Bay 12 Games Forum

If you are in desperate need of bad weapons and can't smelt, make rock short swords.

Only works if you have obsidian specifically.  No other rock will do.

I'll take my pick o' the litter when I get a turn.

By the look of it, this fortress won't last long.

You'd be surprised -- "Play now!" forts are actually quite salvageable, though they'll present some issues early as its unlikely you'll have all the tools you normally would.  In my case, Barrels were sorely missed, but starting the rock pot industry earlier solved booze shortage issues.  this site may not have wood right now, but it's got deep soil for farming and eventually tree farming.  The only thing I'd be particularly worried about is what metals are available down below.

Loose stone is the appearance-bane of a fortress.  This can be solved by any Quantum Stockpile solution: dump, undump, minecart, take your pick.

After that, stone is a useful, if plentiful resource for any fortress.  Raw stone can be put to use for...
1) All your furniture needs except beds. Doors, Cabinets and Coffers for every dwarf's needs, weapon racks and armor stands for nobles/barracks assignment, and coffins for burial.  Not to mention incidental but important furniture like Grates, Hatch Covers, and Floodgates.
2) Rock Pots, which hold food and booze further reducing your reliance on wood (which, while renewable, can be dangerous to get if you don't have a soil layer to dedicate to tree farming) by supplanting barrels
3) Rock Crafts.  Though low value compared to, say, spikeballs and other trap components, Rock Crafts will clear the stone from your fort decently quickly and are valuable enough (especially at high quality -- a good use for mood-generated legendaries!) to buy up caravans.  This includes mugs, instruments, and other "vendor trash"
4) Mechanisms.  This is another thing colorful stone is great for: any good fortress wants at least a few lever-controlled machines, and color coding them is a good idea.  "plain" mechanisms are essential for linkage, and anything for which color coding is not mission critical.  It may seem like you don't need many mechanisms, but trust me: you need more.  Traction Benches are 1 mechanism each, and a drawbridge you can raise/retract costs 3 mechanisms, and it only goes up from there.  Want a simple, 4-tile danger-room (or 4 tiles worth of invader-perforator)?  You'll need 9 mechanisms for that: 2 per tile and one for the lever.  A long hallway of normal traps is a little cheaper at 1 mechanism per tile, but you'll also have to build a lot.  Don't forget clusters of cage traps if you want to snag local wildlife/GCS/a dragon: they're a mechanism each too.  A decently defended fortress with only a few machines can still consume a hundred mechanisms.  And why not set them on repeat?  they're decently valuable if you do find you have too many.
5) Rock Blocks.  Rock Blocks are just plain better than raw stone for constructions: not only do you get four times as many (and trust me, as swarmed with stone as you think you are, trying to build a pyramid or castle will prove you're actually short -- especially if you care about color!), but the blocks are faster to haul, result in constructions being assembled faster, and give you smooth constructions if you care about that.

In my average fort, I quantum-pile then reclaim all stone I mine out from future rooms near the masons, with the old 1-tile dump method.  Ore gets yanked out later, when I set up my metal industry, as does Flux if and when I start making steel.  If I find myself in possession of stone I want to use for very particular purposes (usually colorful block/mechanism stone: Cinnibar, Pitchblende, Cobaltite, Rutile, sometimes even Microcline... but if it's rare enough in my embark, I might make a special pile for magma-safe stones.), I make a custom stockpile for it and set it as economic until I have a job order that requires it.  All the lousy gray and brown stone just sits there until the masons or craftsdwarves grab it.  In the end, I never feel like I have enough these days, and often start a "Quarry" layer or two to acquire more, at least once I start above-ground building.

prefstring covers every likeable animal, if not literally every one.  finding '[PREFSTRING' and replacing with '[PET][TRAINABLE][PREFSTRING' should get the desired results.

Should.

I've been tinkering with dragons as well... Made them Intelligent, flying, and trap-avoiding and gave them "Dragonscale" instead of regular scale, which had raws largely copied from Slade.  In the Arena, a few hundred hyper-skilled and fully equipped axedwarves with iron armor kits and candy axes were able to subdue one such dragon, putting out its eyes and knocking out its teeth, but even with all of them wailing on it, the worst they could do to the overall dragon was dent the scale.  They fought that thing as long as I let them, seldom losing a dwarf once the dragon was in pummeling-land but also making no perceivable progress...

they still died in worldgen like any other megabeast, though... I think they need to be bigger younger in order to have better worldgen survival.

Blunt Weapons: Silver -- even if it's not particularly distinct from other metals (sans candy), that does mean its no worse, and silver doesn't compete with...
Edged or Pointy Weapons: Steel (or Cotton Candy)
Crossbows: Depends on who's wielding it.  Since they're blunt in combat, Silver is a good choice for army marksdwarves.  For fortress guard, the wiki suggests that bone, light wood, or candy will reduce beating severity, though there have been some disagreements on this of late.

I just collapsed a 10z tall 2x2 column into a spire and the entire clown car teleported into a single tile of solid obsidian at the top of the spire while I recieved the screams ect. message even though nothing extra was revealed. They seem to be safely stuck in there without any FPS hit. The solid tile they are in is surrounded on all side by more solid tiles. I'm not sure if they would be able to move out to an adjecent open tile if I mined out around them - probably not.

Like flies stuck in amber, it seems...

I'm all for smoothing and engraving this obelisk.  Hopefully, the RNG will create at least a few engravings suited to the nature of what is contained within.

You should see if the presence of the trapped demons prevents any more from spawning on the map edges of hell like wildlife.  If it does, you can colonize in complete peace.