Bay 12 Games Forum

I set up a ballista based defense system for my fortress but I noticed that the operators run away in fear when they see enemies. How do I make them stop this? I tried [Nofear] modding and also tried to assign the dwarves to squads but no success.

After I saw the thread with the experimenting of the student and teacher skills, I thought, why can't we make schools in dwarf fortress? You could designate a chair or something to be a school and you can assign dwarves and a teacher to that school, and also the skill to teach in there. You could teach social skills that are normally hard to increase, or if your teacher is good enough, you could also teach labor skill but not fighting. You could thus increase the dwarves teaching and student skills and thus also have them train faster through demonstrations when assigned to a barracks. This would help to train dwarves faster or those who tend to put the "useless" skills to nearly every dwarf such as masonry, carpentry and plant gathering or wood cutting, you could increase their skill easily without needing to create, for example, 20 masons workshops and have them all produce crap for 3 years in succession to get your dwarves not to be that bad at doing their job.

Try it out. Just embark and place a water source zone on the river. If the numbers in the brackets in the water source are more than 0, the water is drinkable. For example; Water source (13) = drinkable, water source (0) not.

Overclock and never suffer an FPS death anymore.

How exactly did you station your marksdwarves? When I use the move to command in the squads screen they automatically go back and get some arrows. Also if you use burrows so that you just open the burrow and select "assign civilians to burrow" to make your marksdwarves guard that area, you are doing it wrong. To restrict civilians to a burrow, go to the (m)Military screen where you select (a)Alerts and create a new alert. There you select "burrow restrictions" to the burrow you would like to restrict your CIVILIANS. Whenever you get attacked you just open the military alert screen and hit enter on the alert you just created and civilians will run to the burrow. If you want your military to defend burrows or just act differently during the alert, you got to edit their Schedule and edit what they do every month during when the alert is toggled for the squad, for example, defend burrows. To use your new created alert for your military, you got to open the squads screen and where there is "Active/training" and "Inactive" you should be able to toggle that field until you see your new alerts name.
So simple; setting alert for military is done from squads screen and setting alert for civilians is done in the military -> alerts screen

Let me guess: you're setting down the plans for the entire stack, right?

The game uses designated pumps as existing support for placing new designations, which is nice so that you don't have to wait for one level to be built before setting up the next. However, this also means that if you make the planned line too long, the pumps that are already built run the risk of falling apart if the whole planned stack isn't completed.

The solution? Either plan shorter stacks, or what I like to do, provide support at the top with a stable gear assembly and go from the top all the way to the bottom. Dwarves build things in a last-in-first-out order, so if the last pump you designate is the ground floor pump, that'll be the first one, and they'll go from there. I learned this the same way I imagine you are, by planning a very tall pump stack (30+ z-levels) and having the pumps already build collapse before the stack is completed.

Woah, thanks for the info! Its not too annoying to have them deconstruct but the fact that the parts go behind the channel where the dwarves cant access and the parts are wasted because I can't be arsed to retrieve them

Also I've got a problem: how the heck does one get the power for the pump stack? Any possible windmill farm designs? Im really bad at using machinery.