Bay 12 Games Forum

If I were you, I'd post this in the bug section of the forum. Also, a save might be necessary, so I suggest you at least make a backup which can be shared.

I use quantum stockpiles to quickly move stone out of places I want to have clean, like waterworks or roofs. I don't place stockpiles under the dumping zones though. I usually have 2 masons and 2 craftdwarves dealing with excess stones. When legendary, they keep several dwarves with wheelbarrows busy. But I don't know how to make them pick up stones from a specific area, unlike quantums, which is why I use them.

And even 1 depth water on ice floor turns into ice wall, which is lethal.

I have merchants stuck on my map. They just froze in their tracks, for some reason, and they are just sitting there.

Here is what happened chronologically, in case it matters:
New embark, a heavily forested flat savage forest, with no z change whatsoever on the entire embark. There is a river running across northern border and murky pools litter the area. During first year, I get the "Wagons has bypassed your inaccessible site" message. That tells me it's that time of the year, so I plop down a depot and wait for the merchants to come and unload. I then trade them a pile of worthless bone crafts in exchange for two iron anvils and ten assorted logs. At this point, I call off my trader and stop paying them attention.

Then I get a message saying that they have embarked on their journey. But now it is mid winter and they are still around. It looks like they moved a couple of tiles and just stopped. The depot is also covered with some junk they haven't packed yet. I checked combat log and found out that a marksdwarf hit a giant mantis twice. Once on the embark day and once a day later.

But that is all. There are no corpses, no obstacles, no wagons, no messages. And the merchants are just standing by their pack animals, doing nothing.

Have you seen merchants behave like this? How can I get them to leave? What could have caused this?

Each civilization has access to certain stones. Their selection is determined during worldgen, somehow. You can check what stones your civilization has access to during embark or when making an import order.

I wonder, is it possible to mod stones a civ has access to? I usually spend a long time when rolling a world, because I'm checking embark options for each civilization (waiting for history update again and again) and if I don't find a civilization with access to bituminous coal and whatever combination of ores I want at the moment, I reroll entire world and start the checking process all over again.

I think I've read somewhere that smoothed aquifer will start leaking water when reclaiming/unretiring a fortress. I cannot find where I found it though and never tried to verify it myself.

Another stockpile problem which had me scratching my head for a while is that when setting a custom stockpile you disable everything except what you want to store. Seems right, doesn't it? But no. If you disable everything under "Additional options" (plant/animal and non plant/animal) as well, the stockpile won't accept anything.

Also, the problem with wheelbarrows is that they limit number of concurrent hauling to a stockpile as dwarfs will use wheelbarrows only and you can assign only 3 of them per stockpile. I make lots of small, 6 or 12 tile stockpiles if I want stuff moved by wheelbarrows on large scale. There seemed to be some problem with 3 tile stockpile with 3 assigned wheelbarrows though, they weren't moving any stuff at all.

And even then, the endless stream of zombie ravens was more annoying than challenging.