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[Saiko Kila]

Hello
I have some newbish questions, this is a rather long list, but I grouped them together because while not all of them are related, they are all quite specific. This is my first fortress (but not first embark) and it is 3rd year. Game version is 0.31.25. Maybe someone with experience in such matters would feel inclined to shed some light on these? Thanks

1. When embarking, I had no choice of iron anvil, only steel one. I had to forfeit it, because my starting points pool was only 70, and steel anvil freed additional 300 points. Fortunately, the first caravan brought steel anvils. But not iron one. Also their liaison offers only steel anvils every year. Is it possible that my civilization doesn't use iron anvils? That would be undwarfish. Or is it a bug?

2. My civilization list displays 4 civilizations, batmen, dwarves, elves and goblins. All of them have green "P" next to them. I thought that means "Peace", but after three ambushes from goblins it is still there. What does that "P" mean?

3. My dwarven civilization listed no important leaders for over two years. I've read it may mean the civilization was wiped out, but I'm getting a migrant wave every season, and recently got my third caravan from them. Also, their liaison is listed as a leader now, after third coming. Is it possible that they had a revolution or anarchy, and have no kings?

4. After I noticed that the batmen killed the first Forgotten Beast, I used dfreveal to learn their number and status. It turned out one of them is friendly, and all others are hostile. Is it (still) possible to have any fruitful agreement with them? Also, do beasts like cave crocodiles and giant cave spiders reappear after some time? Because the batmen wiped them all.

5. Waiting for my first contact with goblins I built an execution tower, with wings and holes over river, murky pool, grass and stone, on different floors. For experiments. I threw a turkey chick to the ground - it was heavily wounded, but tried to return to my fort and after a moment was trapped in a cage trap nearby. It was still tame, thus friendly.  Does that mean that my dwarves can be trapped by my cages if wounded or otherwise?

6. I threw another chick to the river - it ran to the bank, and spent three days there vomiting and bleeding, but not drowning. After three days it felt better and climbed out and ran to my fort. But there is no single ramp in that river - how could it climb out? Does that mean that my dwarves can also survive long submerging and eventually climb out? What about gobbos? Or are turkeys special in some ways?

7. I was unable to assign my first prisoner to a pit on execution tower (it was a bug, the prisoner wasn't assignable or visible even on the list of the chain it was chained with, and I could assign other prisoners, but they were not disarmed yet) so decided to kill her with my military, to let them train. I was monitoring the fight closely using "." key and Dwarf Therapist. They finally killed her, militia captain used his steel shield for killing blow, but turns out they didn't get any XP points! Not in fighter, not in shield user, not in nothing. The shield lists the kill though. Why is that? In regular combat they were gaining much experience with every blow and shot. But not there. Is it because the prisoner was chained?

8. I've built a dwarven reactor to power my closed-circuit waterfall in hospital. It was working very well (after I figured out the power has to be redirected through middle segment of waterwheel, seems dwarven engineers are more stupid than ancient Chinese) for many months, until I decided to stop filling the reactor with water, using buckets. After some time the water level was so low the reactor stopped working. I asked a dwarf to fill it, but he refused citing "dangerous environment". What danger could lurk under a reactor which lost most of its working water, I was wondering? The basement under reactor and floor nearby was contaminated with goblin blood, probably my doctor washed his patient using a well in the hospital, or the blood was washed from one of the dwarves in the mist creating area and taken to the well with flow (because the well is connected to the circulation of waterfall) and another dwarf took that water to fill a reactor. I was finally able to move the contamination further, using a master pump operator, who risked his life to partially decontaminate broken reactor with a pump. Anyway, my question is: why does the contamination persist? I've read somewhere, that pumps will destroy contaminants? If not, how to clean them? I decided the new generation reactors will have better safety measures, with cisterns to fill them quickly and other to empty contaminated water, but I have no room or time for rebuilding that particular reactor.

