Bay 12 Games Forum

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=5097

From the wiki:

Building destroyers cannot destroy buildings unless their path to the building passes through the building's z-level. This means that building destroyers cannot destroy, for instance, a forbidden hatch above them (note that non-forbidden, i.e. passable, hatches are vulnerable!), or a magma forge from the magma underneath it.
Building destroyers can destroy buildings from the z-level below while standing on a ramp or stairs that leads up to the building's z-level.

From that I take it that if you place a hatch on the stairs leading down to your cavern AND forbid it you are safe. You are also save if you use an artifact hatch (if you are lucky enough to mood one). The latter I can confirm, in one fort I had an artifact hatch leading to the caverns and nothing ever made itīs way through it even though it was not forbidden (I controlled the access to the cavern with burrows and alert levels).

I guess so. The neighbor list shows what "guests" you can count with. Especially on smaller worlds you can end up with whole civilizations missing (my last pocket world had no elves) and spots being cut off for certain civs, either because of the ocean or steep mountains...

You might want to lock one of your picks away: tool stockpile, assign one miner less than you have picks, then forbid it once you see it on the pile. In one of my forts I dumped a spare pick among some other stuff which you might need once your fortress starts to crumble (some coke, magma safe blocks, booze and whatnot down the hole where I locked off my vampire bookie. Then walled off her quarters again. She will be able to jumpstart my civilization whenever necessary.

the order of items is important, mailshirts can't be put over breastplates.

Maybe only for adventure mode? I dabbled around a bit with uniforms and the order in which you put the items into the list doesnīt seem to matter - the dorfs are intelligent enough to first put on the mail shirt(s), then the breast plates and so on. Now maybe I was lucky, maybe that behavior is new?

Focus on food and booze and sit tight until you can buy a pick from a trader or at least some stone to forge one yourself. Maybe do some woodcrafting to have trade goods, in case the trader only comes with a steel pick which can easily cost more than 1k dwarfbucks.

I wouldnīt use restraints, because then the dogs can only attack within a very restricted area. Pasture them and theyīll attack hostiles nearby. Iīve seen two of my dogs happily kill one snatcher, but maybe they only got lucky.

If you only want to scare them off - a wandering stray cat will do the same job as well.

Hmm, the beast I mentioned in the OP (the one fighting my war dog) was supposed to have a fiery breath. The dog stayed unharmed though. After a while I gathered all my squads and had a miner open the seal. A couple of hammerdwarves rushed in and smashed it into oblivion in less than a few minutes. Now some of them have bad thoughts about having been exposed to smoke and a clothier who was standing nearby started flashing strangely. But when I investigate him he seems to be fine and is ecstatic about his life. Guess Iīll have to wait if something bad comes from that, but by now almost a year passed, he is still flashing, but doesnīt seem to have any health problems.