Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[madmenyo]

I have read about this somewhere but can't find and remember exactly what can and can't be done.

What i currently have is a hole from the surface 2 levels down where my refuse pile is located. Is it possible to just throw stuff down from top so when my hunter kills an animal he just has to go near the pit and throw it? Does this bring any dangers, like falling dwarfs. If so i rather wall it in and bring the refuse in normally by stairs.

And what options does this throwing open for me? I'm more interested in the practical options then the funny ones.

[Sutremaine]

You can't have your hunter use a refuse pit instead of whatever they would normally.

Holes may cause issues with flying enemies if the hole is a quicker route into your fortress than the main gate AND they've had an opportunity to calculate it as such (fliers make a map by seeing where they can walk, and only then do they consider ways to get to a point on the map.) Dwarves and enemies might dodge in if they're fighting nearby, and while a two-level fall can rarely make a mess of a dwarf it's very rarely fatal.

Throwing may be useful in vertical fortresses with the magma smelters built over the magma. It's a little more time-intensive for you as it requires setting up one or more dump zones and then unforbidding items and making sure that nothing rotty has been dumped along with the wanted items, but it's quicker in-game. If you have a single central shaft you may be able to drop water down it and then pump it back up elsewhere to make a mist generator. I'm thinking of trying that next fortress.

[Grumbledwarfskin]

I'm more interested in the practical options then the funny ones.

So...I take it you want both, but order matters? I can do that.

More practical options:

Hunters always "return kill" to a butcher shop, not a food stockpile, so, if you want them to get back to hunting faster, build a butcher shop where you want them to drop their kill, queue a "butcher animal" job on it, a "slaughter animal" job on it, and suspend both. That will prevent the shop from being used for auto-butchery, so it'll only be used by your hunter for dropping off kills. (Note: haven't tested to make sure it works like this, ‼science‼ needed, but there's a decent chance it'll work.)

A hauler will then come and move it to a refuse stockpile.

In order to get dwarves to dump stuff down a hole, you use a garbage zone, not a refuse stockpile. The difference is, a zone can be declared over open space, but a stockpile can only be declared on solid ground, when you declare a garbage zone with one solid square to stand on and one square of open space, dwarves will stand on the solid ground, place things into open space, and you get them automatically dropped off the edge.

Dumping requires manually marking the items to be dumped, so it's not very practical for hunting, as you'd have to micro-manage it.

However, you could set up a stockpile on top of a hatch cover. Haulers will move the bodies from the butcher's shop where the hunter left it to the stockpile. By connecting the hatch cover to a lever or a pressure plate that dwarves trigger when they go to place a body on the stockpile, using an appropriate delay, you can have the hatch cover open to drop the corpse down after the dwarf has left. You'll want to (d)esignate restricted (T)raffic over the hatch-cover, to reduce the chances that anyone will be standing on it when it opens.

The funny ones:

You could instead set it up like this: build the butcher's shop with suspended jobs, as suggested above, but then build a wall around it, force access to it to be from a long, narrow hallway directly above where you want the kills to be dumped. Channel out the ground from this hallway, but leave one square of solid ground at the entrance of the hallway.

Build a retracting bridge over this hallway, and a pressure plate in front of it. Connect the pressure plate to the bridge.

Now, when your hunter goes to drop the kill off at the butcher's, the bridge will retract, and they'll instead drop it off wherever they land.

[Quietust]

when you declare a garbage zone with one solid square to stand on and one square of open space, dwarves will stand on the solid ground, place things into open space, and you get them automatically dropped off the edge.

Not true - garbage zones can only be placed on solid ground (when you view the zone's properties, it shows how many tiles are valid, and only the ground tiles count for garbage dumps), and the dwarf will toss the item in an arbitrary direction not related to the shape of the activity zone. In fact, if you place a 1-tile garbage dump zone and it just happens to be next to open space, dwarves will still toss items over the edge.

However, you could set up a stockpile on top of a hatch cover.

Impossible - stockpiles cannot be placed on top of existing buildings (or vice-versa).