9. The well mentioned above is built over an channel with flowing water (when reactor works it flows anyway) and has a deeper hole beneath, so there is a 7/7 water always on the bottom, and 3/7 to 7/7 above it, depending on the current level in the waterfall circuit. I've read, that water deeper than 7/7 means the well will give non-stagnant water. But the water dwarves pull out in the bucket is always stagnant. Not a big deal, but I'd prefer it clean, because hospital patients drink it sometimes. Is it because I used water from murky pool to fill the system and it is inherently "stagnant", or is there a trick to do it properly?

10. Mentioning hospital, how to force dwarves to stack it properly? There is only one bar of soap (of five allowed), and I still have another 4 in the general stockpile, months after designation. The same goes with crutches. But the stupid dwarves overfilled it with cloth and thread, it's 90000/75000 of thread and 210000/50000 (!) of cloth and going up. It seems there is a bug, because obviously they don't care about levels I decided and feel obliged to fill it with all crap they can lay their hands on, forgetting about truly important things.

11. And last thing, questions about thieves and ambushes. I've never encountered thieves. I have no children, but I have some valuable things, like masterpieces of large, serrated steel discs, and artifact hatch cover worth over 50 thousands. I have animals in many places, including entry area, is it possible the thieves feel discouraged by them? I had three ambushes in the last two seasons, so goblins must know about existence of my fort. Or there are no goblin thieves? First thing every ambush party does is to kill the animals near entry, and then many of grazers. They seem to ignore dwarves who shoot them, until the chosen animal is killed. Unfortunately, goblins are much speedier than my animals and dwarves, and more agile. They are able to turn on spot, while it takes 5-10 tiles for a dwarf to turn around and start running in the proper direction. Is it possible than my dwarves are too fat? Oh, and why some of the attackers stay uphill and only observe the battle, and then run away? Are they spies of sort? They are listed as normal axemen or hammermen. If they run, will return return with stronger force, or is their escape non essential?

[Naina]

Here we go: I don't have definitive answers for everything, but I can help on a few counts.

1. Sometimes, dwarven civs just don't have access to iron. If this is the case, they won't offer you iron anvils on embark. Dwarven civs ALWAYS have access to steel, however (how they make steel without iron is anyone's guess), and you'll have the option of steel anvils. The only real solution to this is to find a civ with iron, but it's not horribly inconvenient.

2. Yeah, the green P means peace. Batmen and goblins, however, are always hostile to dwarves. Gobbos will ambush and siege you, and Batmen have no real civilization (can't trade with them), but are still hostile. If you're at war with a civ, you'll get bigger/more frequent attacks from them.

3. If you're still getting migrant waves after the first two hard-coded ones, your civ is not dead. It's possible to have a civ with no king or queen and still have a living civ. Maybe they got kidnapped and transformed by a night creature. The only aspect of gameplay it will affect is you won't ever have the King/Queen migrate to your fortress.

4. It's never possible to have trade/agreement with any animal men. It's possible the friendly batman is still hostile to your civ, so you may have issues killing him. Cave crocs/GCS will migrate to your caverns if there's an opening off the edge of the map (much like FBs/random wild animal on the surface), but until you kill those batmen, they'll probably just keep killing your animals.

5. Friendly animals, dwarves and creatures with [TRAP_AVOID] can be caught in traps if they fall unconscious on a trap.

6. Was it a brook or a river? Brooks are funky in that they have a walkable surface, so it's possible the turkey was just lying on a surface tile.

7. No clue. Military is not my forte.

8. Dunno on this one. There's a tool you can use to clean contaminants in dfhack - it's called dfcleanmap. Hard to tell from your description why exactly the dwarf won't fill the reactor.

9. The water from the murky pool is probably why it's reading as stagnant.

10. I've run into the same issues with my hospitals. No idea how to fix this one.

11. The only kind of thieves around are kobolds, and they have an unfortunate tendency to die off in world generation. If you want to keep your grazers safe, try building walls around your pastures with an underground access tunnel leading to your kitchens or something. That way your dwarves can still use the animals during a siege without risking themselves or being scared off by seeing a gobbo.  If your dwarves are wearing armor, that's gonna slow them down. Copper armor is pretty heavy stuff, after all. Steel is much better, but it still will slow a dwarf down a bit.  You'll see goblins that escape come back, but even if you kill them off you'll get larger and larger sieges as your fortress wealth increases.

