Print

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

[IVIaarten]

All over I've been reading that there's a bug with hunters/miners/woodcutters in the military.

So far, I've been setting up my squads to train 6 months and have 6 months off-time. I set my marksdwarfs to hunt while they're off duty, and my axedwarfs to chop trees. I was assuming that since they have the correct weapon equipped anyways, this would not cause problems. So far I've not noticed any either.

Can anyone explain to me what this uniform bug actually is, and if my current setup is wrong/will lead to problems?

[Witty]

Hunters, miners and wood cutters have an invisible uniform that assigns them their appropriate tool (pick axe, crossbow, etc.)

The "bug" comes into play when your axe dwarf doesn't use the same axe for woodcutting as he uses for murder. They will use a different tool, even if their military/civilian tool does the exact same thing, because they are two separate uniforms.

I'm not sure if this comes into play when they're off duty, but if your current setup is fine, just roll with it. Best not break it

[Garath]

basically, any time your marksdwarf start doing the hunting job (not killing wildlife but actually hunting), they'll have to switch crossbows and, this is really the problematic part which causes the mention as bug, drop any armor they were wearing. If they switch back and forth a lot, they'll spend a lot of time putting on their armor time and time again. Putting on armor is already somewhat difficult for dorfs, doing it 20 times is not a great idea.

[FuzzyZergling]

Those professions won't equip armor properly, and when set to be active will immediately drop their weapon and go find a new one.
They may also claim large amounts of food, but that's less of a problem now that ownership wears off on loose items.

[IVIaarten]

Ah thanks for clearing that up

guess I'll have to find some other way to keep my military happy then. They keep complaining about the draft, some are approaching unhappy status now, since it seems they get the unhappy thought almost at every month when the schedule refreshes

[FuzzyZergling]

Complaining about the draft happens when dwarves are militarized without having any combat skills. As soon as they gain enough experience to become novices the thoughts should stop.

[Bandreus]

In my experience, you don't really need a huge amount of hunters, especially if wild life is scarce on your embark. You should likely be fine with 3 to 5 fulltime hunters you simply don't use as military (unless, say, emergency times arise). Put the rest in your military, disable the Hunter job and you shall have 0 issues.

Using your military to hunt in place of regular hunters also is a popular alternative.

[Merendel]

Using your military to hunt in place of regular hunters also is a popular alternative.

Or even better send out 3-5 hunters doing said job full time, when they have trained up to an apropreate level turn off hunting, draft them, and recruit another set of haulers for hunting training.   That way you can train your marksdwarf squads by doing something useful instead of just wasteing bolts on a target.

[sirdave79]

Dont you guys have trouble with ambushes when employing full time hunters ? Keeping the gates open or having a dwarf work outside my closed gates definately seems a bad idea in my experience ?

[AutomataKittay]

Dont you guys have trouble with ambushes when employing full time hunters ? Keeping the gates open or having a dwarf work outside my closed gates definately seems a bad idea in my experience ?

Sometimes, sometimes I just let them die as ambush detector. I've set d_init to disable labor on arrival for dwarves ever since I found it under SET_LABOR_LIST, before that it was on a whim.

[Bandreus]

Well, regarding ambushes, it varies.

In my experience, you either lock yourself off completely, taking the risk ambushes will be waiting for you that single time you need to open the gates (say, to let a carava in or w/e), or you accept the fact you need to deal with ambushes anyways.

In fact, both hunters and fisherdwarves make for a pretty much efficient (and expendable) ambush-alert system. You'll still want to place a few guard animals in key locations, as those in conjunction with surface workers will make spotting sneaky intruders a piece of cake. The sooner you spot ambushes, the less likely they are to inflict serious casualties, so it's not like the occasional unlucky dorf is going to die in vain.