Bay 12 Games Forum

This thread's full of confusion.

First of all, and most important, if you want hospitals to work, make sure you're playing 0.31.25 (or later, whenever Toady releases the next version).  There were a slew of healthcare bugs in older releases.

If a dwarf requires a crutch, it will say so on the (v)(z)(h)(Treatment) screen.  The same place it says "Diagnosis required", it will also say "Crutch required" or something similar.  If it doesn't say that there, and if the dwarf does not already have a crutch, he's not going to get one.

If you don't have bags of gypsum plaster for making casts, you can get by with splints.  If the Treatment screen says "needs setting", then the bone doctor will put either a cast or a splint on it.

Tables that are built inside the hospital zone can be used for surgeries.  The table should be right next to the patient's bed, so that the patient is taken directly from the bed to the table.  If the transfer takes too long, there's a risk that the doctor will see that the patient in his arms is out of bed, and take him back to the bed, instead of to the table.  Or something like that.

I'm not aware of any bugs regarding tables that are sitting in a workshop or furniture stockpile interfering with healthcare.

Soap is definitely desired for cleaning.  They might clean a patient without soap, but in that case, there's a serious risk of infection.  You want soap ASAP and at all times.  I generally make 4 bars at a time, whenever I see the suppy dropping.  (Dwarves also use it at a well for "clean self" jobs.)

Bags of plaster are stored just like any other object (splints, buckets).  They're already in a bag, so you don't need another bag to contain them.  Building a bag as a hospital coffer is just the same as building a rock coffer.  Also works for nobles' rooms (and since my bags tend to be much more valuable than my rock coffers, it's a great way to boost room value -- although precious metal coffers might be better still).

"Empty food storage item" for booze means a barrel or a rock pot.  You need some.  You can almost never have too many bins, barrels, or rock pots.

Its just that only 1 dwarf can use the well at a time.

I don't think that's correct.  You can fit up to 8 dwarves around a well, one per adjacent tile, if it's got floor all around it.  Maybe only one of them at a time can actually be retrieving water from it, but the others will definitely stand there with the active job, whether they're actively performing it or not.

If the well's only got 1 adjacent floor tile (e.g. you built it at the end of a 1-wide dead-end corridor), then indeed only 1 dwarf at a time can perform a job there.

Once I remake the plant/food system I plan to call underground seeds "spawns" or "spores" and aboveground just "seeds".

I really like that.  (Better than I like "pips".)  Also, if you could somehow manage to force the underground plants and the aboveground plants to group together in the stockpile list, that would be really nice.  As it is now, in order to make an underground seed stockpile, you have to go through the whole list and select these 12... skip a few... these 3... skip some more... these 5... skip more... this one... etc.  That's not as important as labeling them, though.

so if you were to place a dump zone on the next box, place the egg there by dumping it, forbidding then the egg, remove the dump site, and letting it there for a while...will it grow or rot?

Feel free to try it, but I doubt it will work.

Doctors will use supplies from anywhere.  They don't have to be inside the hospital.

I believe barrels of lye still have a stockpile bug.  That is, if they're in a stockpile, they can't be used, but if they're outside of a stockpile, they're fine.  Since food stockpiles accept lye by default, you may need to turn that off.  For existing barrels that are already in a stockpile, you may have to dump them somewhere else outside the stockpile (then reclaim).