[Sphalerite]

1. When embarking, I had no choice of iron anvil, only steel one. I had to forfeit it, because my starting points pool was only 70, and steel anvil freed additional 300 points. Fortunately, the first caravan brought steel anvils. But not iron one. Also their liaison offers only steel anvils every year. Is it possible that my civilization doesn't use iron anvils? That would be undwarfish. Or is it a bug?

With the rebalanced mineral scarcity, it is possible for your civilization to have no access to iron.  They always have access to steel however, even if they don't have iron or flux, so they will bring you steel items.  Save up and buy the steel anvil, it works the same as the iron one.

2. My civilization list displays 4 civilizations, batmen, dwarves, elves and goblins. All of them have green "P" next to them. I thought that means "Peace", but after three ambushes from goblins it is still there. What does that "P" mean?

You have no state of declared war with the goblins.  This is common.  However, goblins are coded in the raws to send babysnatchers and ambushes, which means they will be effectively at war with you even if the civilization page says they're not.

3. My dwarven civilization listed no important leaders for over two years. I've read it may mean the civilization was wiped out, but I'm getting a migrant wave every season, and recently got my third caravan from them. Also, their liaison is listed as a leader now, after third coming. Is it possible that they had a revolution or anarchy, and have no kings?

Most likely the most recent dwarven king died without leaving an heir, leaving the civilization with no leader for a while.  The civilization is still alive and able to send immigrants and caravans, but had no king.  Interesting that the liaison took over as leader, I didn't know they could do that.

4. After I noticed that the batmen killed the first Forgotten Beast, I used dfreveal to learn their number and status. It turned out one of them is friendly, and all others are hostile. Is it (still) possible to have any fruitful agreement with them? Also, do beasts like cave crocodiles and giant cave spiders reappear after some time? Because the batmen wiped them all.

When a member of an animalperson civilization kills a forgotten beast, that individual becomes Friendly.  The rest of them will still be hostile to you, and the only thing the friendly unit will do if you make contact is come and hang out in your meeting hall, doing nothing.

Animals like cave crocodiles and giant cave spiders wander onto the map from the map edges.  These unit spawns are taken from a finite off-screen population.  Once that off-screen population is all gone, it never recovers.  So they will reappear for a while, but kill enough of them and they will stop appearing.

5. Waiting for my first contact with goblins I built an execution tower, with wings and holes over river, murky pool, grass and stone, on different floors. For experiments. I threw a turkey chick to the ground - it was heavily wounded, but tried to return to my fort and after a moment was trapped in a cage trap nearby. It was still tame, thus friendly.  Does that mean that my dwarves can be trapped by my cages if wounded or otherwise?

Friendly creatures which pass out, are knocked unconscious, or are entangled in web on top of a cage trap will be trapped.  This can happen to your dwarves as well.

6. I threw another chick to the river - it ran to the bank, and spent three days there vomiting and bleeding, but not drowning. After three days it felt better and climbed out and ran to my fort. But there is no single ramp in that river - how could it climb out? Does that mean that my dwarves can also survive long submerging and eventually climb out? What about gobbos? Or are turkeys special in some ways?

Creatures which can swim can exit water and move onto land without needing a ramp.  Your dwarves can do this, provided they gain enough skill in swimming, which is tricky to do without drowning them.

7. I was unable to assign my first prisoner to a pit on execution tower (it was a bug, the prisoner wasn't assignable or visible even on the list of the chain it was chained with, and I could assign other prisoners, but they were not disarmed yet) so decided to kill her with my military, to let them train. I was monitoring the fight closely using "." key and Dwarf Therapist. They finally killed her, militia captain used his steel shield for killing blow, but turns out they didn't get any XP points! Not in fighter, not in shield user, not in nothing. The shield lists the kill though. Why is that? In regular combat they were gaining much experience with every blow and shot. But not there. Is it because the prisoner was chained?

