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[Sutremaine]

My dwarfs are kinda trapped in their fortress and the only consumable plant available is plump helmet (no water and thus no plants in the caverns, I already checked).  I'm wondering if I can alleviate the same old food thoughts by cooking up the raw plump helmets into biscuits or something.

I'm leaning towards no, but perhaps spawn and plant are considered different enough to count as different items. I've had dwarves get fed up with meals made only from assorted turkey parts, but unlike spawn, wine, and plump helmet, turkey meat and turkey guts don't have individual appearances in a dwarf's thought screen.

Are you getting any animals in the caverns? If you're lucky, you can catch something breedable and non-grazing. Draltha can count as both of these if you chain some wild females and set cage traps for the young, but it's a little fiddly. Giant rats and giant moles are pretty good if you can get them, though they do have very short lifespans.

Otherwise, you can just kill whatever you can handle and throw it in the pot.

[Chattox]

How do I go about getting a safe water supply without a river, and without digging into caverns? Is bucket brigading ponds my only choice?

[Crinkles]

How do I go about getting a safe water supply without a river, and without digging into caverns? Is bucket brigading ponds my only choice?

If you have a lake or ocean, drain that into a cistern. (Make sure you can shut off the flow or refresh the cistern.) Use pumps to desalinate salt water if necessary. Alternatively, make use of an aquifer. If you don't have any of those, then your question is basically "how do I get a water supply without any water", which is a problem for the ages.

[Chattox]

How do I go about getting a safe water supply without a river, and without digging into caverns? Is bucket brigading ponds my only choice?

If you have a lake or ocean, drain that into a cistern. (Make sure you can shut off the flow or refresh the cistern.) Use pumps to desalinate salt water if necessary. Alternatively, make use of an aquifer. If you don't have any of those, then your question is basically "how do I get a water supply without any water", which is a problem for the ages.

Beh, I'll embark on a river then. Just wanted to not have to worry about blocking off the flows while draining into cisterns.

[weenog]

Are you getting any animals in the caverns? If you're lucky, you can catch something breedable and non-grazing. Draltha can count as both of these if you chain some wild females and set cage traps for the young, but it's a little fiddly. Giant rats and giant moles are pretty good if you can get them, though they do have very short lifespans.

Last thing I saw in the caverns was a small group of bugbats.

Due to the reanimating biome and extreme shortage of dwarfpower right now, I don't want to risk having a meat industry -- I can't spare haulers to get garbage into the atom smasher ASAP, a cook to be waiting with no other jobs, nor soldiers to put the butchered parts back down if they get up.  If I can get something that lays eggs, and lives long enough to get a decent amount of food out of it before it dies of old age, I'll certainly exploit it, but so far I haven't seen anything like that.

[Sutremaine]

The whole site reanimates?

In that case, you're going to be waiting on a female cave crocodile or elk birds, though the elk birds are rather fiddly because they're grazers. I've never had any starve on me, though I think they get close. Presumably DFHack could peek at the exact numbers. Crundles are an option, given that they produce either no unraisable remains or very small ones. Not-an-edit: Upon reading the wiki to check out their raws, apparently they lay eggs, 5-20 at a time (I had no idea). They live for somewhere between 10 and 20 years.

Do you have any honey bee colonies on the map? It's possible to dig defensive moats from below (up stair, then channel), so if you can find a spot that's not close to the map edge and doesn't have too many undead nearby you could try making a grab for a hive. Risky, but only needs to be done once.

Bear in mind that the bad thought for 'I've been eating and drinking nothing but mushrooms for the last year' is less severe than the thought for 'I've seen everyone I love attacked by zombies and now they're zombies and also now they're attacking me too'...

[weenog]

Right now I'm just trying to get my 8 surviving dwarfs (4 members of Reclaim Expedition #3, and 4 lucky surviving migrants) happy enough that they can survive the hits when clothing starts falling apart.  I'm working on a complex trap to clear out some of the (currently around 70) zombies so I can maybe start to trade and get some pig tails and cloth, but I think I might miss this year's caravan and have to wait for next year.

[WarRoot]

I have a glass forgotten beast corpse sitting in my stockpiles. Can I make something out of it, or should I just dump it into magma?

[Garath]

can't use it unfortunately

[smjjames]

Is there a way to filter out what would piss off the elves in the trade screen other than look at every foriegn item that is decorated? Because I sold off 20k dorfbucks worth of items for a bunch of animals in an attempt to get better animals and still pissed them off somehow.

[Garath]

I just don't give them that decorated stuff. Usuall I give them meals and let the humans or dwarves carry off the garbage of questionable decoration

[L0master]

Got a question regarding (starting) caravan. I usually chain a dog adjacent to caravan and try to dig out and designate a proper underground storage area for food and other embark stuff then i deconstruct the caravan.
The question is: is such rush justified? Is food and stuff in caravan more prone to vermin/spoil/theft?
Sometimes i can't plan proper storage areas before dealing with aquifers (which is time consuming) that's why it bothers me.

[WhimsyWink]

I saw a reference recently in this forum by a player saying he routinely made archery ranges 20 tiles long and I can't find it now so I cannot attach my question there.  By all accounts, the distance to target does not matter for skill.  Could that distance be intended to create more misses for bolt recycling?

[Garath]

Got a question regarding (starting) caravan. I usually chain a dog adjacent to caravan and try to dig out and designate a proper underground storage area for food and other embark stuff then i deconstruct the caravan.
The question is: is such rush justified? Is food and stuff in caravan more prone to vermin/spoil/theft?
Sometimes i can't plan proper storage areas before dealing with aquifers (which is time consuming) that's why it bothers me.

it is highly important in areas with evil weather and such or with lots of keas and giant keas or other stealing animals. If you have a non evil biome and don't think monkeys or birds will steal your stuff, you have some more time. The wagon acts like a stockpile in preserving food

I saw a reference recently in this forum by a player saying he routinely made archery ranges 20 tiles long and I can't find it now so I cannot attach my question there.  By all accounts, the distance to target does not matter for skill.  Could that distance be intended to create more misses for bolt recycling?

it does help. I usually make them 11 tiles long or something.

[weenog]

If a cave-in falls through the space occupied by a retracting bridge (currently retracted out of the way), will the cave-in destroy the bridge?