Bay 12 Games Forum

Name: Benjamin Snipes
Appearance: A squat guy with a small paunch, wide shoulders and a perpetual stubble.
Backstory: As a professional shaman, Ben's job is to talk to troublesome ghosts, sort out their issues, and occasionally banish them back into the world of the dead.
As a crooked shaman, most of Ben's money comes from binding the most interesting ghosts and selling their names to the highest bidder.
One of those spirits, desperate to escape slavery, had offered him a way to get fit, resolve his own issues and learn to kick ass all at the same time. When Ben accepted the deal, the spirit told him about the Fight Club.

Body: Medium
Mind: Medium-High
Soul: Medium-Low

Equipment: Tambourine of Summoning, Hallucinogenic Blotter Square

Give them to your baron as a gift, along with a mysterious unmarked lever standing right next to the cages.

Recently, I had 44 elven warriors come to my 30-dwarf-strong fortress, allegedly looking for some place called Mistclunked or something.
I might have tolerated their presence - they did, after all, have more legendary warriors on their side that I had warriors at all - but then I saw them read poetry to my dwarves. Poetry. And my dwarves listened to it.
I was not about to permit free dissemination of hippie art, and direct assault was out of the question. After a bit of consideration, I decided to give them permanent wooden lodgings, where they could recite their poetry in a controlled environment.

Unfortunately, I did not think of confining them first. Building a king-sized cage-in machine for forty-four customers took longer than they had deigned to remain, and so they departed, all forty-three of them. Didn't even bother to say goodbye so I could lock them in one of the trap corridors.

But that's not the weird thing. As you probably noticed from the number discrepancy, one of them had stayed behind. An elite bowelf, she was unwounded and unencumbered(no sentient bone trophies on her, just the wooden "armor" and "weapons"), and yet she moved with the speed of a palsied turtle. Literally. I'm pretty sure turtles move faster than she did.

Unless leaving their stroke victims in dwarven fortresses is the traditional elven method of senicide, I thought, she must have had a special mission. So I had her motives checked by sending her to my artifact vault. She didn't grab any of the things in there, so I concluded - maybe incorrectly - that she wasn't left behind to execute the slowest heist in the world.

Since there could only be one other reason for a suspiciously legendary, suspiciously slow-moving elf to stay behind in my humble deathtrap, I had her vampire-checked by testing the aforementioned king-sized cage-in machine on her and all the other moochers that spent their days distracting my dwarves with fine arts and liberal thinking.
Surprisingly, the test came back negative: she got knocked unconscious and ended up in a cage. Now she is decorating my dining hall, permanently stuck in a state of Socializing.

Now, the strangest thing is that while the other guests I had caged received water and food(as evidenced by the buckets next to their cages), the elf herself did not. While I applaud my dwarves on their surprisingly good judgment in this regard, it's been half a year and she still didn't die.

So, I have an elf that moves like a terminally sober dwarf, decides to stay in a dwarven fortress when all of her buddies have left, has no ulterior motives that I could prove, is not a vampire, and needs no food or water to survive. Anyone have any idea on what she might be and why she decided to stay?

5. Just got through setting it up myself. Wiki guide is unstructured, easy to misread, so I'm laying things out in steps.

1) Make a squad with as many marksdwarves as you want. Make sure they have crossbows assigned to them, not "individual ranged weapons". Make sure you have quivers for them, too.

2) Go to Ammunition, select their squad. It allows for 250 bolts of any material. Change it to 1000-2000 bolts of wood, set for combat and training both. (Or 100-200 bolts per dwarf, if you plan on having fewer than 10 in the squad)

3) Go to Schedules - and here's the tricky part. There are TWO lists of orders in this screen - one is a table with squads on the top and months on the left, and one is below that table, a list that by default has only one order: "Train, 10 minimum". You want the list below to have 10 orders "Train, 1 minimum" instead of one "Train, 10 minimum".
To do that, first delete the default order with x, then press o. New screen appears. Press o until "Train" is selected. Press / to set minimal number to 1. Press enter.
Now you have given the squad one order out of ten. Without switching to any other months, do the same nine more times.

4) Now you have the right orders for one month out of twelve. Copy orders for that month and paste them for the other eleven.

5) Build Archery Targets, set them as barracks andassign them to the squad for training. One target will only be used by one dwarf, so build one for each dwarf you train.

And now they should train, as many as are currently available. If you had one "Train, 1 minimum" order in the bottom list in Schedules, as I'd done at first, you'd have only one dwarf training at any time.

Our cat is provided with ample alternate scratching items, gets yelled at every time he scratches anything and still does it, the cocky bastard. I think he likes the attention.

I saw that in the patch notes also.  Awaiting SCIENCE for confirmation.

Just tested it. Confirmed: the exploit no longer works.

Lots of dwarves die from untreated infections. Not all of them have the Recuperation and Disease Resistance necessary to recover from it, and even with high stats, the dwarf isn't guaranteed to survive. Due to the nature of armor system, wounds such as smashed fingernails and broken fingers are impossible to prevent, so there must be some way to treat them.

The simplest solution is to amputate the infected bodypart. That's how doctors in real life dealt with infected wounds before antibiotics, after all.
Sure, the dwarf will be a cripple, but at least he won't die of something as embarassing as an infected nail. (And your surgeons will finally start to rack up experience at the same rate as suturers and cleaners, he he he.)

UPD: Right now infections don't seem to trigger the "cut it off!" response as they should; that is reserved for rotten flesh. In real world, necrotized tissues are dangerous because they get infected, so I don't see any particular difference between the two.