Bay 12 Games Forum

What do I do with a caged goblin snatcher?

If you just want to free your cage, you can pit him outdoors-- over your wall or something.  He'll just run for the map edge, totally harmlessly unless he runs into a dwarf on his way.

If you want to get some use out of him, one popular idea is to sic your guards on him.  I like to always have a few goblins around because they're handy for logic devices.

They don't trigger the traps both BEFORE and AFTER being revealed, for some reason.

You watched the goblins walk over the trap, or are you extrapolating from the fact that you didn't see any combat reports/corpses?

If I didn't see the goblins come in, I think the first thing I'd be suspicious of is if there's an accidental alternate path into my fort-- fairly easy to check for.

I think the kobold on the left looks less dog-like, personally.

That looks beautiful!

I think that maybe the elf might be better represented by a slight frown.  It always sounds like they're frowning when they're talking to me.

The human is perfect.  "What a pleasant place you've carved out for yourselves...

"Goodbye."

I made a raising bridge that opened+closed 1 tick later than a retracting bridge directly overhead, both linked to a plate triggered upon entering the system.  Not very useful.  Upon retracting the bridge, dwarves go into free-fall state, but of course they have nowhere to fall because of the raising bridge 1 z-level under them.  They don't move or drop their item until the retracting bridge closes-- then they cancel their job and drop their item.  The item itself, once dropped, won't fall-- probably uses the same falling code as dwarves, maybe instead same code as water, takes a few ticks to fall, so can't fall in the 1 tick window allowed it.

You could take advantage of this technique to separate items from dwarves, but it's a pain.  First, you've got to autodrop dwarves, which requires long bridges.  Next, to get the goods someplace safely, you've probably got to use long rows of hanging floodgates (rather than a raising bridge underneath).  You need separate entrance and exit actions, so one-way entrance: assuming initial state of bridge and floodgates closed, entrance triggers the bridge (open+close is fine), and exit triggers both the bridge and the floodgates underneath (again, open+close, to return to initial state).  Probably want the exit blocking off entrance for a while, too-- hatch/retracting bridge combo will keep it closed during the necessary period (200 ticks).  You might have extremely rare instances of plating of goods, when a dwarf is so slow he takes 100 ticks to move a tile-- basically, goods will be plated at the same rate that a plate-hatch undump lure tile needs ungunking, which I think is an acceptable rate of rot.

You'd still have the problem of dwarves delivering a lot of empty barrels for a booze stockpile, but now that I think about it, I bet you can get around this with some orientation tricks.

Not quite a trait, but easily overlooked:

The single best judge of how well a recruit will turn out is his initial skill in student.

I think their clothes are probably protecting their throats for you-- unless there's been a rehaul of coverage for v34.  It's probably not that relevant to this discussion, since you can't armor throats in unmodded games, but for good coverage, I believe you want something with the UPSTEP MAX token-- shirt, robe, dress, something like that-- to cover the throat.  I believe that silk is probably the strongest non-armor material (discounting candy clothing, which is a pain because it rots, same as pigtail fiber).  In whatever version I was looking at, silk had a ridiculously high shear value, which would be appropriate, were it not for the fact that DF considers a silk shirt to be as thick as a leather cloak.  But then, I've never done comparative combat testing on it.

I think it would work better if bandits threatened to dump all their armor, weapons, clothes, and human bone rings on your stoop unless you agreed to their demands.  Oh hey, that's how it works out anyways.