Bay 12 Games Forum

note also that trees can pierce through floors. So if you have a room for a tree farm and the level directly above is also hollow, trees will grow through the floor into the room above. If you cut the tree afterwards there will be a hole in the floor.

I think what happened is that the remainder of your dwarven civilization was conquered. Someone new needed to be made king and new nobles where appointed, it happened to hit the caravan and not your dwarfs but I believe 7 dwarf fortresses with a king and a few nobles have been observed in 0.40 versions. I don't know whether they will be very useful in defense, I would expect that if they die nobody in your fortress will care but some of your fortress inhabitants will become nobles instead.

some general musings about having idlers:
dwarf fortress is very sandbox, so if you roughly know what you are doing, you will have lots of labor left over, that is intended to be the case. There are lots of projects you can do, so I will just list a few:
-start a metal industry and equip your military with armor, a single dwarf needs several pieces of equipment, so this takes quite a while
-build a well, preferably in a convenient place by channeling the water to where you want the well to be, requires some knowledge about water mechanics, don't drown your fortress
-dig to the very bottom, you will find magma, which allows forging without needing fuel and other interesting things
-give every dwarf a nice room, with a cabinet and a chest
-smooth and engrave the walls and floors of rooms in your fortress you want to look nice, dwarfs like this as well
-start up the slightly more exotic industries like soap making or cloth making
-build a water waterfall in a common meeting area, use pumps and a dwarven water reactor (see wiki) to run in indefinitely
-do some random mega projects like building a giant glass cube just for the challenge
-don't get killed by invasions :-) once you are beyond the first 2 or 3 years this seems to be much easier in the 0.40 versions than in 0.34

I seem to recall that werecreatures are very tough in their wereform but while there are in humanoid form a few applications of an axe or sword or something similar should be easy and work fine. I also trapped a werecreature in wereform in a cage trap, and then walled up the cage somewhere, out of sight, out of mind.

I am not a big user of burrows but I would expect you can make the socialize with multiple burrows. Have one downstairs burrow, one upstairs and one for the entire fort. Both upstairs and downstairs have a room designated as meeting hall. The magma workers are restricted to downstairs, most of the rest are restricted to upstairs and only a few designated carriers are allowed to go everywhere. The carriers might throw parties downstairs and slow work down but if there are only a few of them and they are kept busy with carrying stuff it should get too bad.

I have issues with getting any mammal births in my 40.04 fort. Fort is now almost 2 years old, I have cats and dogs (both male and female) and no births whatsoever. The bugbats in the caverns seem to mate fine (I occassionally get the message, bugbat has given birth to pups), the birds are laying eggs properly as well. I haven't seen any dwarf babies yet either although this might be due to lack of time and to few couples of married dwarfs. Both animal births and dwarf births worked for me in 40.03. Any idea what could be causing that?

Note that named weapons can be somewhat annoying in fortress mode because the dwarf that named them will insist on using only this weapon henceforth. So if he really likes his wooden training axe, he will not switch it out for one of the nice new masterwork steel battle axes you made.