Bay 12 Games Forum

You could build a dwarven bathtub in such a manner that dwarves have to stand in it to use the well or path through it to get there.  Not sure that would prevent re-contamination, but it's worth a shot if the magma proves too hard to engineer.

Are there any mods at play here, or did a lower body "body part" get [invisible verb] in vanilla?

Artifacts can't be destroyed, and gold isn't flammable (so no ‼Artifact Anvil‼), so you should be able to use it in a magma forge just fine.  Said magma forge should be the centerpiece of the temple described above.

Of course, you are correct.  How silly of me.  Dining arrangements are the second easiest.

Because of Dwarf Fortress... this conversation, slightly paraphrased, happened the other day

"The solution is obviously magma."
"We don't have any magma."
"You mean we just need to dig for it?"
"You can't dig to magma."
"What, no pick?  We have to make a copper pick first?
"You can't make a copper pick.  We don't have copper, or a forge, and you don't know how."
"What kind of lousy embark is this?!"

(Entirely in good humor, seeing as I was positing magma as the solution for scheduling mishaps.)

not sure about your main question (I don't know if FBs actually home in on your fort, or wander like wild animals, I seal the caverns like the paranoid I am.), but the best you can do to get a dwarf-arm sword is symbolic: move the arm to a certain spot (use dumping), apply magma and water to create obsidian on it, then mine the obsidian out and use the boulder for an obsidian short sword (burrows help).  A limb might eventually decay to bone (I think it depends on if the hand is attached), but you can't make bone melee weapons in vanilla (though, if you do get dwarf bone, it should be usable for "decorate with bone")

I'm certain you can make a custom reaction to take any wooden object and make charcoal.  Or, for that matter, specify "any wooden weapons" or "any wooden armor" but then you might burn your own training spears if they're laying about.  "Any wooden furniture" would let you burn tables, chairs, beds, barrels, and bins as well, because things like bins, barrels, and buckets are technically furniture.

It would be nice if you could mark wooden objects for burning like you mark metal ones for melting...

I have enough trouble with goblin ranged siegers, though I suppose that if I knew elves would coming, I would build my surface defenses to minimize shooting gallery type straightaways, in favor of a maze of twisty high walls -- or at least something that becomes that with the change in status of a few key bridges blocking the straight paths.  I'm shuddering at the dwarfpower required to build so much though.  Jobs will cancel, masons will be perforated.

I'd frankly just play with it for a while.  There are no real tricks needed to learn to read ASCII, especially not the "High ASCII" (CP347) graphics, with both foreground and background colors, used by Dwarf Fortress as opposed to the standard ASCII used by, say, Nethack (which I play with the standard tileset: no confusing one h for another).

You may or may not lose an early fort due to misplay, but by the time you do, the ASCII will create as much a picture for you as the graphic packs.  I've never used a graphics pack, but from looking at graphics pack screenshots, the ASCII is actually a lot... cleaner.  even with Varied Ground Tiles and no flow amounts.  When reading succession forts, I get more information at a glance from ASCII shots, especially about which dwarf is which. ☺ and ☺ look more immediately distinct for me than most ways a tileset differentiates "mechanic" from "mason" for instance.  You may think this is natural, as I've used only the ASCII and not any of the common graphics packs, but the goal of a graphics pack is to make the screen more readable than ASCII at all times.  I don't... I don't particularly know if its possible, frankly, especially now that procedurally generated creatures like FBs and Titans are just going to make graphics packs throw up their hands and display ? or the normal tile rather than trying to figure out how to render every possible gigantic blob composed of slade with wings of stretched skin, one-eyed mandible-bearing therapod with pink feathers, and monarch butterfly twisted into humanoid form on the fly.