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[sir_schwick]

I want to assign my military dwarves appropriate duties for when they are off duty.  The goal is to have tasks that maintain important attributes such as strength and endurance.  Here is a provisional list with reasons attached.  Tell me which ones are incorrect, and further suggestions.

Mining - think that helps with some weapon skills and strength.
Woodcutting - I believe woodcutting increases axe related skills.
Hunting(some) - does this help marksdwarves
Stone Hauling - strength
Pump Operating - does this help with physical stats?

[NRDL]

Unless it's been changed, I believe pump operating is like weight-lifting for dwarves. 

[Sutremaine]

Sparring is the best way of keeping combat attributes up. Why not just leave them on duty all the time?

Mining raises weapon skill only if your military uses picks as a weapon.
Woodcutting raises woodcutting skill only and does not affect the axe skill used for axe-wielding.
Hunting will raise Archery and Crossbow skill once the dwarf starts shooting. But since hunters have their own leather uniforms, you're better off putting your military in their usual metal gear and manually sending them after the animals that appear on the map. You could also set traps at chokepoints in the caverns and let them shoot at whatever you catch. If you can get animals who breed naturally, great. You have a renewable supply of targets.
Hauling raises no stats at all, because it is not a skill.
Pump Operating isn't that impressive. I did a test earlier in the year and over the course of six months got about 150 points of Endurance and 18 points each of Strength and Toughness. That was with attribut decay turned off, as well.

I normally just turn attribute decay off. I prefer that any dedicated haulers I have not become worse at their jobs as the years pass.

[Oaktree]

Once I have a magma-based Foundry going my militia get assigned Furnace Worker, Armor Smith and Weapon Smith so that they can take turns doing smelting and making low-skill metal items like bolts or if necessary stuff that will simply be remelted.  Those tasks help some of the right stats and I am also trying to get one of the smithing skills to be the one chosen if a militia member get a mood while off duty.  (Militia also tend to get Mason and Mechanic assigned since that ensures that traps and walls get worked on fairly rapidly.)

[Hans Lemurson]

Furnace operator is a decent militia-job, if you have the capability to melt down lots of items to generate the jobs.  Haven't looked into how much the attribute boost there is per job.  Engraver is also good (have your militia smooth out large sections of floors) since it boosts agility, and Kinesthetic and Spatial senses, which make your dwarves handier with weapons.

It's best though to just try to get your dwarves to be on full-time training with a lot of sparring.  You can actually give multiple "train" orders in one schedule slot.  In the schedules screen, Tab lets you switch between the schedule slots and the list of orders given for each slot.  I've heard that a bunch of "Training, minimum 2" orders in each slot is a great way to produce lots of sparring, but have not personally tested this.

If you just want to boost their physical attributes though, Pump operator works (but is slow), or you can try pelting them with small non-lethal items (like seeds).  It's also slow on a per plink basis, but you can dump a LOT of items on a dwarf.  The "industrialized" form of this is to have a small 2x1 pit with two retracting bridges set on repeat to create an eternally shifting floor that flings items back and forth.  Trains up armor-user real good and by the time they are Legendary, their physical stats will have received a +500 boost in almost all of their physical stats.  It's a different kind of danger room.

If you're just planning on using your off-duty military like regular workers though, (rather than putting them through an exhaustive and non wealth-producing training regimen), then it really doesn't matter WHAT they do, because normal civilian tasks train up attributes about 100x too slow to be useful.  The exception to this is Mining, because each square dug = 1 job, so your miners can easily be given hundreds of tasks to complete, and thus give meaningful boosts to their military stats.  If the mining job equipment didn't conflict so horribly with soldier's equipment, then mining would be the ideal "idle military job".

However, since mining skill now only affects speed and not ore yields, there's no problem with drafting your tough veteran miners into the military and replacing them with noobs.

My fundamental point though is that there really isn't any good "Off-Duty task for the militia".  If you're not going to embark on an intensive training program to boost their stats, then it doesn't really matter what task they do, because aside from hauling, there aren't very many jobs that are done on a truly large scale in a fort that will provide noticeable benefits in under a decade.

[crazysheep]

I want to assign my military dwarves appropriate duties for when they are off duty.  The goal is to have tasks that maintain important attributes such as strength and endurance.  Here is a provisional list with reasons attached.  Tell me which ones are incorrect, and further suggestions.

