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[Cellmonk]

5.  I dunno, what else makes dwarves drop things?  How long does it take before they notice theyre on fire?  Are there any syndromes to make them pass out that we can then power wash off them to wake them back up?  Ideas peoples!!

1. a well placed ady upright spear will make a dwarf drop their stuff

2. magma will make them drop stuff

3. spider web?

number three seems like it might be applicable, as they would always stop on the same tile. though you'd need to make the spider shoot web at that spot reliably.

4. do one-z falls make them drop what they are carrying?

5. If they are carrying body parts, and a necromancer sees the body part, they will drop the body part.

[DuckBoy2]

4.  Nope, they hold onto items while falling. 

The spider web thing might work, do they cancel jobs when webbed?  I expect theyd immediately attempt to resume their job on being unwebbed though...

[Cellmonk]

I was thinking they might drop the item when they become stunned, seeing the job cancellation spam one gets when a dwarf is repeatedly stunned by a syndrome... that was also the reason I thought they'd drop the item while webbed...

idk. might need testing?

which reminds me: a sixth way to make them drop it: kill all their children and puppies as soon as they get to the drop zone, as to induce instant insanity

Dwarf cancels haul dwarf corpse, too crazy.

[DuckBoy2]

Nope, they dont even drop their items when they land and get stunned, I found it incredibly frustrating. 

Also, you have to be very precise with the number of children you kill in front of them.  1 and theyll be content.  2 and theyll be miserable, but 3 and they might not care about anything anymore.  Plus, im trying to conserve haulers and automating the dropping of children sounds too lag inducing...

[Nil Eyeglazed]

1.  No path -- this is what the undump uses, and what some of my earlier science worked off of, its major downsides are reduced stockpile size if the whole thing gets blocked off, or major lag if its a repeating trap.  Eyeglazed's work on creature timings has pretty much convinced me its impossible to make a pressure plate hallway that will make all dwarves drop their stuff while still allowing dwarves outside to continue pathing towards the stockpile without a repeater, and to me that means heavy lag.

I'm setting up a water blockage system right now.  It's possible that dwarves treat water differently, perhaps ignoring water until they reach the actual tile where their path is blocked, because otherwise you'd have path recalculation every time flow turned a 3/7 into a 4/7.  Will let you know.

2.  Scaring -- So I think the scare dump is a definite move in the right direction.  It seems quite conceivable that every dwarf heading towards a stockpile with a chained creature sitting on it will drop his stuff, assuming proper window placement.  Then its just a matter of setting things up so that the tiles dwarves drop food on are all hatches or bridges, preferably controlled by the exit of all dwarves from the hallway.  Unless youre dropping into magma, you can always have my patented Duck Duck Goose failsafe system, where stupid dwarves who fall in the chute land on fluffy ducks and gooses instead of exploding, and yes, pastures and stockpiles can be placed in the same place.

It's not that scaring doesn't work.  It does.  It's just that the lure tile ends up getting clogged more often than with a plate-hatch undump.  It's unreliable.

I'm using a scare-based autodump to drop clothing into the magma.  A guy with a pet ram bit it.  Otherwise, safe.  Can't say exactly how much has gotten dropped.

3.  Dangerous Terrain: a dwarf who finds himself in an unpathable tile will cancel his job and try to path out of it if he can.  Unfortunately, they dont always remember to drop their stuff immediately.  Dwarves can be put on unpathable tiles by making them fall onto wall grates, vertical bars, or (iirc) fortifications.  You can also flood the tile theyre in/about to walk into.  Since making them fall has many of the same problems as method 1, maybe we should look into repeating mist machines to cancel their jobs?  I dont know if water forces pathing to be recalculated, or if its more of a OH NO IM DROWNING moment, so im not sure of fps woes from this...

I'll have more info soon, hopefully.  A system that drowned dwarves approaching from one direction, but not dwarves approaching from the other, might be a good way to transfer food.

I would also like to do a little bit of building-based dangerous terrain research.  In particular, I want to see what happens when you build a retracting bridge over a raising bridge and trigger them at the same time, or a tick apart.  This is more pure research for me, because I believe any system used for something practical would either need to use a complicated delay system (for hatches) or else it would need to be a 20-tile long bridge, and I am just not interested in solutions involving 20 tile long bridges.

4.  Does combat make them drop things...?  I know Ive had a marksdwarf drop her baby to the carp while reloading, ( the carp was 3 zlevels to low to attack, and carp cant fly, she had only herself to blame that time). If so, we could just put a bunch of repeating training spears in the hallway, then dwarves will dodge fall down a level, creating a one way path and making their original job inaccessible, more so they drop their junk and head towards an accessible meeting hall, except whoops, they trigger more spikes, to drop them back to fortress proper, and then a plate that dumps their junk.  All the falling, hopefully none of the recalculation of pathing that kills fps.

Personally, I find casualties unacceptable, dodges are really random, and you can't control path with spikes.  If dwarves drop items when spiked (I believe they do), then the dropped items are going to be on the spike square, and any dwarves coming to retrieve the goodies are going to get spiked too.  It all sounds rather dangerous to me.

[MadocComadrin]

Would the quantum Undump from the relativity thread work for this?

[Nil Eyeglazed]

Would the quantum Undump from the relativity thread work for this?

A variation would work, but would lead to waste of about a third of your food (that would sit on a pressure plate and rot).

EDIT: I've got my water-based path blockade going on.  It was ridiculously difficult to set up, and I probably did it every possible wrong way before I did it the right way.  After all that, it's not working any differently than blocking path with a hatch over open space.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

I made a raising bridge that opened+closed 1 tick later than a retracting bridge directly overhead, both linked to a plate triggered upon entering the system.  Not very useful.  Upon retracting the bridge, dwarves go into free-fall state, but of course they have nowhere to fall because of the raising bridge 1 z-level under them.  They don't move or drop their item until the retracting bridge closes-- then they cancel their job and drop their item.  The item itself, once dropped, won't fall-- probably uses the same falling code as dwarves, maybe instead same code as water, takes a few ticks to fall, so can't fall in the 1 tick window allowed it.

You could take advantage of this technique to separate items from dwarves, but it's a pain.  First, you've got to autodrop dwarves, which requires long bridges.  Next, to get the goods someplace safely, you've probably got to use long rows of hanging floodgates (rather than a raising bridge underneath).  You need separate entrance and exit actions, so one-way entrance: assuming initial state of bridge and floodgates closed, entrance triggers the bridge (open+close is fine), and exit triggers both the bridge and the floodgates underneath (again, open+close, to return to initial state).  Probably want the exit blocking off entrance for a while, too-- hatch/retracting bridge combo will keep it closed during the necessary period (200 ticks).  You might have extremely rare instances of plating of goods, when a dwarf is so slow he takes 100 ticks to move a tile-- basically, goods will be plated at the same rate that a plate-hatch undump lure tile needs ungunking, which I think is an acceptable rate of rot.

You'd still have the problem of dwarves delivering a lot of empty barrels for a booze stockpile, but now that I think about it, I bet you can get around this with some orientation tricks.