I haven't been able to find answers to these anywhere so here goes:
How do you give an item to a dwarf? I have created some steel pickaxes, flasks and backpacks for the miners to use but cant figure out how to get them to use them.
You wonīt give it to them...
they will take the items if they need them (and they arenīt forbidden)
As for backpacks...these are for the military only. Soldiers use them to store food in them.
Milking animals. I have cages full of cows right next to the farmer's workshop but a couple of things happen when I set the orders to milk. either they say 'no milkable creature available' or they are interrupted by some hostile creature (which I can only guess is the cow itself since there is nothing else in the area). Is there something specific I need to do to be able to milk something (this is DF2010 not 40d)?
Usually the announcement about hostile creatures only appearswhen, after milking, a dwarf wants to putn the cow back to its cage.
Well, what you need (aside from a cow or another milkable female animal [dwarves arre smart enough to understand that the thing coming out of male animals isnīt milk
] is a fresh bucket (the milk gets stored in it, until it can be put into a barrel as a suitable store.
Oh and you can milk each cow only once per coupleof weeks (oreven per season, donīt know the exact intervals)
Animals in cages. If I have untrained dogs in cages in the animal storage area the animal trainer can't seem to find them for training and I can't see any way to release the animal w/o installing the cage somewhere else and then letting the animal out which means a lot of guessing about which cage has the animal I want. Is there a better way of using animals in the storage area?
I notice you can make a room from a cage but I can't tell what the purpose is.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
It is easy to find out which cagecontains which animal.
If upon trying to install a cage the program asks you which cage to use, press x.
This gives you a list in which each cage is listed separately, including its content.