Bay 12 Games Forum

You can get it out.

You can dig a drain next to the stuck item, then flush out the item.

Or better yet, you could put a drain at the narrow point to the north where you tapped into the natural water, drain the entire system, and re-work the design to avoid this problem in the future.

To drain large volumes of water, dig vertical U/D staircases below the drain point. That's z97 in your case. Let the water drop four or five levels, then dig a large conduit that gets rid of the water. However you design the drain, make it big enough to easily handle the water that you're draining.

How do you get rid of the water? On a small embark, the map-edge drain works well. Just carve fortifications into the tiles on the edge of the map, and water will flow off the map. If that's not convenient, then maybe you could dump the water into a cavern and let it find its way off the map down there. You could also dump the water into the magma sea, though that will lower your FPS.

On the layer below the water, z97 in your case, build a way for your miners to walk out safely once the water comes crashing down. Include multiple doors on that corridor to make sure that the water doesn't follow the miners and flood your fort. Build retractable bridges on the U/D stairs on z97. Those bridges will open and close the drain.

When it's all ready, have your miners dig down stairs on z98 from below. The water will come crashing down, showering the miner but not drowning him or washing him away. If your drain is big enough, then all the water will flow off screen without backing up.

Draining the whole system will take a while. But once it's empty you can replace those floodgates with bridges, which can handle debris. You can also fix the original design problem, which was that you didn't build a blocking bridge at the water source when you tapped it. Always block fluid at the source, and then again further along in the system.

Here's an example from my current fort, where I drained a cavern at the map edge. The water is on z51. Those down stairs were the last piece of the system.
Here is z52, with a miner escape tunnel and retractable bridges blocking the U/D stairs. The drain is currently closed.
z49, 48, and 47 gave the water plenty of drop to avoid backflow. Since this was on the edge of the map, I edge-drained them all, though it probably wasn't necessary:
On z46 I started a double-height room to give plenty of space for the water to spread out before draining off the edge of the screen. This probably wasn't necessary, but I like to overdesign when fluids are involved.
And z45 was where the water finally hit bottom and started draining. This was a few years ago, so trees have grown up in the meantime.

Here's how I prepared my current fortress. I made a small fort and retired it. Then I retired eleven adventurers into the site. Three of them had wandered the world and killed lots of things. The other eight were handmade scholars who never went on any adventures, though some of the scholars did wander the world on their own so they had to be herded back to the site by being grouped with other adventurers.

Here's the problem. Three of the retired adventurers are not quite full citizens of the fortress. Their information screens (z) describe them as citizens of the civ and members of the local government. But their labors in Therapist are shaded out and unresponsive, as if they were children or long-term residents. Though I can adjust their labors in the game itself.

It's not a terrible problem in itself. The scholar was able to join the library, and the military adventurers were able to join squads. Mostly it bothers me that I don't understand why this happened to those three out of the eleven. Is this a random bug, or is it somehow related to the adventurers themselves? If it's a bug, is there a fix? If it's related to the adventurers, then what could they have done to gain this semi-citizen status?

I caught a webcasting FB, and I've set up a silk farm. For bait, I used a sealed-in werepanda, as the wiki suggested. It's not working. The FB won't throw the webs at her as a dwarf or a panda. What's the trick to making the FB shoot webs?

Here's my setup:
The 1x7 drawbridge is controlled by the adjacent lever, so it's definitely down. And the bait is running back and forth trying to get away, so I know that they can see each other.

+1

Yeah, you're probably at war. You can check in an option off the missions screen. I think it's c, and then c again.

You could use the adventurer to reduce the site's population, then go back to fortress mode and launch missions.

DF is full of little gotchas like that. It's just part of the learning curve.

I concluded that mounts were more trouble than they were worth. They would fight and get injured because they had no armor. Or they would get scared, toss the rider, run off, and never return.

Pack animals, OTOH, I found to be extremely useful.