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[TheFlame52]

In Bastiongate's world, we have no werebeasts, only vampires. When the next update comes out I'll just get someone to tip a statue in a temple and do some experiments on said vampire.

[Skullsploder]

So here's a progress report from the fortress of Lancedweakened:

Most importantly, I have the training spears linked up to a minecart repeater and have had them going for some time. Most of the trainees are dabbling or novice in most related skills. None are actively dodging yet.

I have breeding pairs of wild capybara people and dingo people, and have setup chains at the end of a very long corridor filled with cage traps to trap their offspring in. Still working on obtaining a breeding pair of the significantly more hostile troglodytes.

The corpse processing facility just fulfilled its first bulk order of reanimated body bits. about 60 assorted arms, legs, whole bodies, and so on were brought back to unlife in this first run.

I figured out why dwarves kept wandering into the kiddies' danger room. This wasn't an issue at first, but then they started having babies and babies are soft and naked and soft naked babies tend to get perforated by pretty much anything vaguely pointy so in other words the childcare was full of dead babies for a bit. Anyway, the reason mothers were bringing their babies into a location where they were certainly going to be bludgeoned to death in their mothers' arms is that they wanted to eat lunch. The mothers that is. The mothers were getting their babies murdered in order to eat lunch in the unoccupied dining rooms in the kids' area. Some other mothers got their babies murdered trying to retrieve socks and seeds and such dropped by other mothers. It was just a bad situation for the babies all-round.
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Anyway, forbidding all the unused furniture fixed that.

I have a very basic sort of live training room under construction, just a 5*5 featherwood bridge that retracts 1z above a featherwood floor covered in cage traps. It's near the barracks so if there is some sort of horrific malfunction (like a megabeast preventing the bridge from retracting or something) the military can step in and mop up the mess.

Finally, I'm contemplating giving the kiddies access to the aboveground farms and harvest stockpiles in order to prevent cave adaptation and train them in a useful (albeit civilian) skill. Thoughts, opinions? The childcare was built one level below the surface for convenient aquifer access and control of the water for filling the kiddy pools so it's not like they'd have to go far, and I can always reconfigure the surface fort to bring the farms closer to the childcare entrance.

[miauw62]

Why the featherwood bridge?

[Skullsploder]

Why the featherwood bridge?

Extra safety. Just in case the kiddies get picked up and thrown, the skidding across the ground bit won't be as bad.

[miauw62]

Oh, right, I had assumed the bridge was to drop things in, not to cancel the class.

[Staalo]

Congratulations Skullsploder! Active dodging will start around Adept skill level; students will reach that quite quickly and after that they'll start their involuntary swimming lessons. If you're using a spear load of one per trap you might want to start planning for an advanced facility like I did in Searingmines, to help training Armor user fully.

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Since Copperfell again has a surplus of caged invaders I've decided to go for yet another round of zombification and combat training. This time I'm building a drowning chamber to get whole and unmutilated corpses; militia tends to be quite messy when creating reanimatable material. Just one question: am I correct assuming that cage release by lever works also underwater?

Otherwise progress has been very slow. Stability is getting gradually worse and I have to save often to avoid losing months worth of work in crashes, and hope the game won't crash mid-save. Speed has also declined to a steady 8 FPS which means that graduation day is still very far off.

[Max™]

I don't see why a cage release wouldn't work if submerged in anything, so magma-safe materials would work submerged in magma, and anything will work submerged in water.

[Skullsploder]

Thank you, thank you Made possible entirely by your pioneering efforts of course! 

Yep, AFAIK cages will work underwater, just like bridges, doors, floodgates, hatches, etc. Although you could always just pit the invaders into the drowning chamber, to reduce set-up hassle. But anyway that reminds me quite a bit of the real (improved) Necrobacon facility in the Ravens are Murder thread. Maybe I should also build a drowning chamber for my captured gobbos.

And could you recap quickly for me what the Searingmines special armour training facility was? A coinstar room?

One last thing is that I intend to try doing some SCIENCE with zombie sapient creatures, to see if the fact that they're undead removes the trauma training that killing them would normally provide. My money is on trauma training working normally, because IIRC undeath is essentially just a syndrome applied to a perfect copy of the living creature; or in other words, the creature is revived exactly as they were in life, same stats and everything, and then they have the zombie syndrome applied to double strength and toughness, reduce speed, cause them to attack non-undead, and so on. So their [CAN_SPEAK] and [CAN_LEARN] tags should be unaffected. Anyway, I was wondering if anyone here knew of a DFhack command or Dwarf Therapist column or something that can show me exactly how desensitised a little dwarflet is. Thanks in advance

[Staalo]

Excellent. Then everything is good to go for releasing them to their watery DOOM (muhahaha etc.). I'm reluctant to just pit them because about 80% of the time they will attack their attendant right away and the militia will have to deal messily with them.

Searingmines advanced facility was just another training room, but with maximum spear load per trap. The original had only one spear per trap and I wasn't happy with Armor user training speed.

[Skullsploder]

Have you ever tried making an entire facility of 10 spears per trap? because now that this one is up and running, I'm considering building a second minecart repeater and slowly replacing the spear traps 10 tiles at a time or so with max spear load traps. I have no shortage of wood. So the traps would mostly remain active and I'd just be replacing them a few at a time.
so yeah my question is, did the advanced armour user training facility cause any serious harm to students if left in there too long? or is it safe to use a spear load of 10 per trap across the entire childcare? Because if it takes however long to get your obscenely good results with 5 spears it should take half that many with 10, at least in theory.

[Staalo]

Yes, the Searingmines advanced facility was exactly that. I found it easier to build an entirely new facility rather than trying to refit the old one. That was my first serious Dwarven Child Care^TM fort so I was doing a lot of trial and error.

Even the full spear load did no harm to anyone fully clothed, though any exposed part would be in danger. If a student managed for instance to lose a mitten, more spears meant more chances to hurt that hand. I'd still say go for it if you have the resources and dwarfpower; training speed is really only a function of attacks to dodge over specific time. Ten times the spears = ten times more xp for Dodge and Armor user.

[Proudnerd]

Oh, right. No double entendre intended. I don't know how that one slipped through when I edited the post several times already.

They are dangerous enough even when someone isn't giving them too much head.

sicne when is there such a thing as too much head? That's like too much bacon

[Bumber]

So how about them libraries? Can children read? What are our ideal dwarven values? Should we instead turn them into mindless killing machines who care nothing for peace, friendship, family, and leisure? -50 Nature goes without saying.

I'm kind of torn on anger propensity. On one hand, it's extremely dorfy to have them be extremely unstable, rage-prone berserkers. On the other hand, it's not beneficial to the perfect solider. Decisions, decisions. Maybe we should encourage those already inclined, and put them in their own special squad: The A(rmok) Team?

[Dwarf4Explosives]

Ahh yes, the eternal question of whether to let our soldiers run A(r)mok...

[miauw62]

This thread is my... Amour(k)?

:V