Bay 12 Games Forum

I last played a few years ago, and at the time people were discussing whether doctors would soon be able to be trained by giving them sick animals to diagnose and heal, similar to the method of training doctors by repeatedly giving your dorfs small injuries. Evidently that possibility got shelved.

Presumably Toady thought of the player implications. And, namely, what they'd do to get all these sick and injured animals.
Otherwise, you don't train a doctor by making them a vet.

Oh, the system I have in mind can account for that. If I disallow masterworks from the minecart that transfers things from the dump pile to the incinerator, that's a nonissue.
Otherwise, the severity of the bad thought is inversely proportional to the amount of masterworks created. If my 200-dorf fort has thousands of worn masterwork socks to sort, it's going to take years to drive him to suicide.

So, do worn clothes get put in refuse piles now?

Three simple solutions:
1. Don't fish on frozen ponds.
Disable the zone (and labours in dorf therapist) for winter.

2. Pave over the pond apart from the fishing zone.
Masonry is a wonderful thing. The fish don't care about seeing the sky, and dwarves can't fall through a stone floor. And while you're at it, why have a vulnerable exposed walk out to the pond? Masonry up a walkway to get there.

3. Put magma beneath the pond. Never freeze again.
Magma a level underneath water means the water's warmed all the time.
Magma. The cause of, and solution to, most of your fort's problems.

Specialise. If you want wood cut, have a woodcutter doing nothing else. Maybe two; just clearcut an area of forest and have it hauled to stockpiles and minecarted back to the fort.

Thank you, do you happen to know how to label levers though?

Colour-code levers with doors, or just with a floor tile nearby. I also like having a control room of sorts, with the levers also having a positional relationship to the doors/floodgates/whatever. This helps when I give up in frustration/complacency and come back to the game months later without remembering what did what.

The starting 7 aren't super important. You will get more dwarves. You can train dwarves to do other things. You can always drown someone if they don't get on with their job.
Read the wiki and learn to farm.

Minecarts: You only need a VERY simple system for them, but you need to crack the caverns first.

Caverns: You can basically just open them and then wall them off to get the spores circulating. Three levels of cavern, then magma sea beneath the third one somewhere.

Simple minecart system: Find a hole right the way down through all three cavern layers, without penetrating any of them. If you're a lazy mason, you can dig a hole through and just build a shield around it to stop flyers getting in, but I prefer safety and digging over masonry and scaffolding.
You need a minecart at the top, and a track stop set to dump. Basically, you use wheelbarrows to load a stockpile of ores, flux stone, and charcoal. Then you set the minecart to load from the stockpile and GUIDE (not push) to the track stop, where it dumps and is returned. (And not just pushed over the edge.)
Down at the bottom, you have a single-tile ore and charcoal and flux stockpile, with a little room around it, nicely out of the way and NO THROUGH ROUTE, to avoid anyone other than J Random Hauler getting squished. That loads another minecart that's guided to the forges above the magma, and dumps with a track stop onto a single tile stockpile.

Magma forges/smelters:
Channel through the floor into magma. One tile per workshop. Put the impassable tiles over the channel for safety. Things live down there, and you don't want them running riot among the forge complex.