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[ocmsRzr]

I made it three years so far!  However, this is where things usually
unravel for me.  I dug out a cistern and provided a safe place for
dwarves to fish inside.

Unfortunately low booze stockpiles have caused a bunch of them to
congregate outside the fortess walls next to the river.  A dwarf and
her child fell in the river and are now being sucked towards the
waterfall on the map...

So mom and child will go over the edge and die at the bottom of the
river.  How the hell do I recover their corpses to prevent their
ghosts from giving more unhappy thoughts?  How do I console her
husband to prevent a tantrum spiral? (I'm thinking give him a really
nice room, but that may involve evicting someone.)

On a related note, because I'm pretty sure the answer is going to
involve damming the river. (which I want to do anyway) is there a
reliable way to dam a river without pumping water out faster than its
flowing in?  I want to dam the river up stream in order to completely
dig out the dry moat around my fortress.  I haven't decided if I'm
going to be able to fill/drain the moat yet.  If I do fill the moat,
should I make it two levels deep instead of one?

If I do get a building destroyer FB, what counts as a building??  If I
carve fortifications out of a smoothed wall, can the FB break them and
storm into my fortress?

Also, my booze stocks were zero, but I'm now in full time brewing
production with three stills  I hope this is enough for 110 thirsty
mouths.  Does booze have any nutritional value?

Finally, in my minds eye, is the inside of my fortress pitch black?
Can dwarves see in the dark?  Do they have torches lighting everything
up?  Its really been bothering me...


Thanks for reading!

[Shiv]

Walls and fortifications don't count as buildings that can be destroyed I don't think.  Actually, scratch that, I think it may just be walls, as I think I've seen the message 'topple a fortification' before.

As far as the corpses, engrave slabs to them and then build the slabs as a memorial.

[vanatteveldt]

Many questions, so short answers per question :-)

I made it three years so far!  However, this is where things usually
unravel for me.  I dug out a cistern and provided a safe place for
dwarves to fish inside.

Unfortunately low booze stockpiles have caused a bunch of them to
congregate outside the fortess walls next to the river.  A dwarf and
her child fell in the river and are now being sucked towards the
waterfall on the map...

You can designate a zone for drinking using the zones menu (i). Further, you set an (o)rder to only drink from designated places. But you probably want to ..

1) make a well for getting any needed water
2) really fix your booze problem first :-)

So mom and child will go over the edge and die at the bottom of the
river.  How the hell do I recover their corpses to prevent their
ghosts from giving more unhappy thoughts?  How do I console her
husband to prevent a tantrum spiral? (I'm thinking give him a really
nice room, but that may involve evicting someone.)

Make a slab, first have the mason make one, then have the craftsdwarf engrave it with the right name, and then build it somewhere.

I might be wrong here, but I don't think the drowning will give many unhappy thoughts as nobody saw it happening. He probably thinks she is off buying cigarettes :-)

On a related note, because I'm pretty sure the answer is going to
involve damming the river. (which I want to do anyway) is there a
reliable way to dam a river without pumping water out faster than its
flowing in? 

Damming rivers is hard. The options are basically getting magma up, or pumping real hard. Google should give you some detailed designs.

Dwarfs occasionally suicide near waterfalls because they think the shallow water near the edge is a great place for pathing. The easiest solution is to build a bridge over the last part of the river so they can safely cross.

I want to dam the river up stream in order to completely
dig out the dry moat around my fortress.  I haven't decided if I'm
going to be able to fill/drain the moat yet.  If I do fill the moat,
should I make it two levels deep instead of one?

Standard advise seems to be to make the moat 2 deep and only fill 1 level with water. You might have to stop water pressure by having it flow through a diagonal on z-2.

If I do get a building destroyer FB, what counts as a building??  If I
carve fortifications out of a smoothed wall, can the FB break them and
storm into my fortress?

Walls (including fortifications) and raised bridges are safe, at the moment there is nothing that can destruct them. Doors etc will be destroyed.

