http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=93279
The whole game was centered around children problem. Bug, as later deduced, was somehow related to an abducted child, who remained at map as a "ghostly" data, with nothing actually at his final place, being that of abduction.
But your children situation is different, as well as version (not that it really matters). Perhaps, something happened with mountainhomes. Like, you could have severly depleted your own civilisation resourses by recent migration waves. Not sure about this, as caravans would spam regardless as long as civ itself is alive. Or maybe you encountered something similar in nature, yet highly improbable...
You should try and slab missing ghosts with DFHack, but it may not work.
Oh my, it's been almost a month?
It hasn't, not that it's much of a surprise. I have only noticed that the scattered caravan items are similar in status to those "hidden" by water flow, but marked red in the stocks screen instead of yellow. Maybe even the gear of the caravan guards had been left here. I'm dumping it all and hoping that will work. In the worst case, I get some free goods. In time, I might even become able to rely on natural population growth, but another caravan willing to take away my bone
garbage crafts can't be replaced that easily.
Anyway, thank you for giving me an excuse to read the famous Saga of Weatherwires. Man, how hard do my storytelling skills suck in comparison to this...
'Tis time for celebration! With the passing of the year 176, Wirejade turns 50 years old. I guess I should deliver something special for this occasion, so I announce that
THE MINECART WATERCANNONS ARE FINALLY WORKING!Apparently having a gear assembly power the rollers at the start of two neighbouring cannons and the minecarts in both switching it off so they don't immediately roll back where they came from is a bad combination. Gearboxes toggle on every signal sent, so sending two means they remain in the same state as before, defeating the whole purpose. I was close to disassembling everything and putting a tile more between the cannons, but alternating the length of the uppermost sections (so there is 1 gearbox/1 starting roller) is a simpler and more effective solution, which was subsequently verified by experiments. The amount of water fired depends heavily on how the water supply is designed, length of each cannon's reloading section and number of active cannons. I achieved about 40 globs of water simultaneously fired from 3 of them. Detailed schematics in the link.
The obsidian tower is getting a sterling silver roof. Good progress is being made on the statue garden, even if shortages of building materials hamper it from time to time. New minecart routes were created to transport clay to the magma kilns and crafts to the depot. Hopefully it will let me drown the elves in bone/wax/horn/whatever crap more effectively. At least the bone carvers appear to have put a dent in the mountains of animal byproducts lying around the fort. Meanwhile, setting the farms to be cultivated one season per year only resulted in the plant stocks remaining at a steady about 10500. It looks like I'll have to turn off agriculture completely for the next... few decades or so, except for rope reeds and pig tails. Dyes are not a problem. Pressing industry was restarted, and now dwarves have mead to drink.
I've never really bothered to check just how much of finished goods do I have. I ended up with over 1500 totems, and about a thousand of each of the craft types. And that's not counting the absurd amounts of bone bolts. Lesson for today: Don't go overboard with your meat industry, even if you like variety. Seriously, just don't. Otherwise, this happens.
The struggle to reclaim the second cavern level continues. The unreliable double shotgun was replaced with a new system which has yet to be tested. Mirise, a dust beast, hit a wall at high velocity while fighting the latest delivery of war animals, killing itself. Marksdwarves are more successful - they shot two firebreathers, Ospun and Uzbad Holecrabs the Nightmare of Midnight respectively in the throat and both lungs, as well as another FB called Stukos and some vomit blob. However, inorganic beasts can't be killed with bolts, and even the organic ones aren't easy to shoot to death. The occasional errors with equipping ammo make it even worse. And for some reason, wildlife returned to the cavern, which means its reclamation is even more important than before. Crundles could make a nice source of target practice, and a giant cave spider has been spotted there, too...
Speaking of FBs, they have mostly been spawning in the second cavern level, and any others were dealt with swiftly and surely. One was made of quite unusual material.
Calcareous ooze is a type of oceanic soil; I don't think I've ever got a beast made of soil before. As expected, it died quickly. But some time later, this showed up.
Ooze contaminating my moat. I'm fairly sure no dwarves were around when it appeared. Does the game spawn contaminants in places they have never actually reached? It would explain the antman ichor everywhere. Two werebeasts showed up as well: one wounded an alpaca and ran away, another encountered a crossbow-armed dwarf, who scored a lucky shot to its throat. How many more are stuck on this island? There aren't even any human settlements, only elves and kobolds.
Two more kobold thieves had been caught sneaking through the barracks, between the training soldiers. Needless to say, it didn't end well for the kobolds You'd think they would notice it might be a bad idea after carefully opening the door and seeing a bunch of heavily armed dwarves and pools of blood on the floor, but no. Another one somehow walked into the fortress proper and snatched an artifact adamantine figurine, but died mauled by a giant eagle.
Ingiz Scouredmachine became a mace lord, and one Zasit Waxycrystal a hammer lord. Since the military in Wirejade is kind of low in numbers, and some of the soldiers are of advanced age (Ingiz, for example, is over 120) I introduced a new recruitment policy. Every dwarf who comes of age must have his/her physical attributes checked. Those with above average stats are to be conscripted. So far I've got a new competent hammerdwarf; three more recruits are still dabbling at their respective weapon skills. The policy was inspired by discovering that one of the hammerdwarves, Rimtar Groovedpulleys, was born and trained from scratch in the fortress to professional levels, meaning that the whole project is feasible. Rimtar is about 40, but I don't know how long ago did I conscript him.
The recent artifacts have been thoroughly unimpressive: a bone left gauntlet, an animal trap, two splints, one of them made of adamantine, a shoe, and this. Note the name.
There seems to be a bug regarding creatures standing on top of floor hatches - they open after a while, no matter if the creature in question was going down through the hatch or not. If it's yet another war cheetah, it causes annoying report spam. Things get worse if it's a dwarf carrying something heavy.
Oh, and does anyone remember how I installed an artifact door in the entrance into the well chamber above the forges to hold any FBs inside should they fly through the opening? Probably not, it was one of the first updates after reconquering the caverns. I myself barely remembered it, until it actually served its purpose about 20 years later.
With the year 177 comes the 30th anniversary of Radavi's rampage. Time to toss in some sacrifices.
I certainly didn't expect being ninja'd.