Possibly, you might not get XP for killing a confined prisoner.  I have not experimented with this.

8. I've built a dwarven reactor to power my closed-circuit waterfall in hospital. It was working very well (after I figured out the power has to be redirected through middle segment of waterwheel, seems dwarven engineers are more stupid than ancient Chinese) for many months, until I decided to stop filling the reactor with water, using buckets. After some time the water level was so low the reactor stopped working. I asked a dwarf to fill it, but he refused citing "dangerous environment". What danger could lurk under a reactor which lost most of its working water, I was wondering? The basement under reactor and floor nearby was contaminated with goblin blood, probably my doctor washed his patient using a well in the hospital, or the blood was washed from one of the dwarves in the mist creating area and taken to the well with flow (because the well is connected to the circulation of waterfall) and another dwarf took that water to fill a reactor. I was finally able to move the contamination further, using a master pump operator, who risked his life to partially decontaminate broken reactor with a pump. Anyway, my question is: why does the contamination persist? I've read somewhere, that pumps will destroy contaminants? If not, how to clean them? I decided the new generation reactors will have better safety measures, with cisterns to fill them quickly and other to empty contaminated water, but I have no room or time for rebuilding that particular reactor.

Contamination can be destroyed by dwarves with the cleaning skill.  They will only clean tiles that are inside, and I think they won't bother cleaning rough floors, so you need to smooth them or build constructed floors.  Building constructed floors over contamination also destroys the contamination.

"Dangerous Terrain" messages are generated by water more than 3/7 deep, or by any depth of magma.  If your dwarves were refusing to do a job and claiming "Dangerous Terrain", it means that the job site or the path they'd have taken to it was blocked by water.

9. The well mentioned above is built over an channel with flowing water (when reactor works it flows anyway) and has a deeper hole beneath, so there is a 7/7 water always on the bottom, and 3/7 to 7/7 above it, depending on the current level in the waterfall circuit. I've read, that water deeper than 7/7 means the well will give non-stagnant water. But the water dwarves pull out in the bucket is always stagnant. Not a big deal, but I'd prefer it clean, because hospital patients drink it sometimes. Is it because I used water from murky pool to fill the system and it is inherently "stagnant", or is there a trick to do it properly?

Water and what's contaminating it are strange and hard to figure out sometimes, it appears that DF sometimes tracks what's in the water, sometimes where it comes from, and sometimes where the water was gathered determines if it is stagnant.  In your case the fact that you are pulling water from the murky ponds is probably the cause.  Try getting water from your river instead.

10. Mentioning hospital, how to force dwarves to stack it properly? There is only one bar of soap (of five allowed), and I still have another 4 in the general stockpile, months after designation. The same goes with crutches. But the stupid dwarves overfilled it with cloth and thread, it's 90000/75000 of thread and 210000/50000 (!) of cloth and going up. It seems there is a bug, because obviously they don't care about levels I decided and feel obliged to fill it with all crap they can lay their hands on, forgetting about truly important things.

This is a bug.  The dwarves ignore stocking limitations on the hospital and fill it with cloth and thread forever.

11. And last thing, questions about thieves and ambushes. I've never encountered thieves. I have no children, but I have some valuable things, like masterpieces of large, serrated steel discs, and artifact hatch cover worth over 50 thousands. I have animals in many places, including entry area, is it possible the thieves feel discouraged by them? I had three ambushes in the last two seasons, so goblins must know about existence of my fort. Or there are no goblin thieves? First thing every ambush party does is to kill the animals near entry, and then many of grazers. They seem to ignore dwarves who shoot them, until the chosen animal is killed. Unfortunately, goblins are much speedier than my animals and dwarves, and more agile. They are able to turn on spot, while it takes 5-10 tiles for a dwarf to turn around and start running in the proper direction. Is it possible than my dwarves are too fat? Oh, and why some of the attackers stay uphill and only observe the battle, and then run away? Are they spies of sort? They are listed as normal axemen or hammermen. If they run, will return return with stronger force, or is their escape non essential?

