Bay 12 Games Forum

The "stay indoors" order has been removed from the game. It has been replaced with three pre-defined-and-changeable and as many custom alert states as you like. Alert states determine which schedule a squad uses and also have a few parameters defining how civilians behave as well. This means you should be able to make a alert called "Underground Attack" that makes squads carry out whatever plan you have regarding plugging up an invasion of ratmen from an underground layer while the civilians meanwhile cancel their jobs and run up to the highest meeting hall you have, while your alert called "External Siege" might see the civilians run down to your lowest meeting hall while the squads run over to the towers and gates... or just wait for the traps to do their job. That's a later adjustment.

So somebody asked if it's possible to use civilians for jobs and so on while the alert is on, in the zone to which they've been restricted. I was originally thinking more of shorter alerts where you just wanted to get them away from someplace dangerous while you fought something out. However, while I was working on it, I decided I might as well make it more diverse, so I put in burrows.

The ill-named burrows are larger sections of your fortress where dwarves live and work and to which you can restrict their movements. Dwarves can be assigned to multiple burrows, and you can paint them with your mouse in a few brush sizes or lay them out in multiple rectangles (a burrow need not be a rectangle). Any number of burrows can overlap and you can give them names and an ASCII symbol.

Dwarves will only use workshops, stockpiles, living areas, meeting halls, etc. in the burrows to which they are assigned. I've removed all of the "entrance dance" code so that they can survive the mental trauma of not being in their assigned locations, and they can cross locations that aren't in their burrow, but they'll maintain the restrictions in the general sense described above.

There are many, many ways in which this can be useful for controlling labor (you could even have your experienced miners mine veins of your choosing in this way -- it'd be a slightly clunky workaround, but it works). Just the basic burrow mechanic is powerful enough that it is pretty exploitable, so there will be several ways in which dwarves either move beyond their burrows or are affected adversely by heavy restrictions, but I'll leave those for you to find. These effects should all make sense and not be all that restrictive on play, especially if you are respectful to your critters (for instance, having your soap makers all stand in a 3x3 corner in the main hall until they starve to death shouldn't proceed as planned for very long).

A dwarf not specifically assigned to a burrow can work anywhere, but in the future there might be, say, a restricted burrow setting or something that'll exclude such dwarves. There are also items posted on dev about burrow hauling jobs and burrow production limits and all of whatever -- I haven't done any of that. Things like restricting manager orders to certain burrows etc. would all be great (and faster than doing it via particular workshops in general), but I don't want to get too far afield for this release (since I'm already far afield). In any case, the core work and mechanics are done.

Getting back to the immediate topic, alerts can now just restrict civilians to a set of burrows, with the further restriction that they should get to this set of burrows with priority. If a dwarf then doesn't feel comfortable working there because they were previous assigned to areas outside the alert area, they'll be idle as before, but it's a smaller problem than the one described in the beginning of the first paragraph, and it can be easily corrected if you plan on or are forced to stay in that alert state for a prolonged period. Giving individual dwarves different burrow assignments based on their alert state could be a future possibility (perhaps in conjunction with the work-gang class of ideas), but that's not in the cards for this release.