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[River Rat]

I've been trying to follow the wiki and make an live target archery training room with some gobs I caught in last siege.  I did like the wiki said for a mass pit dump on the upper level laid out like this:

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=========
=C==C==C=
=========
=========
=C==C==C=
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= Floor set as animal stockpile
C Floor hatch cover

Did like the wiki said and set the 6x9 area as a pit dump.

The lower level is open area below the 6x9 upper level, originally surrounded by a double wall of alternating solid walls and fortifications:

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fwfwfwfwfwfwf
wfwfwfwfwfwfw
ww.........wf
ww.........fw
ww.........wf
.X.........fw
ww.........wf
ww.........ww
wfwfwfwfwfwfw
fwfwfwfwfwfwf
w  Wall
f  Carved Fortification
.  Open Floor
X  Floodgate
(How do I type in the special ascii characters so I don't have to translate?)

Surrounding the double walls is a 2 wide open area for my marksdwarves to patrol. Stairs up on west, along with lever to control floodgate and ammo storage.

The 1st mass pit dump of gobs went fairly smooth.  One escaped somehow and killed a civ or two before coming out of the access hallway into my barracks where he quickly met his doom, but the other 7-8 went into the pit no problem.  The gobs are milling around in the pit and I set my archers to patrol.  None of them take a shot for a couple days game time.  I read on the wiki that archers have to be level 10 to fire through non-adjacent fortifications, so I figure they can't shoot through the inner layer of forts.  I decide to mine out the outer fort tiles to let my archers step up to fire through the inner, but my pansy miners would freak out when they saw the gobs and would run away.  They finally managed to get the NW and SE corners mined out but after that they couldn't turn those corners without seeing a gob and running away.  I watched for 3-4 game days and my archers managed to get off a few shots occasionally from the corners, but not many.

I decided to redesign the system so I set a bunch of cage traps up, opened the flood gate and let the gobs out to get caught again.  After making my changes I tried to re-pit the gobs.  Now anytime my civs try to pit a gob, the gob will either break away from the civ and start fighting, or if he does manage to get thrown in, within a few seconds he climbs back out, sometimes managing to kill a civ or two before hitting another cage trap.  I've read that this is what thieves do, fight when being pitted and climbing out, but the 1st time they stayed in the pit for like a week of game time without climbing.  It's like their thief flags (?) have been set either by "escaping" from the pit the 1st time, or being caught in a trap inside my fort.  Anybody have any ideas?  Is there any way to check to see if a gob is flagged as a thief?



               

[PatrikLundell]

I suspect your hatches are not set to locked, and this allows pittees to climb up again. Thieves presumably can climb out through locked hatches as well.
My experience with pitting is that it's rather common that pittees escape during pitting (40%?), and for some reason most or all either escape or are pitted successfully in any one batch (I only have a single hatch, and thus only 8 pitting positions, hence 8 in each batch). The solution to pittee escapes is to station militia in the pittery to put down escapees.
Your other alternative is to build the cages in the lower area and link the cages to a lever (you can link all cages to the same lever). When ready, pull the lever and release all the gobbos at once.

[utunnels]

I still doubt this method works. Because your dorfs might not be smart enough to choose the nearest hatch.

[Reelya]

With one hatch and 8 cells, it's always adjacent. You can use a feeder stockpile link to keep the pittees coming.

I don't like building the cages and using levers because this takes a massive amount of dwarf time and micromanagement. It's not really worth it. I just have a squad training in the actual pitting area. You can also ring your pitting area with cage traps to help ensure any escapees get caged again quickly. This should help minimize deaths.

[utunnels]

I wonder why you need a hatch?
If the enemy can't fly, and there's no adjacent walls, how can it climb up?

[River Rat]

No my hatches weren't set to locked, I'll try that.  I was afraid if I set them locked dorfs couldn't open them to pit.  Can confirm they will climb out of hatch.  Watched the last one standing next to a fort carved from smooth stone out an overhead hatch 2 spaces away from the wall.

[Reelya]

btw, if you ever pit ogres or other building destroyers, I've had them break the floodgate. A 1x1 raising bridge is safer.

[PatrikLundell]

My understanding from the wiki description of mass pitting is that dorfs would be smart enough to select the closest hatch. Since the victims escape frequently anyway, I doubt that would make much of a difference if they didn't, however.
I actually build the cages by my pit, because the pitting screen doesn't provide enough info to distinguish between the cages by the pit and the main stockpile. It's a pain to go through 50 undead, because they can only be distinguished by gender, race and cage type (wood/glass) when building the cages, while the pitting menu provides profession as well (and in case of living victims, their names), but not, crucially enough, distance or whether the pittees are located within the pitting zone. So I start with building the cages of e.g. all female elves and hope that I am lucky enough to get the cages of e.g. all female elven macemen, and so on. The cases where I've bungled it up and happened to select someone from the main stockpile by accident have luckily not resulted in any escapes.
I would build a bigger mass pittery, but I'm out of space, since the pittery is crammed in between the volcano, the sentient garbage incinerator, and the workshop.

[Reelya]

If there's no hatch then the civilian dwarves can see the goblins which are in the pit, and keep running away instead of working. This can cripple a fort if you can't get the military into to pit to kill them. For example, if you put the lever to open the pit floodgate in the pitting room, then no dwarf will go near the lever which could open the pit up to let the soldiers in, and you'd have a nightmare working out how to solve the issue, you'd end up having to deconstruct some walls.

So you need the hatches to keep operations running smoothly.

[utunnels]

If there's no hatch then the civilian dwarves can see the goblins which are in the pit, and keep running away instead of working. This can cripple a fort if you can't get the military into to pit to kill them.

Yeah, I forgot. Once when I did that without a hatch, they just refused to do the job because of the obvious reason...

[Reelya]

If there's no hatch then the civilian dwarves can see the goblins which are in the pit, and keep running away instead of working. This can cripple a fort if you can't get the military into to pit to kill them.

Yeah, I forgot. Once when I did that without a hatch, they just refused to do the job because of the obvious reason...

That reminds me of the real risk of building just one main staircase down to the caverns. I did that once, and a lone crundle 50 levels down paralyzed an entire fortress, since no-one would go past the central staircase.

[utunnels]

They seem to ignore line of sight. Once my entire fortress refused to work because there were buzzards in the basement below the workshop level. In real life they shouldn't have seen them because of all the walls in the way...

[River Rat]

Locking the hatches fixed the climbing/escaping problem.  Someone should update the Mass Dumping wiki to mention that.  It's just weird that they went so long the first time without climbing out.  Managed to get 3 out of 7 down in the pit without them escaping topside. 

Yeah I made the mistake of dropping trolls in the pit in one of my go rounds.  Once the 3 in the pit now are dead I'll replace the floodgate with a bridge.

[Reelya]

The wiki for current version of DF does mention locking the hatches. Earlier versions e.g. the 34.11 wiki don't mention it since it wasn't relevant then.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Mass_pitting

[River Rat]

ok thanks I was looking at the v0.34 page