The only thieves are kobolds, and kobolds don't survive past a few years in world gen.

Goblins should be sending baby snatchers and ambushes, and eventually sieges.

Dwarves not turning quickly has nothing to do with being fat.  It's just the DF AI being stupid - dwarves tend to try and reach the last point they were going for even if their orders have been changed, and don't want to obey new orders until they've finished the old ones.

At the moment, there is a bug whereby any creature who enters the map and then leaves the map loses their position in their civilization.  So even if a leader of some sort accompanies a goblin ambush or siege, they'll effectively cease to exist when they leave the map.

[Psieye]

With the rebalanced mineral scarcity, it is possible for your civilization to have no access to iron.  They always have access to steel however, even if they don't have iron or flux, so they will bring you steel items.  Save up and buy the steel anvil, it works the same as the iron one.

To clarify, the game does not care that the civ has no access to the raw materials for the reaction to produce steel. The game sees dwarves as being allowed to use the "make steel" reaction so therefore give them access to steel even if they never get any iron ore in any of their sites. This also means you are guaranteed bronze from your parent civs too.

The only thieves are kobolds, and kobolds don't survive past a few years in world gen.

Again to clarify, this is because the latest version included resource tracking. Kobolds can't grow their own food and have to scavenge - if they can't get enough from their worldgen activities then they die out. In previous versions, all sites were assumed to have adequate provisions so never checked for whether individuals might starve or not.

[Saiko Kila]

6. Was it a brook or a river? Brooks are funky in that they have a walkable surface, so it's possible the turkey was just lying on a surface tile.

That was a river, and the chick was underwater. When I threw in some goblins instead they acted differently - they weren't moving and their names had blue outline (I suppose it means drowning). They had broken spines and that could be reason they couldn't move though. Anyway, it seems they weren't good swimmers.

8. Dunno on this one. There's a tool you can use to clean contaminants in dfhack - it's called dfcleanmap. Hard to tell from your description why exactly the dwarf won't fill the reactor.

Oh, a good idea. Months old blood doesn't disappear, and it's getting on my nerves. There are places with over ten spots of different blood.

10. I've run into the same issues with my hospitals. No idea how to fix this one.

Maybe I will try to fight less - my lazy doctors (five of them) allowed their only patient to get infected. It happened after 8 diagnoses (they apparently need to repeat diagnose after every step, like cleaning, suturing or dressing) and cleaning, they did it, but too late. Over two months and they can't heal a guy with broken leg.

Animals like cave crocodiles and giant cave spiders wander onto the map from the map edges.  These unit spawns are taken from a finite off-screen population.  Once that off-screen population is all gone, it never recovers.  So they will reappear for a while, but kill enough of them and they will stop appearing.

I see. I should probably take on these batmen sooner than later.  New crocodiles appeared, but they are dangerously close to these murderous savages.

Water and what's contaminating it are strange and hard to figure out sometimes, it appears that DF sometimes tracks what's in the water, sometimes where it comes from, and sometimes where the water was gathered determines if it is stagnant.  In your case the fact that you are pulling water from the murky ponds is probably the cause.  Try getting water from your river instead.

I've built a new channel with clean water from the river, time will tell if it helps, but is seems to be a good idea anyway. More civilized.

This is a bug.  The dwarves ignore stocking limitations on the hospital and fill it with cloth and thread forever.

I wonder whether that was reason they were ignoring the wounded soldier for so long, or is hospital generally buggy and there are more issues.

Dwarves not turning quickly has nothing to do with being fat.  It's just the DF AI being stupid - dwarves tend to try and reach the last point they were going for even if their orders have been changed, and don't want to obey new orders until they've finished the old ones.

That's great, I can continue to feed them well! I will probably assign more animals to the external pastures, they are good at slowing down attackers.

Thank you guys for answering my questions, and for all tips, it was really informative and helpful!