Bay 12 Games Forum

I can't seem to get Bee Keeping going >.< I have a Hive, as well as natural hive inside my fort at the moment(And they are outside, no roof) I have an artificial hive next to the natural one and nothing is happening o.o No moving of colonies, no combs inside the hive, nothing. What am I doing wrong? D:

Beekeeping, being a new profession based on a recent sponsorship animal is still pretty buggy.

When you build artificial hives a dwarf with the beekeeping labour will go and fetch a wild colony from the map and install it, this works fine.  Once the hive is big enough to split it should be a viable target for collection and installation in an empty hive (this is why you prevent product gathering, to let them split).

Where the bug appears is that if say you embark on a map with 2 natural colonies and immediately build three artificial hives you will have problems.  2 will be installed and then your beekeeper will stand on the spot of the last natural hive with the 'install colony' job and do nothing till he is interrupted by hunger/thirst/sleep.  This repeats pretty much forever.  If you think this is whats happening then dismantle any hives empty of bees and rebuild them.  They should then get that its transfers between artificial hives that are now the thing.

From your description though it almost seems like you dont have a free beekeeper since you have a natural hive still to collect.  It seems to be a pretty low prioritised job so maybe try killing off hauling on the dwarf in question for a bit

Im running a new fort using the Fortress Defense mod.  Currently about 4 years in as best I can tell, things are a blur and I havent seen a caravan from any race in forever.

Everything is an awful mess.  When im not being seiged by 3-4 races at a time my entire 170 dwarf workforce is hammering flatout trying to dispose of body parts.  I have 6 magma smelters that have been running flatout melting objects for a few years now and am beginning to seriously consider paving the map with reclaimed goblinite.  Clothing...dont even get me started on clothing.  Even with a lot of junk loot trimmed in FD im drowning in leather caps and assorted crap and without caravans I cant offload.

Im under seige probably 7 months of the year with enemies in various stages from the surrounding wilds to the trap corridors.  The real bind is that furies arrive right at the end of summer and as fliers dont path to my fort.  If they bring elite bowman squad leaders or even entire bow squads then im reluctant to sally out and meet them outside the fort.  Every time i've done so thus far has resulted in me slamming in Minatorossi or Honey Badgerman ambushes and if I take too long about the whole thing I meet the hellfire imps in mid autumn leaving the dwarven caravan a rare thing.  Thankfully the days of swarms of tigermen, frogmen and blendecs are over as these races already brought leaders and lost them so are barely a nuiscence.

Still.  Im glad the challenge mode enemies have steel because I got no flux.  I managed to get a 50 strong military established.  maybe 10 good crossbows and 10 poor ones.  10 candy clad melee legends, 10 quality melee in steel and 10 militia melee in iron take care of the trap-avoid races.  My axe lord and spear master both broke 60 notable kills in my most recent seige, both are wielding candy artifacts, both made their own weapon under posession.  (my policy of having all militia serve a few months as rookie weaponsmiths making menacing spikes is paying off big time..about 35% of my eligible mood dwarves have weaponsmith highest)

My greatest regret is that I've been forced to neglect my caverns.  With my attention so firmly on the surface the FBs are starting to stack up.  Theres deadly dust and deadly blood in 1 which sounds like a shit party if ever I heard one.  2 has a firebreather and a spitter which would be fine but theres a shaft to 3 which has 2 more with deadly blood and both fly so thats a 4 way pile of fun.  I may have to resort to opening tunnels to a room with puppies and a magma shower which is boring.  I like to get kills on my dwarves

Whoever is being cool at any given moment.

I am the noble who mandates battle axes, the legend who makes them and the lord who decapitates giants with the product.
I reserve the right at any moment to disassociate myself with any of my bearded underlings should they displease me.....they will know, I am not a subtle being.

I have unholy piles of reclaimed goblinite yet my bone decorators cancel with 'no decoratable object'.  I took a quick look and while some is decorated already and some is melt-designated...if weapons were bone decoratable they should have done so but wont.

It should do but I've never checked.  It comes out through the right logs to be regular combat so probably is

There are a good number of cavern critters worth weaponizing if thats your thing.

Cave crocs obviously.  For others you need to look no further than what you would least like to see invading goblins riding.

Jabberer, rutherer, giant cave crawler.  Yer looking for the critters with large body size, those are the ones that when they engage rip off armored limbs when they shake things around with their teeth.

The danger room shouldnt be seriously injuring your dwarves.  The militia ideally should never even notice.  If you have more than 2-3 spears per tile then any civvies passing through are at risk though (even just 1 spear will nail babies and pets).

The most important thing is hoods and cloaks for anyone whos going to be in there.  People say helmet, but a hood will stop a training spear just fine.  The reason you take hood and cloak first is that they are the only armour piece that covers certain weird hit locations like toes and some facial parts.  Note that cloak is the only thing that covers throat which is a frequent source of BS deaths both in danger rooms and out of them.

Mine personally is a 3 tile design I got from these forums.  Armor stand, forbidden door and 1 tile with 10 spears where everyone stands.  If you kitted your military properly you dont have to worry about training spear quality either. (mine are masterwork, sometime the dwarves admire a sublime trap as they beat off its spears)