Bay 12 Games Forum

1) use a water lock... i set up a 7 x 7 room to flood with a 3x3 water chamber from a suitable river or pond... i like squares. risk of fun if you are not used to controlled flooding yet.

2) Z = 0 is above ground. on Z = -1, dig a room, and channel to the layer below (Z = -2). Designate the channel as a pond, muddying Z = -2. needs buckets and time consuming, but safe unless there are zombie carp or suchlike.

also, having them indoors is a good idea, as dorfs happily ignore refuse outdoors unleess you go into the orders menu and tell them to gather it...

steal them. keep salavge vettes on evasive, and suggest having them supported by repair corvettes for obvious reasons

mine work with the following set up perfectly:

1) designate a barracks for them. mine is in the same room as some archery targets, using a weapon rack. somewhere to sleep is also a good idea.

2) designate some archery targets for them, and assign them the relevant equipment.

3) ensure thay are set to active/training in the alerts menu, and that the minimum soldier requirement under the train order is not set to 10. 6 works well for me.

4) in the ammunition tab, equip them with wood bolts for training - with big green T. dont put a C by it or any other bolts. ONLY put a C by the metal ones when you want them to use them. any letter by them will let them be used.

you might also want to make sure the squad leader has some combat skills to begin with, so there is somthing that can be learnt by the rest of the squad. my marksdwarves are happiny performing dodging classes, shield classes, crossbow classes and practice firing. the biggest mistake is not giving them a barracks AND some firing targets. they need both to train all skill areas.

make sure under alerts they are set to active/training or they just sort of mope about. this is a facealm that i have made many times before noticing it...

whale milk.

no.

mermaid milk.

of course the issue there is in having a storage mechanism, which might use such an obscene amout of energy you might as well just use that energy directly in the form of a weapon...