Bay 12 Games Forum

I am baffled as to why I cannot build a water wheel on a brook.

My first attempt was to build an east/west wheel (since the brook is flowing westward) and two vertical axles to hook up to my mill. However, the wheel was "inactive."

I learned next that brooks have a floor that you have to channel out, so I channeled a 3x1 area on the bank of the brook (downward slopes are shown). Now I'm told "Blocked" and "Needs ground or near machine" when trying to place the wheel over the channel. I tried to build some vertical axles adjacent to the wheel, but the same error persists. I also tried just channeling out one tile and the same thing happens.

What do I have to do?

My dwarves have standing orders to collect refuse from the outside, and they've normally been doing so (I have a huge boneyard as a result). However, there are some oddities.

On two occasions, I've had visitors show up plainly announced as vampires. In both cases, I sent the dwarves with torches and pitchforks to do away with the unwanted guests. The first vamp was an axedwarf that caused much slaughter defending his life. He also arrived at the same time as a minotaur (not sure if they were in cahoots or if it was a coincidence), which also caused some damage.

The second was a human, apparently pacifist bard that hilariously just ran away and took weeks for my dwarves to finally surround and kill.

For some reason, neither of the vampires nor the minotaur corpses have been hauled away, and now there seems to be permanent skeletons standing around my fortress. Dwarves are often horrified by or moved to grief when seeing them, yet they do nothing in bringing them to the refuse pile. I even explicitly selected them to be dumped, and they still haven't been disposed. The skeletons blink menacingly (probably just because they're laying on top of other things, but still, spoooky).

What's going on here? Do dwarves ignore the skeletons of sentient races?