Bay 12 Games Forum

I guess I was a bit hasty with writing this discussion because the answers weren't hard to find. I'll be waiting on the tip of my chair for the magic update then, I cannot wait!

I'd recommend NOT waiting on the tip of your chair for the next 7 years, but rather do something useful (while eagerly waiting nonetheless), like playing the DF that's available, investigate the weird stuff called "life", or start a multi billion dollar company (the profits could then allow you to donate a couple of millions to Toady).

And you have verified that they haven't laid eggs and those have been collected? This also leads to the next question: Have they laid any eggs at all (all egg layers act as domesticated chicken, i.e. lay eggs regardless of fertilization or not, so there should be a steady stream of eggs).

I haven't had chameleons, but I have had snakes and crocodiles.

Any plans to allow the creation/filling of a wagon and sending it to trade off-site?

A return of the economy and trade is in the future somewhere after Myth & Magic. It's not unreasonable that trade "armies" could be introduced after that. It's probably better to make this suggestion in the suggestion forum, though, as Toady won't look back to this thread at that time, but he does look at the suggestions.

The only requirement for artifacts to get stolen is that the thief can get at them (which includes stockpiles: I've had a theft from one).

Caravan guards should be able to engage enemies, but "civilian" caravan members are easily spooked (less so now than in the past), and when one caravaneer gets spooked he bolts and takes the rest of the caravan with him. Anything unloaded in the trade depot is abandoned (and you're credited with stealing it, regardless of whether you take it or leave it cluttering the depot), and if the spooked caravan member was a wagon it will disintegrate, leaving the carried goods in a pile on the ground (there should also be a log of wagon wood there in that case).

The result of such incidents is a reduction of the size of the next caravan (i.e. fewer good available for sale and a lower capacity for hauling away your garbage).

Your dorf is probably lost. Using DFHack you can teleport it to safety, but vanilla rescue would be very tricky:
- Set up a ballista and fire bolts at the tree to destroy it. The dorf will either drown trying to swim to the shore, actually make it to the shore, or get stuck in the hole in the water where the trunk used to be, doomed to be stuck there to die of hunger/thirst (Don't know if dorfs can drink from walls of water, though).
- If stuck in a hole in the water, you need to create ripples in the water by e.g. channeling out a tile of the shore. Eventually that ripple should hit the hole in the water and get it to collapse, at which time your dorf is back to swim or drown. Note that ripples may be cancelled by water flowing in from the edge if the lake is connected to the edge, in which case you may have to create new ripples.

If the lake isn't connected to the edge you can also drain it by digging a tunnel to the map edge underneath the lake, carve a fortification in the edge, and then drain the lake into that tunnel. I'd probably try that in parallel with making and setting up a ballista.

There are many possible approaches that are usually successful if implemented correctly.

The easiest one is to ensure you can lock yourself in and wait out the siege (one season or one year, with a small number of oddball exceptions). This means ensuring food and drink gets indoors and that you have to ensure sufficient building materials to keep going is present. The key dangers are to screw up you your entrance blocking measures (such as not hooking up the bridge or making it retracting rather than raising), wait too long to close it in the hope of saving that last straggler who is trying to save that precious boulder from the invaders, and early weres wreaking havoc because you haven't been set up were warning stations (possibly because you haven't had time to do it) so they're effectively inside before you detect them (visiting weres are extremely dangerous).

Creatures that are not egg layers (such as mammals) breed by having males and females adjacent to each other. Thus, all you need is a pasture, although grazers need "grass" on it (cavern fungi count as grass), and enough grass for them to eat without overpowering the grass regrowth. It's said you can even cage a male and have the females outside of it such that they get adjacent to the cage and he'll impregnate the females (I've never tried that variant).
Once gestation is over you get an announcement that baby animals have been born (and you need to add those to the pasture).