Bay 12 Games Forum

You should have a legendary+ engraver engrave masterwork pictures of your most valuable legendary items along with gold bars and dwarven children and kittens right behind your most deadly traps. That way, even if invaders survive the traps, they slam their head into the wall and fall unconscious into the traps. And then the roadrunner pops back out of the engraving, goes meep meep and runs off.

I've had some luck just waiting for nightfall and the freezing of the water. I don't really understand why the water freezes every night, even in tropical regions, but it seems to work every time I try it. You can't swift travel, but fifteen minutes or so of walking will get you over small channels easily. I never had an issue with the ice melting during the day, but again, I really don't understand why.

Unless the respective stockpiles (bar/block for blocks, furniture for bags, cloth for cloth) are full, I'm not sure what could be going on here.

Have you tried pitting them into this kill room from above?

I can't know for sure whether or not this is really what is happening in your game, but when you drop a large chunk of rock into magma, it displaces any magma that was below it, sending magma blasting upwards. http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Cave_in

I don't know if you've gotten to the part where it introduces dwarf therapist yet or not, but you can check what the miners' current jobs are pretty easily with that. Alternatively, you can either try to locate them on the map, then use (v)iew to see what their current job is, and then even switch to inventory list in view to see if your dwarves still have their picks.

If you can't find them, you can search for them on (j)ob list and then zoom to their location.

Some other possibilities I can think of as to why they don't seem to be mining:
1. They are still mining in a previously designated area.
2. They had their job switched to tree chopping, which automatically disables mining since it requires a different weapon.
3. They are on an extended break, possibly including eating, sleeping, drinking, and even taking their break. It's been known to happen, usually when you least want it too. It's not horribly likely that 2 or more dwarves would do this at the same time, but it could happen.
4. They got injured/killed somewhere. I hope not.

Yep, you'll definitely need more picks if you want to assign more miners. However, the miners you have that already had picks should be digging unless they're busy doing something else.

You know, I think that's the same thing I read to get started. There's a bit of difference between the current version of DF and the one that that uses (unless it's been updated recently), but it's pretty good for getting the basics down. The military interface, burrows, and the need for mud for underground farming are the two major differences I can think of, but I'm sure there's more. It's been awhile.

You should be able to make more picks if you have a forge and one of several types of metal smelted (copper, iron, silver, ect).

I think the option you are looking for is "wear over clothing" vs "replace clothing". I don't really see the point of the wear over clothing option, though I can't say I fully understand what this option does. I don't think normal clothing has any real armor value, that's assuming the game does a check to see if it pierces the clothing at all.

Then again, I usually don't have my military dwarves doing much of anything else besides training, eating, drinking and sleeping. Armor might slow them down a bit if you had them hauling stuff around, but I don't know why you'd make them do that.