Bay 12 Games Forum

Here's what I noticed in my fort:

They would claim items dropped by a siege.  They were forbidden on death, And I thought that should have stopped them from claiming things.  Usually happened close to my fort, so proximity might play a factor.  there were a few things on the edge of the map, but I didn't notice until after I sent dwarfs out there to recover items.

I had phantom cave spider silk everywhere, so I made some clothes for my military to wear under their armor.  Dwarfs claimed a good chuck of the clothing for themselves, but they never put it on.

If a dwarf had 2 cabinets, they would an item from one cabinet to another, rather than collecting all their items.  Forbidding the item they were moving fixed it.  Probably caused by items being put on top of the cabinet instead of in them.  However, one I did see an item in a cabinet once, viewable with "t" instead of "k".  I didn't think much of it at the time and haven't been able to reproduce it.



P.S.   Is there a some utility like dfhack that can un-claim items?  I'd like some of those masterwork clothes back...
 

I have a mangled wooden bucket, it's showing wear in the same way clothes do (XX), and is described as such in the description.  Any idea what would have caused that or do wooden items also wear out over time?

Temperature can damage things.  Definitely fire, but extreme heat or cold can also cause damage.   High heat can cause damage before it ignites something, or it could have caught fire but been put out by water before it was destroyed. 

The problem might be that the item that was selected to build the stairs is in the cavern itself.  The stairs at bottom have a path to parts of the cavern, so anything in there can be used to build it.  But since the dwarfs can't get to it, they can't build the stairs. 

You didn't happen to dump the body down a convenient deep hole, did you?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Plenty of water and earth down there...

Almost, I threw it down a 2 story hole, filled with burning graphite blocks, along with soon to be burning elf junk that their caravan brought.

I always make my beds out of tower cap.  Logs are cheap enough, I usually bring enough with me on embark to last until I can get more.  Started in 40d when tower cap was the only underground wood, and just kinda kept with it.   Also, if nether-cap is available, that's the only thing I make barrels out of.



Anything that doesn't use materials on a 1 to 1 ratio uses (x/4)+1 rounded down, and I always try to maximize that.  It works out as the first one being able to do up to 3, and each one after that can do up to 4, so I try to make it so the total is 4x-1.  Roads tend to be 3*9, farms are usually 3*5 or 7*5 (for fertilizer), and I even make long axles in 7 tile segments (3.5 tiles per log vs 3.33 for 10 length segments) 

I've noticed the first problem a couple of times.  I've also notice my marksdwarves shooting though fortifications without being right next to them, although there was no path to them at the time (built floor out of wrong material, had it deconstructed at the time)  Did your fortifications have roofs over them?  Mine didn't, I'm wondering if that's the problem.

I decided to mix things up a bit and built an incinerator instead of an atom smasher.  Just a hollow shaft up to dump things in.  It had a graphite block road on the bottom, connected by a granite door, and a ramp leading up to dump things in.  I added a little bit of magma with DFhack to start the fire.  The idea was to dump everything in there, when the fire burned out I could go in and salvage anything that didn't burn, mostly metal that could be melted down.

The problem?  Fire safe does not mean fire proof.  I didn't realize that fire, unlike magma, will heat up adjacent tiles.  Or that fire burns hot enough to melt some types of stone, like the granite door I used.  Also, I didn't realize that when going though the stocks screen, I had unforbidden some of the items dumped.  Sure enough, some dwarf came by to pick something up, walking right into the fire.  He got about 10 tiles away before he started bleeding from his melted-off fat, and bleed out after another 10 tiles.

P.S.   Granite melts at 11440 degrees, and according to DFhack, fire is 11612 degrees.  It also melted (and came close to boiling) some zinc cages I had thrown in.   As for the creatures inside those cages...  well, they were no worse off then the creatures from the wooden cages.

You could also turn off cave-ins for a while.  That should speed up the sealing process, and when its done you can re-enable cave-ins.