Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm pretty sure they're a sub-category of furniture. So make a furniture stockpile, forbid all the sub-types, then hunt out the barrels and un-forbid them.

The well should count as a water source. Make sure the well's not forbidden, as mentioned before.

Also make sure that a) it's not freezing (since you said there was open water just a few pixels away, it sounds like it might be outside), and b) there's deep enough water in the well for it to be useable. I think it needs around a depth of 4 to be used? The wiki said at least 3 levels deep is usable, but I had thought I'd seen them become unusable before that. Still, my memory's more faulty than the wiki. :p

(It also says that the well will self-dismantle if the water beneath freezes, so I guess it's probably not that.)

You said it's in a training zone AND pasture, is that maybe messing things up? Training zones are for training things to be war/hunting animals, and the dwarves will take animals there as needed apparently. I don't know what might happen if you have an animal that needs to be tamed that's in a zone that's both, if it might mess with things somehow.

I prefer the arena method myself. Dig out a big room with lockable doors, (b)uild the cages (which are j in the build menu, and use tab to expand the list and pick out the specific goblin cages) in the room. Once they're built, attach all the cages in the room to one lever that's outside the room. Once all the cages are hooked up, station your squad(s) in the room, lock the doors once enough of them are in there, and flip the switch to free the goblins. You get to get rid of goblins and train your squad at the same time!

Before you set them loose though you should get rid of the weapons at least. I just strip them bare since it's easier - d-b-f in an area over the cages to unforbid everything, d-b-d to dump everything. Then look at each cage individually and un-dump the cage before they get taken to the dump, it'll still have your hauler dwarves strip everything from the prisoners and take it to a dump. Where you can then reclaim it. You should be able to just unforbid/dump the weapons themselves from the stocks menu though, but that's more of a pain. It does let the goblins last longer and thus train your squads more though.

For added dwarfiness, I dig out a dining room above the arena, with channeled out quarters of the floor letting the diners see down into the arena. Of course, they don't appreciate this like they should and actually flee and stuff, but that's their problem. Wimps.

Edit: Er, right. It's "x" to expand the list, not tab. Sorry, brain fart.

Well, to train outside an "individual drill" they need orders to train (which the "training" alert has automatically), and you then need to put the military squad(s) on that alert level, yes. If you just have them on inactive all the time, they'll have no specific training/patrolling orders unless you change the inactive alert schedule itself.

Yeah, with the egg layers you not only have the issues of the nest boxes, but you also have to keep in mind that

a) Not all clutches will be fertile, even with a male on the map. (Or rather various things can cause the eggs to not hatch, including the mother getting moved off the eggs for even a microsecond.) So give them a couple months and if they don't hatch, unforbid them.

b) The egg layers only lay eggs every.... month or two? It's not a constant stream of them. When you first catch and tame a wild one and chuck it in a pasture with nest boxes, or when you first trade for egg layers from a caravan, they'll be ready and will pretty much lay eggs right away, so you can be quick and (f)orbid them asap. Likewise, if you wait a couple months for a clutch to hatch and they don't, by the time you unforbid them and they get collected, the mother is ready to lay eggs right away again.

But if for some reason the new batch of eggs gets collected too quickly before you can forbid them, or say if you see the mother get moved off the clutch right after she lays them and decide to let those get collected as well, you then have to wait around for another month or two for her to lay new ones. That isn't too bad with totally tame animals, where you can put doors leading into the pasture/laying zone and just lock them for a while, but for only partly-tamed animals that keep having to be tamed further by trainers, it's a pain. -_-

Is it even possible to keep them tame long enough to breed? My few times trying to tame enemy creatures has led to them becoming untamed, and no longer on the creature list so that my tamers can't re-tame them.