Bay 12 Games Forum

Okay, after devoting a full season to mining and construction and losing half a dozen trained dwarves to FIRE IMPS EVERYWHERE OH GOD, I've finally got a huge awesome magma forge/smelter system built directly over my volcano. Only now my bloody ingrate blacksmiths refuse to go anywhere near it. I know it works, I've gotten an axe and about ten iron bars out of it (over the course of an entire year), and the area's getting accessed constantly by Imp Patrol and miners stacking my huge, useless ore stockpile next door so it's not like it's inaccessible. Even with all other jobs turned off they'd sooner sit around with no job or wait for something to pop out of the farm than touch the factory. What the hell is going on? What can I do to make them work? Can I, at the very least, appoint a Hammerdwarf to beat them senseless day and night until they stop slacking off so I feel better about the whole situation? I don't want to have to go back to charcoal-based production again, I don't have any coal mines handy and only have enough wood to supply my carpenters, and I'm sitting on an awesome high-efficiency metal factory so sticking with stone is out of the question.

Also, FYI I've noticed that units stationed over volcanos for a long period of time spontanteously combust. If you want to guard the place, give your troops a patrol point that's a few squares out of the heat so that they'll take a break once in a while and not explode.

So I just dealt with my fortress's first real invader, a legendary Titan. Despite having no weapons but the axes my woodcutters came with and a couple of crossbows with about five bolts apiece, I took it down with only one loss because I am awesome.

My awesomeness did not extend, however, to preventing about half the fort from getting wounded in some way while they beat a tore a giant flashing death machine apart with their bare hands. And herein lies the problem, because I'm on an ocean map and the dorfs refuse to touch any water anywhere, no matter if it comes from the ponds or the aquifier or wherever. I just patched it not recently- do the recent patches fix the water fetch bug to include alcohol or allow any drinking whatsoever on maps with bad water? It'd kinda suck to lose only one unit to the monster and then lose the entire rest to poor health care and alpha status.