Hospital patients must be given food and water by others (with the "give food/water" labours). This can mess up if you have no or only an unreliable water source or if everyone's busy with other work. If you have a healthy 10% idlers at all times and enough food and water, and if the patients are actually "resting" (there's another bug where injured dwarfs can get stuck in a non-resting state), starvation and dehydration shouldn't happen. I haven't had a patient die from neglect yet - lack of water might have killed one or two, but that was due to lack of a water source, giving reams of "cancels give water" cancellations (i.e. no bugging out after one job aborted, they kept trying over and over).
O.k., my findings -
imprisoned dwarfs will be given food and water once (both, and reliably), but not a second time. That was already known. These gifts of food and water don't wait for deep hunger or thirst, they seem to trigger pretty much the moment the blue or brown arrow appears. I don't think it triggers that early for unchained dwarfs, or random feeding/watering of fortress-dwellers would be much more prevalent.
Dwarfs who are chained aboveground seem to be very opposed to the idea of sleeping. I had five dwarfs chained outside, all became drowsy, none bothered to sleep; not even the one i built a bed underneath. A dwarf who was chained underground _did_ "sleep without a proper room", but she was chained in the middle of the booze pile anyway, so wasn't a "test subject".
The really weird thing which completely prevented this test from going anywhere:
chained dwarfs appear to be immune to cave-in dust.
I triggered six cave-ins near them, all the children and ex-inmates who were visiting were tossed around, stunned and rendered unconscious. The prisoners showed no effects,
no cave-in related thoughts, nothing. They got "choked on dust underground" (
underground???) thoughts, but were otherwise unaffected. Short of injuring them, which would be quite likely to kill or permanently cripple them, i see no way to turn prisoners unconscious on demand.
Prison assignments are very persistent: i deleted the captain of the guard squad before demolishing the chains, then, after the ex-captain still went after the (dehydrated, currently drinking) justice candidate, i drafted her into an ad-hoc squad with an order to take station near the river and check if the water is still running. She picked up a waterskin and _again_ tried to catch the dehydrating craftsdwarf, station order be damned. Nixing _that_ squad, making an ad-hoc burrow and ordering all civilians inside finally got her off the prospective victim's neck - and reset all pending prison sentences to "no officer assigned".
In short, if you don't want people starving to death in your prisons, there are a few choices:
- do without the broken justice system
- set up prisons to have food and drink freely available without depending on care labours
- force care labours to re-generate via dfhack
- mod away hunger and thirst for dwarfs in general (rather extreme, you might want to revert it after saving your prisoner or baby).
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Topic: [title edited] semi-solution for starving/dehydrated prisoners and patients (Read 18300 times)