Bay 12 Games Forum

My guess is that the huge amount of migrants is due to a confluence of a) not having had a visit from the liaison yet and b) having loads of wealth due to all the iron/steel. Set your population cap where you want it, and wait until you reach that number before you start churning out the goods, is all I can suggest.

Go the barracks and remove the Training option from that squad. Like I said, if you set the squad to train at a barracks, they'll practice melee-related attacks, not archery.

marksdwarf training was ok before scheduling.

As I said, marksdwarves only train archery when they have "no scheduled order." If you schedule them to "train" they will practice melee at a barracks. If you have ten marksdwarves and want four in the towers and six to train archery, set up your schedule so that it contains the two 2-dwarf Station orders (one for each tower) and no other orders, including training.

Do you mean combat training or archery training? I'll assume you meant Archery.

Archery training is wonky. Here are the requirements as I know them:

1. Have archery targets set up at a range. Make each target its own archery range 'room.' If you only set one as a range, only that one will be used. Set each of the ranges to be used for training by your marksdwarf squad.
2. Have a separate barracks (defined from a weapon or armor stand, a cabinet, chest or bed) in the same room as the range. Set that barracks to be usable by the marksdwarves for Individual Equipment or Squad Equipment, but NOT "Training." Make sure the floor area of the defined barracks overlaps the floor area for the archery target ranges.
3. Now here's the confusing part: Whatever number of marksdwarves you want to train, give them NO orders under the schedule. In your case, your schedule orders should consist of two 2-dwarf Station orders and nothing else. If you give Marksdwarves the "Train" order and a barracks to train at, they'll just go beat each other over the heads with their crossbows; but without any barracks at all they won't do anything at all.

Ya see, the reason these fortifications are here is so we can stand behind them and fire out safely instead of having to rush toward the enemy on the field to bash them with our crossbows.

Just saw that my glassmaker has created a crystal glass statue of two mosquitoes. You can spot them if the light catches them just right...

Perhaps new modular system is in order for weapons? Swords and their smaller forms would be unchanged, since for a full-tang weapon the only non-metal part is some sort of grip, which is negligible enough to gloss over in game mechanics. For most weapons of the DF historical setting and earlier, there were two or more pieces to each weapon. Those pieces, in most instances, could be used for a variety of purposes individually, sometimes on their own. As a few examples:

Polearms:
A spear, pike, halberd, Lucerne hammer, etc. each would need a wooden pole and a metal head. The heads would be forged from a bar, yielding multiples for some varieties, and the poles would be made by a carpenter. A pole could be equipped as a weapon on its own, being basically just a staff, and the heads added on later when a metal industry is up and running. The poles could also be sharpened into basic punjis or spears, used as axles, cut down into smaller hafts, bundled and used as palisades, et cetera.

Example: a Weaponsmith uses a copper bar to forge Copper Hammer Head [2] while a Carpenter takes two logs to make two Oak Poles. The Weaponsmith then combines the parts into two Lucerne Hammers, which work roughly the same way as a staff in combat and could use the same skill (perhaps 'Staff Wielder'). If the player changes their mind before making the hammers, they could also sharpen the poles and/or forge Steel Spearhead [5] out of a bar and attach those to the poles instead, which would then use a Spearman skill since the usage is different from a swung polearm.

Hafted weapons:
Axes, picks, flails and such would use a shorter wooden handle with a separate metal head. The handle itself would function as a club if used without a head. Most of the same heads used in polearms would work for hafted weapons too: an Axe Head could make either a halberd or a battle axe, and a Hammer Head could make either a Lucerne hammer or a war hammer.

Tipped weapons:
ImBocaire mentioned earlier about making leather whips, and then tipping them with metal. The same principle could apply to a number of other concepts, all of which would work similarly. A bar of metal could be forged into a stack of metal points, which could then be attached to whips or to shafts to make arrows and bolts. A bar of metal could also be molded into shot for slings, or forged into darts for a dart gun, which in turn could be dipped in venom or some other syndrome-inducing contaminant. Branching off from this, small rock collection could be ported over from adventure mode to allow for stone 'shot' in the form of pebbles, and chert or obsidian pebbles could be sharpened into arrowheads or spearheads to make weapons slightly better than wood-only versions, before metal is available.

I'm aware that much of this has been done already in various mods such as Wanderer's Friend and Masterwork. I am not aware of a modular, useful-parts system where e.g. a pole can be used as a standalone weapon and then later upgraded to a true polearm. But perhaps this system would be too labor-intensive for many to find it preferable? Personally I'd rather do the extra work of carving poles and hafts, simply because the thought of a two meter all-steel spear bugs me.

I have noticed my terraform efforts have an immediate effect that goes away when it is halted

There is also a bug report that indicates the same thing happens with large smoothing designations.

Other possible culprits: are you dwarves suddenly trying to path somewhere that is behind a restricted- or low-traffic designation? Do you have dwarves trying to path to disconnected parts of the cavern, i.e. places you can see but with uncharted territory in between? Note that this one would also cause "cannot find path" cancellation spam, unless you've disabled those in your announcements file, if that's possible.

My sister studies jiu-jitsu (predictably, as the only girl in the class) and stuff like that is how I imagine pretty much every spar goes.

EDIT: that sounds bad, I realized. She's my sister in law, and after she humiliates the guys by beating them (despite being only about five feet and 120lbs) they don't mess with her more than they have to.