Bay 12 Games Forum

Ah, I should have clarified. I was looking for captains of the guards specifically to see if my adventurer could become a fort guard from them. Tried doing so with militia commanders and sheriffs to no effect. I did happen to find a captain hidden within a fortress, which finally let me become a guard, so that settles things.

Just learned a hard lesson on claiming an adventurer camp: don't put items into cabinets or other containers if you plan on crafting with them. Your dwarves even after being reclaimed unless you dump the stuff then reclaim them first. Pity I didn't know that beforehand. I probably coulda saved my legendary armorer and half the fort from a weremammoth attack had I not needed to waste time on dumping/reclaiming all that holy metal stuff.

So, giant elephants seem to regularly path by my fort. I set out to catch a few, and was willing to sacrifice a few war dogs for the endeavour. What I didn't count on was for the dogs' trainer to get involved as well, at least, just right after he grabbed a drink. One fatally crippled dwarf later, and two of his buddies also get in the mix. Turns out booze + anger at loss don't mix well.

Don't know if anyone knew already, but there's a trick where you could contract just about any hostile intelligent creature as a companion, particularly semi-megabeasts like giants. Well... sorta. To start, you'd need to have an adventurer with hero status (ie killed at least one night troll or something better), and probably just a kick-ass adventurer overall. Furthermore, you might want to have a site with numerous logs available, if you're looking to build stuff.

Anyway, here's how it's done:

• Find a target. This should be a non-leader historical figure that's at least semi-intelligent capable of speaking, and, preferrably, doesn't have extravision (ie has functional eyes).
• Get outside their vision range and sneak up to them. Or, better yet, blind them.
• Skip introductions and bring up incident of a significant kill you made (hopefully, one that won't anger them further!)
• Ask for them to join
• Should the target get hostile, blind them (if they aren't already), wait around for about a hundred turns or so until they're no longer in combat, then try talking to them as above

And, that should do. Just note, there's several precautions to take. In particular, the target is still hostile to you, and will attack and stop following you should they regain their sight or you bump into their space. Should that happen, just repeat step five. Otherwise, besides spitting at and spiting you, they'll do just about anything else a normal ally will do, including help build a site for you. In the latter case, they seem to cease becoming violent so long as you leave them to that task on their own, though chopping logs, sleeping, and generally bringing up the timer seems to snap them out of that phase.

Soon^TM

I seem to remember a bag that had teeth in it and would only allow one person to take items from it - anybody else loses a few inches off their fingers. Maybe Harry Potter?

This seems like a "bad" version of that.

Sounds somewhat like the Bag of Devouring, only not indiscriminate.

[MALE] and [FEMALE] castes are required for creatures to breed in either fortress mode or as historical figures.