Bay 12 Games Forum

I thought soap and the crutches are currently hopelessly bugged?

EDIT: How do I make tallow? The kitchen has that task right? (Currently not at home)

Crutches are bugged.  They will (currently) never be used.  Their only use right now is as a trade good.

Soap is fine if it's in a hospital coffer.  Soap outside of the hospital should be forbidden to prevent job-cancellation spam.  (Build more coffers so the dwarves can move the soap into the hospital.)

Tallow is made by Rendering Fat from some animal.  It's a job that automatically queues itself up in the kitchen whether you want it to or not, any time there is animal fat.

Check that they're actually carrying ammo.  Go to the dwarf using the (v) key, then (i) for inventory, and verify that he has a crossbow and a quiver.  Then (Enter) on the quiver to see its contents and make sure it has bolts.  A dwarf that is equipped with a crossbow and quiver with bolts should fire upon enemies.  If the dwarf isn't carrying bolts, then you'll have to figure out why (which can be challenging...).

You're mixing up fish meat with non-fish meat.  They act very differently.

When your Fisherdwarf catches a fish, it is placed on the ground as a "raw salmon" or "raw turtle" or whatever.  These can't be eaten yet.  They have to be processed by a Fishery, where they become "salmon" or "turtle".  (In the case of a turtle, this also leaves behind a shell.)

When you kill a non-fish animal of some kind, you get a "mountain goat corpse", or if it's been sliced up a bit while it was alive, you might have something like a "mountain goat lower body" or a "mountain goat front left leg".  These corpses and partial corpses can be Butchered, and will then produce "mountain goat meat", "mountain goat bone", "mountain goat skin" and so on.

An item that simply says "turtle" is edible meat, just like "mountain goat meat".  It might be less confusing if the game said "turtle meat", but it doesn't.

Okay... As it turns out, I have a crapton of turtle in barrels. How do I remove it from the barrel?

If it's in a barrel and doesn't say "raw", it's meat.  It's been processed already, and is ready to eat or to cook with other ingredients.

Turtles changed in 0.31.*.  You used to get a shell when you ate one in 40d, but now you get the shell when you process the raw turtle at the fishery.  So, you can safely allow cooking of turtles now.  It won't destroy any shells.

A cage trap would be the most effective method if you have no military at all.

Also, never link the gear directly beneath a windmill to a lever - if it is disengated, everything supported solely by it will collapse.

"Everything supported solely by it" is one of those things which is technically true, but entirely misleading.  If you build a windmill on the surface, by channeling out the single tile in the middle of the 3x3 square that the windmill occupies, you can safely disengage the gearbox directly underneath it.  The windmill will be supported by the 8 tiles of soil/rock that you didn't channel out.

In fact, I just generated a pocket world and verified this.  Built a small underground tunnel, channeled one square above it from the surface, built a gearbox directly under that tile, built a lever, built a windmill over the gearbox, connected the lever to the gearbox, and pulled the lever.  The result: upon (q) the windmill says

Active
Total Power: 20
Total Power Needed: 0
Hanging

It still does the animation, and is definitely still intact.

Pulling the lever a second time restores it to its fully working state.  Total Power Needed becomes 5, and the gearbox does its animation again.

Here's the saved game. (5 MB, 0.31.16)

All that stuff about "build another gearbox next to it" never made any sense at all to me.  In fact, I edited the wiki several weeks ago to attempt to clarify this.  I can only imagine someone was building a windmill poised precariously on top of a gearbox in the middle of the atmosphere.  How and why anyone would do such a thing is beyond me, but this is DF, so I can't rule out the preposterous.

I don't think females can be impregnated by caged males, though.  A cage is a separate universe.

What I try to do is chain one male animal of each milkable species somewhere.  Doesn't matter where.  Then I cage the females close to the farmer's workshop where they'll be milked.  When they're out for milking, they can become impregnated by the chained-up male (distance is irrelevant).