Bay 12 Games Forum

So I can just designate the body for dumping into a magma pit garbage dump, without ever assigning a coffin, and there will be no problems?

Do elves still bring only dead animals if your fort is in a freezing biome?

Smoothing floors unmuddies them. Bizarre, perhaps, but there you have it. So does building constructions on muddied rock. That said, if you want constant 1/7 water across a region, remember that you can set pressure plates to work on specific levels of liquid, and that they work like levers. having a pressure plate interrupting the action of a screw pump works, but then again 1/7 water is tricky because it doesn't move.

To remove stone quickly, catapults are always a wonderfully efficient solution, especially if you want siege operators for defense. If not, try zoning a dump and designating the items for dumping. They'll be forbidden so you'll have to reclaim them later to use them.

You can set the amount of barrels assigned to a particular stockpile and the contents of each stockpile in its menu, so yes it's possible to set the barrels used for each food type. However, the option to reserve barrels via /* on the main stockpile screen is a lot less headache-inducing.

As for thieves, tether one animal on either side of a three-tile hallway and the thieves will always bump into them. It's best not to use your best war animals for this so that if you forget come an ambush/siege it's not a problem. Incidentally, goblins aren't immune to traps, so it might be worthwhile having them try to sneak past several menacing spikes. When you see goblin corpses randomly popping into visibility at your fortress entrance you know it's working.

That was what i meant. I know it sounds mechanical, but i didn't intend it to sound any more functional than the hook/peg leg stereotypical prosthetic, which is itself a step up from nothing. This is the same step up functionally, just less glaringly obvious cosmetically and doesnt require producing a new item or range of items. Then again, anything made of metal and used in lieu of a limb walks a fine line between the few examples we have of medieval prostheses (Gotz von Berlichingen) and increasingly fantastical steampunk.

For training, build catapults. For actual defense, use ballistae if anything.

Catapults basically turn stones into grenades lobbed through the air on the same z-level. As the rocks are flying and aren't therefore considered to be in the same space as ground-based things (I think), they won't hit anything that doesn't take up the entire space like a wall until they reach their destination, at which point they do damage in a small radius. Ballistae shoot prepared bolts in a straight line that will go through anything on the same z-level until they either hit a wall or are destroyed by going through too many things. If you go through the effort of tipping them with steel heads, they tend to be very deadly indeed, especially if you trap your target in a hallway as has been suggested.

That said, you want a set of three masterwork parts firing a masterwork bolt to have any hope of precision (dwarves apparently believe in accuracy through serendipity) so be prepared to go through forests of wood in training and then production. In all, its inefficient but supremely satisfying, especially if you don't want to deal with the death, injury, and subsequent tantrum-fest that a military can engender.

As a final note, if a bolt or stone drops a z-level on impact before hitting a floor, it's saved. This can be of great use in trying to salvage precious, precious masterwork bolts, as well as in making nice compact siege operator training centers by pointing catapults at a wall, channeling away the space directly in front of the wall and building a stairway next to it back up to the catapult.

In an attempt to make the caverns in my latest fort safe for tree farming, I'd like to seal them off completely from the map edges with walls. This raises two questions:

1. Will trees still grow within the sealed areas?
2. Will various monstrosities still spawn within the sealed areas?

You can also drop the ice at least one z-level to melt it, should you ever be without magma.