Bay 12 Games Forum

The easiest way to build them is to put a finger of floor out from a tower or the walls. Then put a target on the end of the finger. You don't need walls, and the target is surrounded by empty space. Bolts fly off the sides or the end and drop to the ground. And who knows, maybe the marksdwarfs will spot a goblin while they are up there and shoot it instead?

It was a weird fight. The duke didn't have any weapons, because apparently he didn't want to be in the army. The first arena had some weapon traps in it. The duke's tactics of running away actually worked, the weapon traps minced up the trolls and goblins. One kobold thief must have opened the doors, so the duke got out.

The miners started work quickly to dig out another arena, which wouldn't have weapon traps. Eventually the work was done. The duke was in the new arena, with some troll cages. Somebody pulled the levers and the trolls came out of their cages. The duke ran away.

The trolls went straight for the door and started trying to smash it down. Lucky the new arena had 5 doors in a row. Eventually the duke got thirsty and decided to attack the trolls. They bashed him real bad. Now to find out why his corpse didn't get buried.

In 34.11 I set a squad to wear armor "over clothing". Looked at a hammer dwarf, he was wearing 5 leather shirts. So I changed it to "replace clothing". Hopefully steel boots will count as "wearing shoes".

Suppose I station a squad of soldiers somewhere. After sending them off duty, they turn back into civilians and walk back whereever they want to  go. The weird bit is that they drop their bolts first, so there are piles of bolts left where they were standing. Has anybody else seen this happening? Any ideas how to stop it?

Personally I brew only plump helmets and use eggs for the source of food.

You only let them eat eggs? The smell must be awful!

I've found that trading the stuff that goblins bring is enough to get whatever i want from a caravan. The human caravan just arrived. I selected all the stuff that I wanted, even really expensive stuff like 25 iron bolts for 1000 bucks. All up they had about 34000 bucks worth of stuff I sort of wanted. I gave them about 56000 bucks worth of goblin stuff, such as cave spider silk socks and copper shields, which gave them a profit of 22000. I gave them extra stuff just to try to empty out a couple more bins. I've also got plenty of dwarf clothes that I could sell them, but it seems to make sense to trade away the goblin junk first.

I read somewhere that dwarfs will try to wear one of each type of clothing, where "type" means shirts, robes, dresses, etc. So if you make 50 shirts and 50 dresses, you will probably end up with 50 dwarfs wearing a shirt and a dress, and too bad if there are other dwarfs who don't get anything to wear.

To fix this problem, you can specialise in several types of clothing, one type for each slot. So rather than making 50 shirts and 50 dresses, choose one of them, and make 100 of that type, eg make 100 shirts. Since dwarfs need a minimum of 3 types of clothes, you could make say 100 shirts, 100 trousers, and 100 socks. Hopefully that would be enough to clothe 100 dwarfs.

If you look at the metal page on the wiki: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Metal

You can see that copper is almost as dense as silver. (8.93 -vs- 10.49). You can make copper crossbows, which would maybe work okay as weak hammers. Of course you could also make copper hammers, which would be a lot better for bashing goblins than a copper crossbow.