Bay 12 Games Forum

Interesting, I live in New Zealand and I've never heard of anyone in real life ever being harmed by Keas. Perhaps the solution is to dig straight down after embarking, digging out an area and sealing it off with doors or walls until you're ready to come out. You may need to go to the caverns for food.

I'll check if either of them can fly but if they can they it still won't be too much of a problem because I drop the invaders in with a bridge and most of the time that's closed and when it is open it will only open for a short time.

I had heard that if people go missing but are undiscovered then no unhappy thoughts will be generated so if you want to deal with children then it may be possible to lock them all in individual rooms with food and water and upright training spears repeatedly stabbing them. If they survive to become an adult then they'll go in your military. If they die then lock the room so no one will ever get upset. As for water you could dig into a cavern and search for water there.

I've got 2 forgotten beasts on my map and they're each in different caverns. My plan was to build them a tunnel so they can live in the bottom of my pit but my question is: If I put them both in the pit will they kill each other?

EDIT: The pit is designed for invaders to be dropped in from 15 z-levels above. I would be able to separate the pit with a wall. I think that some of the beasts secrete toxic substances so if invaders land on the wall then the beasts may be able to still get them.

That's an interesting anomaly. I looked at the dwarf fortress wiki and it says that you can't have a woodworker who uses his axe for both military and woodcutting. Perhaps what happened is that one of your military dwarves had the wood cutting labour enabled and had claimed the axe in the workshop but was using it for military instead of wood cutting. He may have chosen to leave it in the workshop until he was given a military order and that may also explain why others couldn't use it either.

Goblins tend to bring a lot of iron when they invade.
You could make cooper weapons then kill goblins for their iron.
So you could use the copper as a stepping stone to get some iron.

This wasn't my first fortress but I was still a bit new to the dwarf fortress world. My fortress had started with 1 entrance guarded block by doors and had fortifications and a level above where archers could shoot people around the tower. I still wasn't very good at training good archers and the enemy's archers were always more powerful I then decided to use the river on my map to create a second passage entrance to my fortress.
This entrance was going to have a drowning trap...
I was in a temperate area and in the winter the river would freeze solid so while it was frozen I built a chamber beneath it and I dug through the frozen river to create some channels above the chamber so that in the other seasons when the river flowed the room below would fill up with a store of water. I then created a path that would go down beneath the chamber as shown in my fail side on perspective drawing. I built hatch covers going from the chamber to the hallway beneath. It was all attached up with levers and I used bridges so that when invaders went in I could close the bridges above the ramps and trap them in. I would then release the water stored above and drown them then I'd filter the water as I drained it from the hallway into my flood plains below.
So I got my first attack...
It was just a small ambush of goblins. So I sealed off the other exit so they would have to path through my drowning trap. I locked some dwarves in the control room so they couldn't leave and I could pull the lever at the exact right time. I watched and I managed to catch all of the goblins in one go and I drowned them all. This felt really rewarding.
Later I got a siege and I thought I'd use the trap on them too, however... They had brought some ogres with them. Ogres are building destroyers and instead of travelling through my trap they decided to break down the doors to my first entrance. Once they were in I couldn't stop them and I found out that my design was terrible and they were able to rampage through my fortress breaking the doors as they go. My last person was one child that I had locked in a bedroom and they eventually found her and that's how my fortress died


_  floor tiles
- hatch cover
X walls/dirt
~ water
\ & / ramps

________      _______
XXXXXX~~~XXXXXX
___--XXX_--_XXX--___
XX\_____________/XX