Bay 12 Games Forum

I started out next to the ocean. Beaches are covered in drift wood but I don't seem to be able to collect any. I tried 'reclaiming' the logs, designating them with both the chop down trees and gather plants functions -- to no avail, and I tried designating a wood stockpile to see if any would show up, but nada.

Any ideas?

I followed the advice of another user who said to fill the opening passageway to your fort with cage traps early on.
So I caught a fox and it I saw on a video a guy caught some goblins in his fort. People have mentioned you can do things with these animals like tame them, put them in an arena, drop them in pits, whatever.
I can't figure out how to get them out of the cage.... >_>

I've been playing around with creating underground tunnels of water between two still ponds that would freeze over in winter. But so far all I've managed to do is flood my fortress. Actually one time I did do it successfully. I dug channel after channel and found this one section of pond (which apparently was connected to a river) that was just a single square that wasn't frozen over and by connecting that square with some channels about 2 or 3 levels below my fortress, I was able to build a well on the level above it and it kept my dwarves quite well watered.
Until spring came and the ice melted and suddenly a raging torrent of flood waters forced its way up through the channels into my fortress, across the tunnels to my main wing and then flew down the staircases flooding every level and covering every food store and what have you.

>_>

So how do you do it? And please note, I haven't built, nor know how to use (or how one works) a pump yet.


EDIT: Also this just occured to me and I don't want to spam more topics so I'll include it here. What do you do with a cage that is full? If a cage has an animal or monster in it, how to do you use it for food, free it, or kill it? Specifically, if I want to train a non-exotic animal into a war animal, does it just stay in the cage and then you go to the kennel to designated taming or training?

Tutorials and the wiki say that in order to farm, you will need muddy ground and or soil. I finally figured out how to effectively irrigate if you have a still pond or any small body of water not connected to a river or being constantly being fueled by a major water source to get mud. However, when I do finally get to the planting, whether or not I am using a muddy ground or soil (I got this message even before learning to irrigate properly), I get this error message that my grower won't fertilize a particular plot, primarily because of a potash poverty.

In other words, shit won't plant. Potash needed.

But in the tutorials I've been reading/watching, that doesn't ever seem to be an issue. But when you're first starting out and need to get food quickly, even just doing bare essential farming (read: plump helmets), lack of materials, especially ones that require several other workshops and job specifications just to create, are detrimental. What do I do?

tl;dr: farm need potash. what i do wrong?

Move the whole bin to the trade depot, but when you select the items for trade (from you list of goods on the right) select the individual items to trade, not the whole bin. Don't select the rope. Added bonus: you don't trade away your bins so you don't have to keep making more.

How do you select the individual items? I see the bin and that value/weight of it. But when I view the contents it doesn't let me select them individually.

I don't know about restrictive profiles for the workshop. (Okay just checked the workshop and every one is permitted, every rank from dabbling up til Legendary.)
Nothing is suspended.
I haven't activated any burrows, never used them before (still very new). So the carpenter should be allowed in.

I have a lot of wood, two stockpiles, one about 6 spaces west of the workshop and a smaller stockpile about two spaces east of the workshop. both are full at the moment.
No walls or anything in progress.

Not sure about work orders. Going to check up on that right now.

Ah,   /   is remove. See I was pressing "/" AND "SHIFT+8" to raise a barrel. Didn't realize "/" was actually remove.
Thanks a bunch.