Bay 12 Games Forum

do "[" and "]" work?

4 of my original 7 dwarves became legendary wrestlers when my attempts to settle in and seal off the caverns were interrupted by a herd of Crawling Eyes.  They have no attacks whatsoever but dwarves nonetheless hate and fear them and fled when they came by.  Having no weapons, I ordered my militia to attack barehanded and a slow battle was fought for several weeks until my dwarves gained enough wrestling skills to tear their bodies apart.

Attacking large defenseless creatures with non-piercing weapons is a quick route to hilarity and massive skill gains.  I hope the undead don't gain skills while animated though, since otherwise those Owlmen would become vicious unstoppable killing machines.

Given that you died anyways however, that's not too much of a concern.

Watching the combat reports of a fight between a Mule Corpse and a goblin, the Mule did the most damaged by biting onto the goblins arm and shaking it violently until it was torn off.

Dwarf Fortress in general exaggerates the occurrance of biting probably due to the reason Grim Portent gave.

And besides, I want invaders too!

Caveins are calculated based on whether there is a continuous path of connection to the rest of the world.  Any Wall or Floor that is adjacent (but not diagonal) to any other Wall or Floor will be connected to it.  Digging out a section of wall breaks the connection to the layer below.

To let loose a chunk of cavern ceiling:
-Dig out a room on the level above the chunk of solid rock wall you want to drop
-Dig up/down stairs all around the perimeter of the chunk on this layer and the one below.
-Channel out the staircases on the Lower level
-Channel out the staircases on the Upper level EXCEPT for one last tile (don't want a premature drop)
-Once the whole chunk of rock is receiving its only support from the remaining staircase, wait for you miners to leave and then designate that to be channeled out as well.
-Watch the fun and mind the dust!

A necromancer isn't necessary in a reanimating biome, but the setup that you would use for this in a more normal fort would in fact work.  It would even be simpler since you don't have to deal with necromancer containment and control.

Kill something and then drop a reanimating body part into a room with fortifications and you now have a live-fire target.  The most straightforward thing I think would be to butcher a spare dog and dump the raw hide.

That is an amazingly prolific silk farm!  How did you even get enough dwarfpower to harvest all that thread?

For my fortress, I'm planning on setting up a live-fire training ground for my marksdwarves using reanimation for fun and profit.  Firing at a live enemy gives about 5x the experience that an archery target does, but either requires the use of cage-traps (which you have declined to use) or a massive engineering project (which probably wouldn't be worthwhile).