Internal doors are your friend-not only do they let you keep your artifact safe (by placing them in a display furniture behind an internal door and statues in a room, so your dwarves can still keep vision of them for thieves) they also let you make barracks that prevent off-duty dwarves from doing "individual combat drills".
-a barracks defined from a piece of furniture behind a forbidden internal door will make the barracks seem inaccessible to off-duty dwarves so they wont use it.
-activated soldiers get additional "go to combat training" and "training session" tasks so they can still use it most of the time. i have noticed my soldiers sometimes wandering around with "no activity" or praying or socializing but for the most part they'll go to train (i consider praying and socializing to be good things because they're already legendary in everything except dodger and armor user and could use the happy thoughts)
-i have not tested this very much, perhaps someone else can? i have 5 separate barracks and 5 training orders for each squad with 2 specific positions being asked to train in each order.
i actually discovered this by accident. the original intention was to put crappy wooden chests brought by the elves behind internal doors so i could resize the room instead of undesignating to keep barracks settings when i wanted to turn the barracks off.
the guild halls you see in the picture are designated from the statues and thus i never found out from them that you could make rooms unuseable this way
Safetly handling prisoners-escape attempts seem to be influenced by
a combination of type of job the the dwarf is dragging them out of the cage for, their emotional states
, and whether they're an enemy of your civ/site.-handling escapable prisoners for pitting may result in more than half of them trying to escape, transfering to different cages on the same Z level is "mostly" safe
-they will try to escape if they're overcome by terror or any other kind of major emotional state
-moving them across different Z levels through hatches gives them a chance to escape#-my disposal design involve building all of the cages with living escapables, stripping them, and then stationing military dwarves such that all the cages are covered by at least one military dwarf's aggro radius. then letting an armed and armored off-duty military dwarf do the transfer from their cages to a single cage -i havent yet further processed living prisoners but once they're all in one cage you can smash the cage or dump it in magma or link it and build it in a slaugther pit or w/e. but always station your military when pitting them
-undead that came back to life, naturally hostile wild creatures, and most megabeast and semi-megabeast seem perfectly safe, if the job isnt interrupted. i havent run into a uninvited guest that was an already an enemy of my civ yet so i cant confirm if they're all safe to handle
-beware, handling a creature only makes it not hostile to your fort members and permanent residents. any other friendlies such as guests and merchants will be scared and will try to fight it, this can result in a number of fun events such as the creature dodging away from the handler
-any interruptions during handling, as long as the creature isnt a tame or trained creature, will result in FUN
UPDATE: i think i've found out exactly what causes creatures to escape.
-dragging creatures is a job and being dragged is also a job, both are interruptable by emotional states that cause the current job to be cancelled (i.e. lost in despair, due to evil rain, or overcome by horror due to seeing enemies)
-sometimes pitting works because these happen to not occur on anyone being handled, if it does occur however... it has potential to allow everyone being handled to escape as well as one still in cages yet to be handled.
-this is because the new vengeance system also causes any jobs to be cancelled and anyone affected by it to automatically become involved in combat.
-i was transferring a few goblins, couple beak dogs, and an ogre that survived my death maze to a single cage; the ogre was the first to be moved and cooperated. a beak dog was second but was experiencing mortal terror and had to be put down by 2 elite soldiers while the cowardly off-duty cager dwarf ran around back and forth in the locked area. i kept him locked in there to finish the job but every other prisoner he tried to move also tried to escape
-this shows the vengeance system will be active for a while and will also affect creatures in cages
-drowning doesnt seem to trigger combat or the vengeance system. i've managed to "process" 50 prisoners in this way by drowning them and letting the biome reanimate them into undamaged corpses to use as undead livestock
#-some pits such as those with hazardous enemies in the area below ready to kill prisoners will result in escape attempts when trying to pit new creatures at the same time because there is constant combat and activation of the vengeance group combat system
#-undead is unaffected by this because each undead is an independent, but still opposed to life so they wont feel vengeance or join the conflicts of other undead (at least, plain zombies wont, havent run into enough intelligent ones)
use more than one built cage when assigning a lot of creatures to built cages-each cage will only generate one "cage creature" task
-dont do this for escapable prisoners unless you want some combat training while caging them
use a quantum stockpile for cages and forbid it when loading cage traps so dwarves will use empty cages that are practically right there
forbid a built cage if you're transferring the creatures inside to another built cage-prevents dwarves from doing a "release creature" job that could result in FUN if you forbade all available cages
making all parts of a room useable-you might notice dwarves eating in your library instead of the legendary dining room even if there are a million tables in there
-this is because of a kind of bug that makes furniture in your room designation behave as if they dont exist as part of the room if they were built after the piece of furniture you used to designate the room
-this bug seems to only affect some pieces of furniture and not others and also sometimes affects room value
#-always rebuild the main piece of furniture you used to designate the room from after upgrading rooms that are communal spaces, if you notice parts of the room not being used or discrepancies in room value
always keep one Z level of undug floor and roof and preferentially wall between you and any cavern layers that grow trees-one piece of common knowledge ppl know is that if there is empty space below a tree and it's cut then it will generate a hole
#-a less commonly known fact that can cause a lot of fun is that greens growing upwards will completely destroy constructed floors and walls that are in their growth path, letting FUN in. this isnt the case for natural walls and floors even if the top part is carved out
use wagon-only entrances and hatches for your main entrance as show here:https://www.dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Wagoni cant even begin to tell you the number of cringe moments i have from watching youtubers play dwarf fortress with a raising bridge as their main door which randomly crush their dwarves and is hard to seal in case of emergency.
