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[Mike_B20]

I just fought a long siege battle without casualties.

There's one goblin left, seemingly stuck on a hillside at altitude; maybe in a tree.
My dwarves keep telling me there is no valid target when I select squads to attack.
The goblin just one-shot killed a dwarf when I marched a squad near him and is just raining crossbow bolts onto my dwarves while they just stand there.

Is this a common bug?
Google turned up the same problem going way back to 2010.

[PatrikLundell]

Creatures can get stuck in trees both as they mature (hoisted into the air) or expand (climber among branches suddenly finds there's no longer a path back). On a hillside the gobbo might have climbed or fallen. In neither of these cases are the target reachable by melee fighters (they usually don't climb to reach targets, except for crossbow dwarves out of ammo, who have an incredible ability to find and use any normally inaccessible path to suicide charge enemies swinging the crossbow as a club).

I can see a few different ways to deal with the bugger:
- Send a crossbow squad. They may or may not be able to fire back (I don't use xbows because of their problems, including failure to fire back at gobbos on the ground while standing on the roof of my 3 tile high courtyard).
- Build a high structure (at least 10 tiles above the gobbo) with a foot far enough away not to be scared by the gobbo during construction and then dump stuff on it.
- If it's in a tree, build a ballista 20 tiles away from the tree at the same level as some part of the tree and fire at it. That should hit the tree and disintegrate it (bonus points if the gobbo is hit), after which your melee fighter should be able to rush it and finish it off. Note that you may need a number of shots to actually hit the target.
- If it's on a hill, pour magma down the hill to burn it to a crisp. That's easiest done via mine cart hauling. You can also use the same technique with water in the hope of flushing it down the hill. For this use I'd rather use screw pumps and larger volumes of water.
- If it's on a hill, designate a dump zone at the edge of the top of the hill and designate stones for dumping. The stones should roll of the edge and hopefully hit the gobbo to push it down the hill (and don't station your militia directly downhill in the roll path...).

[NJW2000]

Dig under it, leave 1 support, and collapse it from far away?

[Daris]

I've had wildlife spawn in trees that abutted the edge of the map.  Not birds, either, but, like, alligators.

[Bearskie]

- Chop it all down

Also, keep in mind that the goblin has limited ammo, so you could just march up a shield force and tank all the arrows.

[PatrikLundell]

You probably can't chop the tree down because the gobbo will scare the woodcutter. Clear cutting will obviously work as a countermeasure against a repeat performance (provided you can keep the area bald).

But yes, milking the gobbo of arrows might cause it to jump down from the tree to do hand-to-hand combat (if not, you can walk a novice X-bow dorf up to the tree under the protection of the real militia for some live target training).

[NullForceOmega]

Just cave in, as suggested above, you won't get a worker near him, and archery across z-levels is finicky.

[FortunaDraken]

Alternatively you could build a tower up above him a short distance away and then build a floor over to him? That may work for your marksdwarves. But cave in is probably easier in the long run.

[Chief10]

Dig under it, leave 1 support, and collapse it from far away?

I would do this for minimal dorf injuries.

[MrRoboto75]

Pump up magma from a source and have it flow out in the general direction of the goblin.

This will destroy the tree as well as the goblin without direct harm to dwarves.  In addition, it should melt the rest of the trees as well, preventing this issue again and probably improve FPS in the long run, and if you plan your design ahead, it can be weaponized to be used against future sieges.

[PatrikLundell]

Are you sure, MrRoboto75? My experience with cavern trees is that the trees themselves are completely immune to fire and magma, although there can be some fire among the twigs up in the tree, but that has no effect on the tree's integrity.

- A cave-in could work, if you can channel out the ground around the tree without the miner being seen/getting scared (when I've tried to get dorfs to make a ramp from below they usually walk out to the surface and channel anyway, despite traffic designations and whatnot).
- Building a tower and a floor is likely to fail because the builder will get scared when getting close enough to see the goblin, which is too far away for the X-bow dorf to get in range.
- I'd still use a ballista on a platform at a safe distance from the goblin to disintegrate the tree. That works better if the siege engine operator is trained, but just keep at it with wooden ballista arrows and you'd hit eventually (it works better higher up where you can hit branches as well as the trunk to get the tree to disintegrate).

[NullForceOmega]

Occasionally trees do collapse during a fire, but it tends to be hit or miss.