymore? I don't want to play without sieges again, I already played DF with the no-siege bug long enough.


EDIT: I retired the fort, and checked my fort area. No more goblin neighbors  . The goblin civ seems to be alive, but I'm apparently out of range.

Is that working as intended? The merchants are unaffected, but their animals 'experience mortal fear', so they just stop trading with me.

EDIT: I reloaded the save twice and tried again. Same thing happened twice, but they seem to be okay when I slaughtered a mule, and they only freaked out when I slaughtered a Blue Peahen. I bought both of these animals from the human caravan.

Well I really want more animals to tame so I went ahead and killed them, civilized or not.

They were all stuck up the walls like celem said. They all came down as one group when my squad arrived, and spawned 4 troglodyte babies as soon as they hit the ground. I guess they held their babies in for three years.

EDIT: Actually, according to the kill list, it seems that the numbers did not increase, its just the name of the Troglodytes that changed. Some of the "Troglodytes" changed into "Troglodyte Baby" when they climbed back down.

I'm not sure if its a bug, but exotics bought from elves don't seem to breed anymore. I bought a Giant Leopard male and a Giant Leopard female on the 2nd year of my fortress.

It is now year 8 and they produced nothing. The animals I bought from dwarves breed normally, so do the stuff I caught in traps (I have lots of coyotes and wild boar now).

On the other hand, NOTHING was producing children (even the pigs I brought on first embark had no children!) when I was playing in 40.05, but I moved on to 40.06 and every female was having babies. Except the giant leopard female of course.