Bay 12 Games Forum

You should have embarked with an anvil and a few picks and axes. Start digging and when you hit rock you should be able to construct a Wood Furnace. Use the axes to cut trees and make charcoal in the furnace (you may dig up coal later but you'll still need charcoal). Use the anvil to set up a metal forge and set up a smelter nearby. Keep digging, find ores, smelt ores, make stuff at the forge. If you're lucky you'll find weapons grade ores otherwise it's wooden spears and the like until you can trade for the stuff. Lots of useful tutorials in this forum on the detail stuff but that's the general idea.

Have you allocated ammo to the squads in the military screen? In these recent versions just having ammo available in stockpiles doesn't get your marksdwarves shooting as it would have done a year or so back. I made this mistake and until I read up about it in the wiki I was also cursing the idle wretches.

I'm getting the same thing, except one step further.  My combination axedwarf + woodcutter (seemed like a good idea at the time) removes all his armour when he goes off duty, piece by piece — he'll run out, do some task, and then I'll see him returning his shield to a stockpile or something.

But the worst of it is, he'll eventually do the same for his axe.  At which point he can't even cut wood, so he'll just ignore any treecutting designations altogether.

I had a similar problem. Set up a squad of talented axedwarves the captain of which was a woodcutter who came with good axe skills, logically enough. He did his share of killing when the occasion arose and, when I stood the squad down for some R&R, returned to his first love of chopping down trees. To which end he discarded his fine steel batteaxe and scampered out with a chestnut training axe. I think he managed to cut down a tree with this but it proved tragically less effective against the goblins who ambushed him. He will be missed.

Freezing/thawing happens instantly it appears. I learnt this recently when a couple of my dwarves and pets were flash frozen in an ice wall - they just happened to be walking through a partly drained pond at the wrong moment. However this just appears to be at the tile level, the actual spread of winter happens more gradually. Your world may differ but in mine freezing starts in the south of the map, so when I see the brook starting to freeze I deny access to dangerous areas and make sure any tree felling and so on occurs away from ponds/streams, and likewise in reverse when it thaws. This seems to work reasonably well.

I ask because, after transferring my save to the .17 version, I'm now finding puddles of dwarf pus about the place. I'm used to blood trails showing up when dwarves decide to go for a paddle through the decaying remains of assorted intruders on the refuse heap but pus is a new one. No obvious source, unlike blood no one claims ownership of the pus, and I don't appear to have any dwarves with suppurating wounds that might be the other logical source. I do have lots of children though, the mayor alone has dropped 10 so far, so I wonder if the emulation of growing up has taken an unexpected turn.

For the general populace I've found that a legendary dining room (i.e. lots of chairs and tables, smoothed floor and engraved walls) is a good start. Get food production going and restrict cooking to your best cooks and before you know it you'll be churning out masterpiece lavish meals for the dwarves to chow on.

For an individual it's worth looking at their likes and seeing if you can provide them one or more things. My Captain of the Guard got depressed after the death of a friend and either got enraged if made to train or unhappy about being relieved from duty. But he liked donkeys and a fey mood had produced a masterpiece cage so I built the cage in his bedroom, chucked a donkey in it and he now thinks it's Royal quality and is over the moon. Fortunately the other nobles haven't cottoned on yet.

Can't answer the dwarves getting stuck filling ponds, but freezing and thawing happens instantaneously, so it's not that your dwarf and cat weren't moving, they were just in the wrong place at the worst possible time.

Ah, my mistake. I assumed that because other stuff was modelled to minute and frequently irrelevant levels of detail that freezing would happen in a realistic fashion as well.

So I set up a pond to give my dwarves a nice bath on the way to the sculpture garden and maybe learn how not to drown. This worked quite well but the water turned red from washed off blood so I decided to drain the pond into an underground room and add dimple cups to my agriculture base from the result. I re-designated the area as a pond to get it filled up again and pond filling jobs appeared in the list although no water seemed to reach the pond. Eventually I noticed a dwarf with a bucket standing in a water source zone (1 tile on land, 1 tile on a brook) and he had pond filling as his activity. The bucket had stale water[4] in it but nothing more appeared in it and a game day or two later Urist was still there, now hunger and thirsty. On cancelling the job he scuttled off for provisions but what got him stuck in the first place? The water source appears valid when I checked the zone - was it the water already in the bucket that stopped him?

On a related note the bath, which has steps either on each side of a central channel, later became a scene of tragedy as first a cat then a dwarven child became encased in ice. This seems distinctly odd as there was no water in it to start off with, though an ice wall appeared when winter came. How does a dwarf, let alone a cat, move so slowly as to get encased in ice? I could understand this if they had no means of exit and got covered in snow but they could easily get out.