Mining - think that helps with some weapon skills and strength.
Woodcutting - I believe woodcutting increases axe related skills.
Hunting(some) - does this help marksdwarves
Stone Hauling - strength
Pump Operating - does this help with physical stats?

Hunting definitely helps marksdwarves, but sometimes there isn't anything to hunt, and they just idle anyway. What I've found is not giving them any job actually helps them more - since they don't have anything to do, they just spar or train in their barracks. And that is way more helpful than training them up through mundane, everyday tasks.

[hops]

Let them spar and if you see animals just send them to kill them (make sure they're properly armored or else it might be embarrassing when your dwarves get killed)

[Twangykid]

Both milking and cheese making give strength, endurance, agility, and kinesthetic sense. (and some useless attributes.)
Start up yo' cheese industry.

[parlor_tricks]

I can chime in a bit, because Ive been working on this problem as well.

Pumping is only good for endurance.

Gains to other skills are negligible for development.

Mining is strength focused, but after a while you require large scale mega projects to mine constantly.

Masonry - similar. I have 6 masonry workshops churning blocks out to up strength.

Gains are uneven, especially since so many blocks being made means clutter, and hence a semi mega project on top of the one I already had running. I now have a 4 story wall with cRenallations hanging walkways to the edge of the map, and various other pointless quality of life improvements.

Not the best ways of doing it, I'm looking at siege operating as an alternative, but with the problems with hauling I had to reconsider.

I suspect that I got more agi gain From switching everyone to marks dwarves though, I'm trying to optimize that, because woodcutters can clear cut entire embarks (including 2 tree farms) with mediocre gains to attribs. Multiple woodcutters will clear it out fast.

[Telgin]

I've had pretty good success with a screw pump gym, and I've seen significant improvements in physical attributes for off duty dwarves.  Endurance is by far the one that benefits the most, but strength also improves.  This doesn't train agility, I'm pretty sure, which is arguably considerably more important than endurance.

Sparring is quite good at improving stats though, that much is hard to dispute.  Pretty much any dwarf that has been in my military for 5 years or so has very good physical stats from the sparring.  If you can keep morale up despite having them on duty year round, this may be the best way to improve stats.

Hauling won't give stat boosts by the way.  Of that I'm almost certain.  Mining, wood cutting and hunting are also very annoying for military dwarves due to the uniform issue, but hunting will at least train marksdwarves.

[Damiac]

If you're taking them off duty to prevent long patrol thoughts, you're doing it wrong.  Which is to say, it doesn't work.  Download the binary patched exe file to fix that, they're only supposed to get long patrol thoughts when on... long patrols.

I have all my squads on 5 train 2 minimum orders, and although I get some sparring, I wouldn't say I got a lot.  I train my marksdwarves with manual hunting and bird shooting (which generates tons of single bolts everywhere...).  I tried using my melee dwarves on animals, but they spend much too much time running around trying to catch the animals for that to be worthwhile.

[sir_schwick]

If you're taking them off duty to prevent long patrol thoughts, you're doing it wrong.  Which is to say, it doesn't work.  Download the binary patched exe file to fix that, they're only supposed to get long patrol thoughts when on... long patrols.

Does this patch work with Masterworks, and where would I get it?

[JimboM12]

If you're taking them off duty to prevent long patrol thoughts, you're doing it wrong.  Which is to say, it doesn't work.  Download the binary patched exe file to fix that, they're only supposed to get long patrol thoughts when on... long patrols.

Does this patch work with Masterworks, and where would I get it?

Afaik, it should, Masterworks modding is mostly raws and the like. I'm using the binary patched exe with Masterwork 1.9.5 and its fine so far.

[knutor]

The bonus we get mainly from Mining is Toughness.  The way to get it is to mine oneself off a precipice and then get mended via traction.  This raises Toughness, fairly quickly.

I believe swimming, or traversing 4+/7 water ways, is one way to raise Agility.  Agility determines soldier blip chase speed, or escape speed in the case of burrowing Hunters before a Siege.   The speed after adjustments for weight, missing legs and age are calculated.  Not sure age plays any factor, but it should.  So should a laden female's extra cargo.  If swimming is too hard to setup, try Fishing.  Fish don't even need to be caught to gain Agility from it. 

On that line of thought, liquids don't even need to be pumped through a screw, in order to gain Endurance.

Training in armor, improves Strength.  Not sure what else.  I like Mining for Toughness, however, not Strength.  But that's just me, I haven't noticed much Strength gain in Miners.  Could Miners gain Spatial sense?

[knutor]

A handy Attribute table.