Bay 12 Games Forum

Well, I haven't tested it. It's the example given in the readme. Maybe DFHack handles it properly but just displays it oddly.

Hmmm... I looked it up and apparently the "cookable barrel" example shown is actually specifying a cookable liquid stored in a barrel (syrup, milk, etc.). It's still not going to store the resultant prepared meals in the input barrel, though. Sorry for the confusion.

The basic design of "drop spider into fortifications" should still work, though you'll need to put it into a cage attached to a lever rather than pitting it. Also, roof over the trap and put a hatch in the bottom to allow for spider retrieval and disallow large amounts of fun.

Right. Except, as you note, you can't just pit the spider any more. And you can't build a cage on a floor hatch. And you need to watch out for jumping and climbing. And you need dwarven bait. And you need some way to rescue the bait since constantly webbed creatures can no longer eventually escape. And you need to protect the spider from hunters and caravan guards. But other than those quibbling details, old designs should work just fine...   

The silk falling also doesn't seem to work.  I had a web-throwing titan on the loose and the webs are still hanging all over the empty air whenever it happened to shoot somewhere the ground dropped away.  I didn't report it as a bug though, because hell, they're _webs_, maybe they should be like that.

Webs have remained suspended in "Open space" since at least v0.31. A retracting bridge will "toss" them down.

This is a long-standing quirk, and one of the less lethal reasons why understanding and controlling water flow is advantageous.

If you're after farming the silk, I recommend a specially designed silk farm.  If you search for "Giant Cave Spider Silk Farm" you'll find a number of designs.

Most of which are no longer functional if OP is playing in the 40.x branch.

In particular:

As an addendum to the above, you can just chain up a non-grazer in the spider's range.

Giant cave spiders no longer appear willing to spray webs at tame animals in v0.40.

I caught my very own GCS, but now I want to know if anyone can give me advice on what is best to set up a farm to harvest this things silk without any more dwarf death

I managed to get a silk farm running in v0.40 by drafting a dwarf to patrol in view of the spider; the modified design is available at:

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Silk_farming

Note the stuff about using a tame spider with an invader as bait has not been tested as far as I know. Do disable hunting and keep any crossbow dwarves away from the spider.

2. Create stockpile which accepts only desired barrels, and set it to give to kitchen/still. You will need to create food stockpile which gives to the same still/kitchen. One stockpile can feed many workshops.

Barrels are not used as reactants in a kitchen; linking a barrel stockpile to a kitchen won't have any effect beyond requiring ingredient stockpiles to be linked as well.

Well, the easiest way to prevent the milling of sweet pods is to stop growing sweet pods.

Quote from: Dwimenor on August 16, 2014, 02:26:56 pm

Also dwarves will keep a lot of worn cloths as their possessions effectively rising fortress total item count (and thus lowering FPS).

I've seen this stated a few times, but it just does not happen in my forts.  Is it possible this behavior differs across platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux)?  Are the people who experience dwarves hoarding old clothing without cabinets all running on a specific platform?

I *always* experience this behavior. My guess would be that there is something about the way you manage your fortress that is preventing this from happening.

While dwarves may not carry their worn out clothes back to their rooms if they have nowhere to store them, they will certainly shed their cast-off clothes inside their rooms, adding to an ever-growing mound of rags. You could be avoiding this problem by only producing clothing in limited quantities. If there are 20 dwarves who want a new cloak and you only produce 10 cloaks, all of them will be immediately snapped up by "no job" dwarves (leaving their old clothes at the meeting area they were hanging around in). By the time your room-dwelling dwarves ("sleep" and "on break" tasks) are able to pick up new cloaks there are no new cloaks left. If you produce a constant oversupply of clothes, though, room-dwelling dwarves will see new cloaks available when they wake up, and leave their old cloak on a tile in their room.

Hmmm, I wasnt aware dwarves ever used a 'garbage dump' zone without you actually flagging for dump.

There is an option on the standing orders screen which enables this behavior; it is disabled by default.

I was infact always sure that this 'clothing decays' thing actually takes place in a refuse pile, not a garbage dump.

Garbage dumps do not cause decay, only refuse piles do. You can, however, garbage dump stuff onto/into a refuse pile, where it will decay as though it were placed in the pile normally. (In the general case, items that "end up" in a stockpile tile are treated as part of the stockpile no matter how they got there. This is relevant to the topic at hand, since any "only new clothes" stockpile will gradually fill with old clothes as dwarves who are standing on the stockpile drop their worn-out clothes.)