Bay 12 Games Forum

Dig out a room preferably near your cage stockpile, make sure there's room for a small corridor above it.
Access to that room can be from above via stairs or a door from the side (from above is better). After digging out the room and the corridor channel away the floor at the end of the corridor. Build a hatch cover over the resulting open space. From (i) zones menu make a one tile zone on the hatch cover. Make it a (p)it. In the zones menu again set (P)it properties, assign whoever you want (preferably one at a time) to the pit. Place upright spikes or station your militia in the room below at your leisure. If you want add a raising draw bridge linked to a lever to crush the remains of the prisoners.
You can also channel away a deeper drop if you still have room below so the prisoners break some bones on the landing, or make it really deep and have them explode on impact.
Fill the room with water or magma... the possibilities are endless.

To elaborate: (v)iew dwarf -> select (z) for status -> (k)ills (if there is no kills option the dwarf has no kills)
for held weapons (v)iew dwarf -> (i)nventory -> scroll to weapon with +-*/ (enter) -> (v) to view it's description.
I think if the weapon is {forbidden} in the inventory list it means the dwarf became attached to it. There's also a message whenever that happens.

The pop cap never stopped the king/queen from arriving for me. I normally get to like 210 dwarfs then the migrants stop, but when the king comes i end up with 220ish dwarfs.
About the children I'm not sure. It might be that they're only affected by the child cap.

You can't get the king without getting a baron first, from my understanding. So if you abort you'll never be a mountainhome. Select a useless dwarf who doesn't have bad social treats, and only likes common items (like iron, donkeys, etc). Build some nice rooms big enough to hold all the furniture he'll need and build him a pump in his mausoleum he'll manually operate so he doesn't wander off and gets jealous at the commoners royal bedrooms.

This seems to happen if a body part sustains more than one fracture. The only way i had a dwarf recover once was digging away the ground beneath him and make him drop one z-level. If the dwarf is in full armor he might need two z-levels tho. That dwarf broke his leg again in the drop (and an arm and a hand) but was patched up and made the recovery.

Floodgates can be building destroyed. I've had a forgotten beast do that to my cave lake floodgate. Had to plug the resulting leak with a cavein as the draining was killing my fps.

The best solution i found is a channeled out trench filled with 3/7 water. The blood will stay in the water where it can't contaminate dwarfs. You can then wait for a dwarf to clean the mess or run dfcleanmap. Watch the filling of the trench closely so you don't get the water higher than 3/7.
A 3x1 trench (should have up ramps at every tile) in front of the doors to the meeting hall is usually enough. Adding more at the fort entrance and at the entrances to the caverns won't hurt tho.

So i was tasked to kill a hydra. Again. Since the last hydra died rather easily i went off with my 19 companions only to find out that its lair is apparently deep in goblin territory. I get ambushed every two map tiles by about 20 goblins. They are weak but still they bring down the number of my followers slowly but steadily. How hosed am I?