Bay 12 Games Forum

Dwarves can become serial killers instead of going stark raving mad, melancholy or berserk.

Any visitor or migrant to your fort could already be a serial killer. Rather than just start random fights, Dwarvern serial killers pick an obsession ( race, hair color, anyone named Urist etc ), then quietly go looking for a target in the fort before disposing of them in a variety of fun ways;

1. Murdering the target in their sleep - DSKs will first seek out a murder weapon, then kill the target without an announcement.
* option; stash the bloody murder weapon in another dwarfs room to frame them when the captain of the guard starts investigating.
** cunning option; hide the bloodstained clothes ( and swipe another dwarfs clean socks ) to throw off the scent.
*** Fridge option; Hide the body in nearby containers so that it's only noticed when it stinks up the place.

2. Murders of convenience - Pushing other dwarves down wells, into magma, pits, spike traps, or just locking them in their rooms until they starve to death. Dwarves could also murder hospital patients, but this might be hard to spot given the normal state of dwarvern healthcare.

3. Poisoning food with various syndromes ( or Armok forbid, booze ). Preferably the targets favorite food. DSKs can either poison the raw ingredients ( and risk discovery ), or the food itself if preparing meals. As there's a fair chance the wrong dwarf will eat the poisoned food there's potential for much fun.

Once a murder is discovered, it's up to that drunk and lazy captain of the guard and the negligent chief medical dwarf to investigate and find the culprit ( or more likely a huge list of potential Urists without a good alibi ).

If not caught, DSK's will then go back to normal for a season or two before selecting another target, waiting for another migrant wave, or sneaking out of the fort to assume a new identity.

The main reason the creatures you buy from merchants die is that they're grazers - They need to be outside on grass or assigned to a dwarf in order to survive. Non-grazers (hippos, fish, big cats etc) can sit in the stockpile for years until old age gets them.
Unless your hearts set on firing rabid pandas or elephants at people, it's probably easier just to stick to non-grazers.

If you must, the best way to keep them alive is create an pasture activity zone over grassy terrain and assign the grazers to it (if they're tame), or you can assign them to a dwarf, then use v (select dwarf) p (profession section), e work animals option. You'll need to make them available on the status screen (press) z.

How many types of booze do you need to avoid getting the is tired of drinking the same old booze lately. I currently have 3 different types but I am not sure I do have more than 3 types of plants and I am not sure if 3 is too few or if I simply didn't notice the thought until it was on it's way out as I used to only have one.

4 seems to be fine. You may be suffering from overproduction of one particular type if you have mixed stockpiles (normally dwarven wine due to excessive plump helmet production.) There's 4 types of indoor booze (ale, wine, rum, and beer) from 4 indoor plant types (pig tail, plump helmets, sweet pods, cave wheat), if you have access to a cavern layer the gather plants order should net you some seeds\plants to start producing what you need.

Personally, I'd try the surface first to see if you can get some whip vine.

Vamps can go mad from depression. My current fort has an immortal foaming at the pointy toothed mouth loony walled up in what used to be a prison cell.

Personally, I say just lock him up somewhere and wait to see what happens. At the very worst you lose a suicidal Urist who'll be replaced with the next migrant wave.

A pump room \ dwarf gym (a room of screw pumps that pump nothing) is helpful for this kind of thing - Assign the separatists the pump labor and turn on manual pumping - They'll keep working on the spot until exhausted, giving you plenty of time to wall them in and starve them to death.

The point of 2+ miners is that you can dig out your initial fortress layout quickly, create your first stockpile and build workshops before the migrant waves \ goblins arrive. A single miner works too slowly, so everyone else ends up standing around waiting for him\her to carve out rooms.

You could build workshops on the surface, but ultimately you'll just end up wasting time hauling everything downstairs later unless you plan on living topside like an elf.

Pfft, the broker will learn to put up with the bad weather - My meeting area's on the roof at the moment to avoid cave adaption so all my dwarves have developed rain tolerance.

Once you remember that wagons will path around traps but invaders will always take the shortest route, it's pretty easy to design a fort entrance that gives you tons of warning. When I first started I went through a phase of airlocking them, but now it's just pointless unless the depot has los to the trap field (which is bad entrance design anyway).

Just build it right next to the trade junk stockpile to speed up hauling and accept that if the goblins get that far, you failed at base defence 101.

Only that one had the picture of the second on it.
And the second had one of the first.

- How is that even possible? The 1st guantlet couldn't have a design showing the second because that didn't exist until 3 years later.