Bay 12 Games Forum

An untested idea I just had is you could forbid all of the stone in your fort except the stone you need to use. This might reduce the number of objects scanned when selecting a stone.

According to the wiki, most if not all humanoids cannot be butchered by any means.

It also mentions a NOT BUTCHERABLE flag in the object raws, but I couldn't find anything like that for any creatures...

Your experience seems to prove the first statement. I was hoping to find a way to mod the game for you, but it eludes me.

One thing that bugs me tho is the goddamn animals. I made a point of not taking any single animal with the expeditionary team (no dogs or cats, my mistake), but the last wave of migrants brought along a shitload of tame donkeys, cows and bulls. Now I have all of them running around the fortress, shitting in the dining room and making a mess in the already overcrowded statue garden.
The problem, as far as I can figure,  is that all these animals are tamed and have an owner, so I can't order Leatherface the butcher to make chops out of them. For some reason, I also can't get to put them in cages (maybe cause they have an owner?). So I basically dont know what to do!

Have you tried butchering them and/or putting them in cages or are you just assuming you can't? The dining room of my last fort was also crowded with animals (and animal babies, about 100 total animals). As soon as I made a little ranch with rows of cages and started assigning animals to the cages, my dining room became empty.

If pets can't be assigned to cages (I haven't tested this, but I doubt it), they won't be in your dining room anyway because they'll be following their owner as they do their jobs.

I would very very much like to be able to somehow make leather out of this animal crowd, because my Mechanic-Trapper-Weaponsmith barricaded himself in the metalsmith workshop and is yelling that he wants tanned hides, and i dont have any tanned hides nor (i think) any means to get any since i only do farming and fishing and never did any hunting

DON'T just kill the animals with magma or other methods. This will create unhappy thoughts in an owner just as quickly as butchering. Go ahead and slaughter those animals.

Also, start requesting items from traders that can be used in moods. I always get a variety of leather, cloth, metals, and gems from traders ASAP even if I won't use them, just for moods.

One second noobish thing I wanted to ask you is regarding ore and stone. (Mind you, I have had a very hard time figuring out how the whole ore and smelting thing works...)
however the thing is, when I first arrived at my soon-to-be fortress, I started digging up Gneiss and Granite. Digging and digging I found stuff like microcline and other colored stone/ore (I use a tileset, cant remember which one).
Now, if I build things out of stone, for example at the mason's workshop, am I not supposed to be able to build stuff from the colored stone (like microcline), and thus building colored thrones, colored coffins and so on? Because when I try to build stone things I only get Gneiss and Granite, even tho I have tons and tons of colored stone laying around.

If you're using the version of DF from the tutorals, you should have Mike's Mayday tileset, which comes with the economic stone mod. Go into the Z menu, select stones, and turn microcline, orthoclase, etc green and put those stones near the workshop.

If you want to be able to trade during a siege, set up an airlock with two drawbridges. Just stick the trade depot between them.

Charcoal burns longer than booze.

And flaming booze doesn't hurt anyone, reportedly. I've never tested it myself.

Well, sure, if you want the trap to be effective then by all means use charcoal. Booze may not do much (any?) damage, but I hear it explodes, which is way cooler. And that's the whole point isn't it? And there are much easier ways to make effective defenses than teleporting combusting prisoners.

Actually I think the best solution is to use both booze and charcoal

I'm using Mayday's tileset

dark spot (same as some oceans) = Underground River
light blue spot = Underground Pool
dark spot (same as red sand) = Magma Pipe
light red spot = Magma Pool
# (identical) = Chasm
○ (vary similar, but sort of 3D) = Bottomless Pit
dots = Other features

I think he's planning on using a cage trap near a pressure plate with a charcoal stockpile surrounding the two such that when the pressure plate is activated a cage containing a goblin captured by that cage trap will drop into the magma which will return the goblin to the location of the original cage trap albeit on fire who will then light the charcoal that will cause a chain reaction on all the other charcoal present that will then proceed to incinerate any passing goblins.

That's what I thought of when Shurikane said booby trap. And something else, too.

Replace the charcoal with booze and you're onto something...