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[Zeebie]

Does anyone have good strategies for cleaning up efficiently after sieges?  I'm currently getting multiple sieges a year, often with 100-200 attackers, and while my military can take care of them, cleaning up ~1000 objects and body parts afterward is proving very difficult.  My dwarfs can't seem to concentrate on low-priority tasks like hauling and dumping long enough to finish cleaning up before the next siege (not to mention the psychological damage of seeing vast piles of corpses).  I know I can do it automatically with DF Hack but I'd like to try to figure it out within the game itself.  Any thoughts?

[Telgin]

I never found a particularly good way to do this without DFHack, not to mention that it can be outright dangerous to do cleanup duty if you're getting attacked that often.

I believe Putnam once said that items lying around really don't contribute much to performance loss, so you could just choose to ignore the items and leave them forbidden.  If seeing them cluttering up the ground bothers you, you can hide them with designations if I remember right.

[Zeebie]

I'm not so worried about the performance hit - one of my issues is that I'm near a tower and when the necromancers show up they can animate the remains of the last siege and things get even messier.

[anewaname]

Corpses:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

To minimize stress, clean up the bodies first and the items later. Use the auto-forbid settings before battle to ensure all the bodies and items are forbidden during the battle, then after the battle use the Stocks menu to unforbid all the Corpses and Body Parts.

Consider specialty production lines for some corpse disposals:
- near or under the battlefield, a 3x3 room with a minecart, a magma pit, and a small wheelbarrow'ed stockpile that only accepts humans, elves, goblins, and trolls. Add a raising drawbridge to keep the room sealed off when you are not doing cleanup.
- near the butchery, a wheelbarrow'ed stockpile for beak dogs and any animal mounts the elves or humans use.

Wait until all the corpses are hauled before doing a mass-claim of the battlefield items.

Items:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

For the items, there tends to be 3 categories: metal items, leather/cloth items, and the odd stuff (books, instruments, body decorations, etc); and there tends to be three things done with them: melt them, sell them, or destroy them.

For stuff to be melted or sold, use binned stockpiles directly on the battlefield so the dwarfs have short walks, then get them to carry the entire bin inside to linked stockpiles near the depot or the smelters.

For stuff to be destroyed, reuse the above-mentioned elf/human/goblin magma pit or something similar, directly on the battlefield.

This system needs some changes to the stockpile links before and after cleanup so it is a pain, but dwarfs will get stuff done faster, especially when cleaning up lighter items like ammo and clothing.