Bay 12 Games Forum

To get your marksdwarves to train more, turn off their hauling labors, set them on Active, then under their Active schedule, set no order for every month on it. Copy/paste helps here to fill in the schedule. They will use up the bolts at a scary pace.

1. Archers need to have a archery target assigned to them to practice, normally on months with no scheduled orders.
2. Melee squads need to have either a armor stand or weapon rack assigned to the squad to train at , Train being the keyword here.
  If you assign a marksdwarf squad the Active schedule, by default they train every month. Guess what happens when you assign them a train order for a month, and the squad has no weapon rack or armor stand assigned for them to train at. THEY STAND AROUND GOOFING OFF. Not their fault, but its the evil overseers. Same problem happens to a crossbow squad. They have no where to go TRAIN at.
Archery targets to shoot at, AS or a WR to train at.
 If you did have a crossbow squad with a train order that month(plus a AS or WR assigned also), you will not get any quasi hammer training through sparring with crossbows,  just demonstrations of fighting skills, and some archery practice. Now later on, when they get highly skilled at crossbows, it might not hurt to add a hammer/shield to their uniform. Now since they have a real melee weapon, you might see some sparring, helping armor user,weapon, shield and dodge skills.

How many you have in each squad, and the min you set could be a contributing factor. As a temporary fix, send them out on kill orders against easy targets

Note to ponder: The maximum range of a archery range is about 30 spaces, which is slightly more than 20.

Beware of getting the other civilizations at war with you. My last fort suffered numerous attacks by strafing elves, with my marksdwarves being the first victims.(SHUDDERS)

In unusable, human and kobold sized clothing goes into it, useable is for dwarven size(dwarf,goblin,elf). I do not think there is a way now to specify where old wornout clothes are stored as of yet

If Hogwarts can have beloved ghosts, why not you.

In DF, always look at how you can utilize problems for your benefit. Set up a butcher and a tannery, use stone fall traps for the pests, reap the rewards of the meat,bones, and hides. With cage traps, a animal trainer is required to tame them for safe butchery.
 If you can armor up a soldier, with a decent weapon, kill orders work good, as well as a station order at the entrance.