Bay 12 Games Forum

Marksdwarfs don't shoot through fortifications unless they are standing next to them.  Walling-in the rest of the room to leave only a 1-tile wide space in front of your fortifications will ensure that your dwarfs shoot.

If you want to get into more advanced stuff, you can designate the area next to your fortifications as a burrows and order your marksdwarf squad to defend it.  I did this with a tower in front of the main entrance of my fort, and it served me well.

Worth mentioning that once a Marksdwarf (or, I think, any ranged weapon user) reaches legendary skill, they can fire through fortifications at any distance so long as their target is within range.

I plan in image-editing software with a grid overlay, because I can't draw anything remotely to scale and my annotations are unreadably poor. Otherwise I'd probably be buried in crude, semi-3D sketches of magma chambers and grand banquet halls. My dwarves, of course, would be buried in magma, and the caved-in shell of that hall.

(amusing account of death by greed)

Pretty much exactly the same thing happened to my last Fortress, right down to the goblin siege getting wiped out by the fiery hordes. I actually drafted my last sane civilian and bridge-locked him in the control room, just so the Fun Stuff would have plenty of time to hunt down the little green bastards.

In more recent news, my Militia Commander just scored a chain of five beheadings, and rather fittingly 'doesn't really care about anything anymore'. Besides beheading, presumably.

EDIT: And the elves have a tame Giant Desert Scorpion for me. It's just what I always wanted!

After much painful experimentation, I've achieved some excellent results using regular training (though I'm sure danger rooms are still far more efficient). I embarked with a dwarf with 1 axe / 4 dodge / 4 armor / 1 shield, paired her with a low-skilled migrant from my first wave (0 weapon, 2 in all others) and set them to Train (2 Minimum) all year round. Within a year, they were both Axe Lords, and within 18 months they were both Legendary +5 Axe, with Grand Master Shield User. Then I split them and paired off new migrants to train under them. Once these were Legendary, I split again.... And so on. In the interrim I allowed low-skill dwarves to be paired, until the prior pairing hit Legendary. This allowed them to develop a foundation of skills sufficient to give a high chance of sparring, and a low chance of crappy do-nothing 'training sessions'.

In short, the best advice I can give is only to draft migrants with some degree of military training to begin with (unless you have a total lack of them) and to always use 2-man, always-on training groups. Give them good food and nice rooms (oh, and plenty of invaders to kill), and you should never see them dip below 'quite content' happiness. I can't be sure how much difference stats and traits make, but:

- Agility allows more 'moves' per sparring session, increasing gain rates
- Memory, patience, focus and linguist seem to have a positive effect on learning, though possibly only from 'training sessions'
- Dwarves with 'organizer' type traits (loves to take charge) and/or 'cautious' traits seem less likely to engage in sparring, in spite of it never causing injury.

Also, don't use training weapons - you can give two newbs masterwork adamantine axes and they still won't ever scratch one another.

It depends, for me. Sometimes I'll try and take things from a 'dwarven' perspective: imagine their societal quirks, and build things from an immersive rather than detached omniscient perspective; but sometimes I really couldn't care less whether Urist McHauler likes moss opals and fluffy wamblers - all I know is that I'm out of migrant slots, I still don't have a decent metalcrafter, and he and his slacker buddies have an appointment with the cleansing chamber.

Magmafalls kill dwarf with lava mist.

I wish they did; it'd be much faster than starving my dozens of legendary sock-elasticators.

Interesting idea with making them burn themselves, though. Certainly warrants some !!SCIENCE!!, but it's 4.a.m. here so those brave new frontiers of sadism will have to wait until tomorrow.

My current housing looks like this, with four identical floors. It's actually kind of a tester for a design I plan to use in a cast-obsidian structure, but I think it looks pretty good in marble:


Very low travel distance, minimal room overlap, decent floorspace and most of them are either 'Grand' or 'Royal', depending on number of masterwork engravings and the occasional gem cluster.

I haven't really played with the agrarian aspect of the game up to this point, so help me out here

I've begun to process rock nuts at a windmill powered millstone, and have built the necessary screw press to mash the resulting rock nut cakes into oil. My question is that the order to "Press liquid from paste" is blotted out in red for the screw press, meaning it cannot be done; so, what exactly else to I need?

If you're playing 31.19 (it's possible that the problem still exists in 31.20, but I haven't tried yet) you need to remove your rock nut paste from its stockpile, by undesignating the stockpile that it's on and forbidding it from your remaining food stockpiles. There was, or is, a bug that won't recognize certain items as being present for use when they're stockpiled.