Bay 12 Games Forum

The idea of setting a minimum for a given scheduled activity is, as I understand it, to allow the activity to proceed without forcing the whole squad to be present. This allows some squad members to bunk off for a drink/eat/sleep when they need to, without that there's a danger that they'll keep training or patrolling until they drop. Personally I set it to 2, even for a full 10 dwarf squad, and find that most of the time at least half the squad will be present and correct anyway.

When the mayor is kept busy , the merchants should be able to leave before the outpost liaison starts talking. Otherwise it would be impossible to get promoted to barony.

I can only report what happens, not what is supposed to happen. My fortress, according to the known criteria, should have had a baron many dwarf years ago but the delegate has never suggested it. There's a bug apparently, perhaps the overstaying merchants are another.

Could your squads have been left at the off duty alert level and thus counted themselves as civilians? Or possibly when you set the alerts you accidentally confined your squads to the same burrow so they couldn't obey the move order. The alert interface is true to the DF paradigm of horrendous confusion wherever possible and it's not difficult to get things wrong.

I'm running a .14 fortress, which is fairly peaceful as goblins don't turn up, to get to grips with the new features before updating to a more fun version. So there haven't been many health issues apart from:

A dwarven baby used a shield by her mother when her militia squad ran into a marauding beast. She got a fractured shoulder and a smashed toe as a result. Dwarven healthcare has no paediatric section it appears as she got no treatment at the time but seems fairly robust as she made it to childhood. She then toddled off to a hospital bed and the crack medical team, hitherto completely unemployed, leapt into action. Wounds were cleaned, sutures and dressings applied and the shoulder set. She then left hospital and no further treatment is scheduled. I thought medicine was pretty buggy so I was pleased to see the system work so well, but will she actually heal?

A more general concern is that the luxurious lifestyle in the fortress is taking its toll on the population's general health. A fairly typical description of the average dwarf is 'belarded by great hanging sacks of fat'. Perhaps not surprising as the place is awash in booze and lavish masterpiece meals. Since (as far as I know) cholesterol levels and cardiac arrests are yet to feature in the game I don't know whether to regard this as a good thing, perhaps the fat will act as additional armour when the fighting starts. But are there any strategies I could use, beyond the obvious of designating hundreds of boulders for dumping or making them all miners and excavating enormous caverns, that would get dwarves back to peak fitness?

This is why your military should be men.

I'm shocked, this is an equal opportunities fortress. Besides what with the long hair and beards and mayor Urist McClinton's 'Don't ask, don't tell' decree it became impossible to tell what genders have actually been recruited into a given squad. At least until their clothes rot off and possibly not even then.

Perhaps it's because there's something about a dwarf in a uniform or the threat of sudden death causing an upsurge in the hormones but putting dwarves into the militia seems to do it for me. Every squad heads off to their appointed position with a cometary tail of mewling infants in their wake, frequently outnumbering the squad itself. So unlike the OP what I want is dwarves who can figure out that a 'Bring you daughter to work day' is possibly not the best idea when the work involves a two-headed horror bent on mayhem.

After running into the problem of "Cannot clean self!" I choose to deal with it, and found that by making a main passage in my fort that everyone, or nearly everyone, needs to pass through a small trench with 2-3 water in it so it doesn't just evaporate.

This works quite well, as all my dwarves are clean if wet, and they all have a small skill in swimming now too.

Top tip: Don't put the bathing pond they have to cross outdoors, at least if you're somewhere it can freeze. See my thread on mysterious dwarf death/unconsciousness: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=69158.0

Make sure that your sculpture room is actually reachable from the rest of the fortress.  It could be you've screwed up ramps or accidentally walled it off somehow and dwarves trapped in there are simply dying of thirst and hunger.

Have a cigar. I'd built a pond across the corridor to the garden which they'd been happily splashing through to get nice bath thoughts. Now it's winter and the pond is frozen and for some reason they won't cross it. I hadn't been expecting that as an early casualty was a dwarf bringing back a log who walked across a frozen pond when the weather was getting warmer and fell through the ice.