Also, my booze stocks were zero, but I'm now in full time brewing
production with three stills  I hope this is enough for 110 thirsty
mouths.  Does booze have any nutritional value?

That is quite strange, I regularly have 100+ dwarf forts with a single stlil. Is the still actually being used all the time?

Finally, in my minds eye, is the inside of my fortress pitch black?
Can dwarves see in the dark?  Do they have torches lighting everything
up?  Its really been bothering me...

They don't mind, they can see in the dark :-). It would be nice if a future version has some notion of creature comforts (heat, light), but at the moment the dwarfs are not very picky...

Good luck!

[KroganElite]

Fortifications are really weird:

-Not buildings
-Cannot be destroyed
-Blocks creatures if it is not submerged 5+/7 and the water/magma isn't flowing
-Archers can shoot through when standing beside(elites can shoot from farther away)
-Elite goblin crossbowmen shoot through fortifications like it's not even there
-Liquids can't flow up or down z-levels (Floor at the bottom, partial opening at the top)

[Rydel]

Anything listed as a contruction (b -> C) can't be destroyed.

With the booze question, what do you mean by "Nutritional value?"  The game doesn't keep track of how healty something it, just whether or not it's can be eaten or drunk or if it has alcohol.

If you're asking if it counts as food, no. Food and Drink are tracked separately.

[ocmsRzr]

Thanks for the great responses!  They really helped.  As soon as I started implementing some of the changes I had a goblin ambush show up with a caravan of elves.  I don't have a military, but I did have some armor and some migrants with military attributes so a mustered a squad and a few of them were promptly cut into many many pieces. 

I've cleaned up the gore, buried the dead and consoled the widowed broker next to my statue garden next to the waterfalls.  All my dwarves are fine or better according to dwarf therapist, and my makeshift hospital stole all the thread and cloth the elves were carrying. 

Somewhere in the confusion my trade depot was destroyed (is that possible?), and the elves left behind some stuff.  The most interesting of which is a breeding pair of badgers.    I want them to be my pets... How?  They're tame and in cages, but I'm afraid of setting them as available for pets in the animals screen.  I don't want a dwarf to adopt one and get his/her eyeballs clawed out when it goes to feed it. 

I know breeding happens by spores, but how do I figure out roughly how long before they have babies?

Thanks again for the help!  I survived my first ambush, and am now figuring out how to use the military so I won't be such a sitting duck next time.  A lot of good my moat did me too, I forgot to hook the bridge up to a lever and so the goblins came right in.  They also pathed around my trap corridor because I had opened up my farming area so that the farmers could tend the outside and inside crops more easily...  Not going to make that mistake twice. 

[Rydel]

Any animals brought by traders are tame, so no dwarven face-clawing.
If you want to train them as War Badgers, you need to first set up a pasture (i > n), set the settings for that pasture (N) to include them, then go to the stocks (z) and look at the animals.  There's an option to train a war animal.
You also need a Dwarf with Animal Training enabled.  Ideally, one in the military, as they'll probably follow this Dwarf around.

As for Breeding, I don't think they can breed in a cage, so you'll want to put them in a pasture (see above) for that as well.

If you need to get them out of the cages, you'll need 3 mechanisms and a spare cage
1. Build a Cage (b -> j, iirc)
2. Query the Cage and assign the badgers to it
3. Build a level (b -> T -> l)
4. Query the level and link it to the cage
5. Pull the lever

As for tending the outside crops easily, try building a wall around them, then making an underground entrance.
You may also want to build a roof (go 1 Z level up and build floors) to keep out flying creatures.

[i2amroy]

If you want to train them as War Badgers, you need to first set up a pasture (i > n), set the settings for that pasture (N) to include them, then go to the stocks (z) and look at the animals.  There's an option to train a war animal.

In vanilla DF badgers are not trainable for hunting or war. Thus you will need to add the [TRAINABLE] token to the badger creature in your save file raws before you will be able to train said badgers.