Bay 12 Games Forum

Of course they keep trading with you- how else will they get back the 200 wooden piccolos you took from the previous caravans you slaughtered?

Oh wait... you can't trade those back...

If you want them to go to war with you, keep selling them wooden crafts every year.

Does this work for sure? Even if they don't send a liaison?

Do Elves even send liaisons anymore? I don't think I've had one in my last 3 forts- just the skinny bastards with their wooden baubles and fantastic animals.

Animal pathfinding is not my friend. Caged animals do not roam. Pastured animals do. Pathfinding is widely believed to be one of the largest FPS eaters, so reducing pathfinding (caging) is good.

As discussed in another recent thread, pastured animals don't appear to eat FPS because they're not pathfinding the whole fort or trying to follow a dwarf and negotiate his pathfinding to create their own. They just chill in the pasture and maybe move to an adjacent tile every few days- like a chained animal. That's my experience anyway, I'd love to hear if your mileage varies.

On egg-laying birds, they tend to die of old age rather quickly so it's good to have a breeding pair. Breeding is kind of a pain since you have to keep the dwarves from gathering the eggs, but a forbidden door does this just fine. Unfortunately their breeding is worse than cats- a dozen chicks can hatch at once and suddenly you have a chicksplosion with dozens of baby birds hanging out in your meeting area getting mauled by that unchained, overcrowded grizzly bear.

Oh. Bloody un-intuitiveness...

It's easy to swing an axe at somebody in hopes of doing some damage even you've never held an axe before... there's a big sharp end and a handle- the dumbest dorf can figure out which end should be in contact with which party.

Crossbows require loading, aiming, pulling a trigger... all manner of intricate things. And then you run out of ammo and you have to be smart enough to go get more- that means turning your back on the enemy! These are all things a newbie marksdwarf has to deal with... it's really a rough life.

Newbie marksdwarves are extremely bad at figuring out all the above. Especially getting more ammo- after they blow their load of bolts (all of which will probably miss), they tend to just stare at the enemy and catch arrows. If they can path to the enemy they'll choose to use their crossbow as a club- it's much easier than figuring out that tricky loading/aiming/firing thing- and soon you'll have hammerdwarves (with weak hammers) instead of marksdwarves and they'll forever prefer to just beat their opponent to death.

So yeah... training is pretty important for marksdwarves. There are several threads in this forum about setting up a successful archery range & marksdwarf squad.

Maybe I misunderstood- 170 animals in a cage wont affect your FPS.

Or are you saying you had 170 running free, caged them all, and your FPS didn't recover?

Considering with 170 you probably had many of them in pastures, that's probably a result from what I mentioned above. In my experience it's the personal pets and horde of war dogs following the trainer that does the worst to my FPS, not all the animals in pastures.

Are you saying you didn't have a hit from the animals?

I had like 170 animals, caged most of them, and it didn't seem to affect FPS much.

There's your answer. Animals that aren't constantly pathing (especially trying to negotiate the path of your dwarf) aren't as big a hit on your processor. Putting all the animals in cages reduces processor load.

Pastures also seem to help somewhat- even though the animal is out of a cage, it's not trying to cruise around the fort or follow your dwarf. I've never tested the difference between caging and pasturing all at once...

Build the cages containing the crundles right next to your pit (b -> j -> x shows you what's in the cage you're building).

Assign the crundles to the pit (i -> P).

The dwarves should pull the crundles out of their cage and toss them in the pit without a problem.

Some creatures are able to escape your dwarf's grip and run amok so it's best to reduce the chance of this by building the cage right next to the pit.

Final Edit; Oh god, I've lost track of him, and he's no longer in my units screen with U. I have no idea where he went. ;_;

Have you fully explored your cave system? If there's any part undiscovered, he might be hiding it and wont show up on the u screen. It's unlikely (impossible?) he left the map completely.

As for hanging out in water- yeah, they do that. I've left a forgotten crab beastie in the bottom of a cave lake for years and he never bothered anything. However if something catches his eye, he'll probably go after them- coming out of the water to kill whatever he wants. Best to be proactive and send some marksdwarves in to shoot him out his watery hiding spot.

As for poisonous vapors- I don't know any way to prevent them from getting a dwarf (there's no "make leather gas mask" in the job manager ) but typically they just make the dwarf sick and if he's healthy enough he'll pull through and be fine. Best way I've found to counter them is to attack from a distance or kill them fast enough they can't gas your troops.