Bay 12 Games Forum

Sooner or later you end up with idlers and excessive production anyway so the kids don't really matter, but Dwarf children are a great bonus resource for training if you use them correctly. Immigrant kids also come with free clothes, so if you must kill them make sure to do so in a way that preserves the free socks (drowning, pits, spikes etc).

I can't remember if this was filed under dwarf day care, but it's always a fun thing to try now and then;-

Step 1: Build a children's sleeping area (1x1 room with a bed for each child)
Step 2: Wait until child goes to their room, then lock the door.
Step 3: Pull lever and dump 100's of excess seeds* on child from overhead trapdoor.

If the child survives to adulthood he\she's got decent dodge and armour user skills so they make ideal recruits. If they get wounded they're a great source of training for your doctors. Sure, some of them end up blind and crippled (cannon fodder), or bludgeoned to death by giant rocks when you make a mess of the dump orders and active pits, but that's all part of the fun.

*For simplicities sake use the ones that produce bad booze but are always brought by caravans, like rat weed.

6 miners (1 cross trained in appraisal, 1 with diagnosis, 1 with weapon\armorsmith if I'm feeling paranoid),
1 decent mechanic,
......and a ton of booze.

Farming skills can wait until the unwashed migrants arrive. Masonry, woodcutting and carpentry skills are easy to train and don't supply enough of an early benefit to justify the embark cost.

If you haven't mapped them yet, a naked solo expedition into the caverns is always fun. With a little luck something interesting will dispose of him (or at least cover him in precious silk).

Haven't found the caverns yet? Make him the only dwarf with the mining labor enabled and order him to channel down 100 or so Z-levels until you hit the lava. (potential fun involved).

If goblins are a problem, why waste a dog? Chain him up outside to act as an early warning system.

How do I get rid of the ghost before it rips someone's leg off?

If that doesn't work, DF hack has "tweak clear-ghostly" to deal with this case in particular--note that it has some bugs, such as the tile the ghost was last on being permanently marked as "occupied".

If it's a caravan guard, that's pretty much your only option (assuming the ghost has proven resistant to slabs and coffins).

Thrips men (and virtually all flying sentients) are irritating rather than hostile. They'll spawn in huge waves, occasionally path into your underground fort and get stuck, clog up any traps they find, and can't be butchered.

Considering the dwarf ballista has an execution capacity somewhere on par with;-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYV-qYeWPkk.

firing it would be a waste of fort resources.

Prisoners are more likely to die of old age\starvation before the ballista actually hits them.

Does it?  What's the command to do that?  I wouldn't mind going from 3 windows down to 2...

No command. Just go to the units screen and press l (not I, or i, but lowercase L - stupid fonts).

If you have DFhack installed it should run automatically.

The Forgotten beasts RNG has been a real pest lately.

First up was a webspinning humanoid made of steel weapon resistant crystal glass, During the fight a troll spawned on level 3 and smashed the water\lava control floodgate in the magma sea, putting the carbonite trap out of action.

Then came a flying opal one with deadly dust that dodged the falling ceiling trap. He's been loitering at the entrance for 6 months with marksdwarves chipping away at him. There's 2 ballistas firing, but the chance of them hitting anything before the crew dies of old age is probably 0.