Bay 12 Games Forum

And from personal experience I found that if you dig an upwards staircase up into water it doesn't give you a warning it just floods down and drowns your dwarf.

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Would the troll be useful to train your military or would it be to powerful? I kinda want to know because in my game I've got lots of trolls (there's over 20 in my pit) that came as an invasion and I want to get rid of them in an efficiently manner.

wouldn't it be possible to carve the sides of the pit into arrow slots?  Just don't allow the archers to shoot across from one side to the next.

I can already shoot into the pit from above and because the siege token isn't showing it means that the goblin archers in the pit won't fire back

I've heard of people who sometimes divide their fortresses into 2 semi-forts. One contains important people who survive on self sustainability and the other is all the disposable migrants that are drafted into the military.

My idea is to have 3 separate semi-forts:

The first one is entirely above ground and deals with foreign matters (migrants, caravans, sieges etc...)

The second one is entirely below ground and consists of important people who survive on self sustainability.

The third one resides in the caverns (you can use tunnels to connect the 3 cavern layers) and survives off whatever it can and has to deal with the various monsters.

All the semi-forts are allowed no connection other than to give new sacrifices dwarfs to each other.
EDIT: This means that the 1st fort will get weapons from merchants as they will have no access to metals and the 3rd fort will need to use wooden weapons to survive the creatures below.
DOUBLE EDIT: All dwarves must be stripped of all their clothes and possessions before being sent to a different semi-fort.

This is always a great resource of cool ideas to do. There are also many stupid dwarf tricks to do.
Or you could try these maps

You could start a zoo of random animals
Or you could use all your captured animals in some sort of trap or death pit.

What you could do in the future is you could loo(k) at an object in your fortress that won't move then select it and press enter. Then press F1 and that will set that as a follow hotkey. Whenever your screen moves you can just press F1 and it'll take you back to that object in your fort.

When I first made and used a drowning trap to dispose of an ambush.