Bay 12 Games Forum

So, pondering what I should do with these three goblin POWs I have, I considered tossing them into my sentients refuse pile (I keep it seperate from the non-sentients). Then I remembered refuse areas apply decay to whatever is in them until it is destroyed.

Right now, I'm wondering what would happen if it happened to be an occupied cage; when it's destroyed, would it destroy it's occupant or release it?

Afaik the increased decay is applied only to clothing, which indeed rots away rapidly. Other items dumped into the refuse stockpile still sit there like forever.

I have a shooting range where dwarves can fire at live targets, but will never hit them (door opens shortly to expose target, but closes before bolt arrives). Works fine, gives more xp than target shooting, keeps prisoners alive. It does drain fps a lot when active, so I am happy to have a prototype, but don't use it much. My dwarves also complained that mock executions are something only depraved creatures like humans would do.

Instead of training your dwarves, you could try training the prisoners, which can be pretty useful given how many animals / invaders / visitors are hostile to each other nowadays.

Careful with shallow and deep metals, I ended up getting zinc, galena, and to rub salt in the wounds, native silver everywhere.

Lead minecarts for the win.

If you scout through different embarks you might find 1) already empty vulcanoes (empty pits down to magma sea exist) +  in flat landscape 2) sizeable deep pits in caverns (I saw some stretching over 60-70 z-levels).

Since I build deep, I personally would put either an aquarium on top of my pit town or even camouflage the whole thing with a lake on top (I like to make a camo topside), basically plugging the pit this way, while still imagining some sunlight filtering through the aquarium and its glass floor (roleplay) allowing me to cultivate strawberries at z100 at the bottom of the pit. I once tried sth. like this in an empty vulcano (not sure about the scale you have in mind), but since I had large waterfalls from caverns right into the magma sea (from start) and bad pathing on top, my fort grinded to an early fps death. If you want to enjoy such a fort for some time, think about fps before you start.

What's the biggest aquifer that you guys have seen?

I'm already 6 layers deep into this one and it's showing no signs of ever ending ;_;

3 layers. What are your conditions that you get so much aquifer. I love aquifers.

Dumping next to a hole means dumping into the hole is the main thing to understand and it is not that intuitive, indeed.

Best practice would be

1) no line of sight for dwarves
2) deep enough so miasma can not rise
3) safe from living garbage (undead)
4) optional magma flooding (directly dumping into magma means bad thoughts each time you dump worn out socks, they rot fast without bad thoughts, however) also avoids any magma mist complications right away
5) recovery option (mistakes happen)
6) one central system with multiple access points

I don't use dumping for moving around items (other than into garbage), just when I work around item-in-bin bugs, but you can easily disable your whole central garbage collection system by locking a few access doors when needed.

The design I would propose for testing is a barracks w/ vertical access, wall, outer room w/ only exit over pressure plate linked to counter. Put in a full squad for a year, then report number in the counter.

In practice, I use underground barracks and / or additionally line barracks with statues.

A closed door stops water / magma flowing in from above - but if you drop it via pond order the water happily shares the tile with the closed door.