any area of the fort with raising bridges should either be sealed with an airlock of doors on both the entry point and exit point or be surrounded by unuseable ramps like in the link
central ramps are a lot better than central staircases-a dwarve needs to separately move horizontally onto a piece of stair before it can start moving vertically this interferes with pathing causing fps loss but also creates more fun in combat situations because station and engagement pathing by soldiers is already erratic
-if a dwarf falls down stairs for any reason it will keep falling until it hits something that isnt stairs
-central ramps allow your dwarves to move vertically the same time as they move horizontally. This makes dodging out of each other's way easier when moving past each other and wide central ramps allow safer engagements by the military if the central ramp is ever compromised because it behaves as if they're fighting on flat ground. if anyone does fall it will be a 1 Z level tumble
-i personally use a combination of central ramps and stairs, a few levels of ramp followed by 2 levels of stairs, then ramps again going in the opposite direction to keep the system at the center of the fortress
always assign everyone to the military and use replace clothes unless the dwarf is a hunter, miner, or woodcutter-assign everyone their own couple of chests and cabinet to store their "civilian clothes" in
-assign normal civilian clothes to the squads you arent using as real soldiers
#-the furniture used to designate the room cant actually be used for storage, so you should use 2 chests
-item ownership is a large problem because it disables anyone other than the owner from handling the item and causes excessive fps loss, the current system of claiming clothes could also cause your dwarves to drop masterworks in the refuse pile because "store owned item" comes after "pickup equipment"
-military assigned clothes will always be tasked with a "store item in stockpile" before "pickup equipment"
-their stored "civilian clothes" will wear out much slower allowing you to circumvent a large part of the item ownership system
-clean owned isnt as good because it also marks everything for dumping, forcing you to manually mark everything as not for dumping if you want to say, trade away all your worn clothes
-mercenaries will never claim new clothes so this is the only way to give them new clothing
-i personally use a layer of civilian clothes under the armor of my military dwarves (everyone) because it helps absorb blunt damage. this is coming from someone who has modded gauntlets, high boots, and helms to be twice as thick (in layer thickness). you need all the protection you can get because some parts of the body are so small in relative body size they'll be severed by the force of the impact even if fully armored in steel or adamantine.
do not use therapist to directly assign dwarves to squads-it interferes a flag somewhere that's used to manage squads when they return from raiding and causes the squad to bug after. instead use therapist to find valid recruits and manually assign them
making historical figures that were assigned through generated merchants useable in the military:-this mostly affects dead civs with no real historical figures left
-when you request worker the dwarves will show up permanently as "merchant" and can still do labors but not be able to be assigned to the military
#-select them and use gui/gm-editor in dfhack and change their profession 1 to recruit and profession 2 to standard and they'll revert to a normal dwarf
healing injuries with dfhack manually (if you find "full heal" too cheesy)-for severed nerves find the "body" section after selecting the dwarf and using gui/gm-editor
-find the wounds section and go to "parts", in "parts" find the muscle layer (it's 0,1, or 2), then go to flags and toggle the flag for severed nerve to false
-for spinal injuries it seems you need to remove all injury flags from the nerve tissue part, then go to "components" under "body" and in "body_part_status" find the nerve body part and remove all injuries from it (lower spinal nerve is part 46).
-nerve tissue didn't seem to heal even though it was set to in the raws
using the justice system effective:-forbidden chains still count towards the number of chains and cages required for your police to not get unhappy thoughts
-forbidden chains wont be used, allowing you to give your dwarves a bonus to armor user for beatings
-forbidden chains will never generate a release creature job of any kind, useful for a dwarf that gets stressed too easily so they can be forced to become hostile and then "transferred"(see next tips) to a more useful location; also for those that feel "repentance" to easily get -100k stress estatic
-having a list of crimes where you didnt convict anyone can be useful because convicting anyone will let you chain and thus handle and control them
-a chain that is used for justice can be undesignated to be used for justice and if the chained creature isnt a member of your fort they can be assigned to any other chain -remember to keep the original chain forbidden so there is no release creature job
-this is useful for turning spies into useful sentries or monster hunters into a make-shift, stationary, military
-sometimes strange mood dwarves will become stuck if they're constructing their artifact in a war-zone (such as a leatherworkers near a corpse quantum stockpile in an evil biome). they will refuse to continue constructing the artifact if caused in any way to move away from their workshop (such as getting up to join an existing conflict) after gathering all of their materials
-interrogating them with your sheriff will cause them to walk back to their workshop and continue working on it
