Bay 12 Games Forum

If you set your dwarves to wear boots over clothing, they won't put on anything at all, because shoes on their feet don't leave any space for boots. I'm pretty sure what the OP is seeing is dwarves who put two socks on one of their feet and have no more place for the second boot there.

Did you try turtling up in a small burrow with your first-year ~20 dwarves, after turning off migrants? Maybe they'll leave when the first siege gets bored and leaves, or you'll just win some time to think about the problem and see what you can do

Usually use leather shields due to my (usual) leather industry and wildlife wiping ways on my melee.  My marksdwarves almost exclusively work from behind fortifications so I never really thought to bother.  I'd figured you'd tried.

Well, actually, the 'archer' uniform has leather shields/bucklers on it, so apparently I do when I use markdwarves. 
... I've never seen them block shitola with it, though.  Either it misses, or the expert bowgobs nail 'em in the spleen.  I think the Crossbow is a 2-handed weapon, thus it doesn't come into play.

No, all ranged weapons are surprisingly one-handed. At least, one-handed dwarves can fire them okay. I've always given shields to my marksdwarves but to think of it now I've never paid attention to whether they actually block things or not. I've always assumed they can do that but they're just bad at it because they don't spar and never get their chance to train blocking. Does anyone here have a clear confimation of a marksdwarf blocking an attack in combat with his shield?

I think killing them is still the best option, except you would want to be more careful now and use more dwarves and more crossbows. Weaponmasters would be the toughest, I'd recommend digging a ditch around them before shooting them.

It's a future 'Tower'. Necromancers have to have a large enough horde to begin construction on a tower, but in the meantime their base is whatever they've taken over.

I believe it's possible for them to take over things other than towns, but it's very rarely seen.

You may not have that tough a time of it. I embarked next to some necromancers and got only one siege before capturing two of them. Haven't seen any undead since, am considering releasing one to see if I start getting undead sieges again.

Yes, sometimes they take over whatever is called "Mountain Halls" and then that's what you get in the neighbour list. In this particular case, though, having a necro town neighbour barely matters, because he's got a real Tower there as well. Besides, it would be interesting to see if necromancers from two different towers would fight each other.

I need to move some magma near to the surface.  I have only 8 dwarfs, and no power.  I can't get power because there is a total lack of subterranean water, and I dare not open holes to the surface for windmills because millions of zombies.  (Actually it's not millions, I'm down to only 144 of them before my corpse crusher was broken by an oversized zombie.)  I'm pretty bad at controlled cave-ins, so a magma piston isn't really viable.  I'm thinking minecarts may be my best solution.

I need to know,

• Can impulse ramps provide enough force to raise an iron minecart full of magma?
• How many impulse ramps would I need per z-level of elevation?
• Is a dwarf's Push sufficient to make the first derail happen, on level ground?
• Do the impulse ramps need adjacent walls, like the climbing ramps do?

First of all impulse ramps are insanely powerfull and cannot be switched off, therefore they're very dangerous, moreso with magma. 5 or so of them would probably send carts flying and make them tumble and shoot magma on contact with an obstacle. Now to the topic:
1. yes, most likely it'll raise the cart several levels. You know, DF doesn't really honor energy conservation, so the energy acquired by going a z-level down if sufficient to climb several levels up.
2. I suppose it would be in the range between 0.2-0.4, though more testing is required.
3. Yes, that's how you start the things
4. Yes they do and the wall needs to be put in place before the ramp iirc.


EDIT: ugh, having reread your post I think now that you're better just making your dwarves haul some minecarts of magma to the surface. Assuming you want to power workshops, you only need two of them per workshop. Dwarves will haul the minecarts manually between two stops if they're not connected by tracks. Minecart helix with impulse ramps would be a far too long project for 8 dwarves to build.

Sieges may take several seasons, though I don't know if undead ones are longer or shorter than goblins'. Surely longer than whatever time your dwarves need to die anyway.
If you don't have enough butcherable animals and a food source inside, go dig to the caverns and hunt some wildlife/gather some plants there. Caverns most likely have water, and starvation takes twice as long as dehydration, so you'll win some time to make weapons and quivers for your military. There might be nasty creatures down there, but certainly much easier than a zombie horde (especially with a necromancer). Unless a particularly deadly FB comes up, caverns will save your fort.