Wondering if there's any way to see what a selected dwarf is doing without having to find them in the [ u ] menu.
As Dunamisdeos said use [v]iew and move the cursor to a dwarf.
Also, a random thought, is there a difference between different types of floors?
Different materials for floors and if they're engraved or not determine the value of a room designated on top of it.
I disabled everything in the smaller stockpile other than the toys that I'm making and... it didn't work.
You need to enable qualities and materials to have anything come to the stockpile: If a material or quality is disabled no item of this material
or this qualty will be brought to the pile. Stuff won't be carried off the stockpile unless there is somewhere else to take it to.
I wonder how the stockpile settings work in terms of overlapping types. If I enable limonite and disable instruments, would a limonite instrument qualify?
To put it simply if the item has
any property that is disabled it will not be brought to the stockpile. So in a stockpile with limonite enabled and instruments disabled no instrument will be stored, even if it is made of limonite.
MeimieFan88 has been found dead, dehydrated. Weird that he was in bed when he died. The booze was just one floor down! I've no clue how this happened.
Since he was in bed, it is likely he was injured and brought there to rest/heal. Injured/resting dwarfs will never drink alcohol and are unable to supply themselves, they need to be fed water with a bucket by another dwarf. So no matter how much booze you had, if you don't have water your're injured dwarfs will die. (This is a longstanding bug that has permeated deeply into the dwarf fortress community, it is caused by alcohol not being defined as a proper liquid and can't be transported in a bucket in fortress mode[this also means you can't make a pool of liqueur to swim in
])
ust noticed that the bins have symbols next to their names, like ≡. Is this the amount of stuff stored in the bin?
These signs signifies the quality of whatever you're looking at. ≡ is the second highest level. You can look at a table
here.
In fact, all of the bins have at least one item that has dwarf frozen blood coating in it
Yes, irrelevant for now. Means just what it says.
It looks like we're out of plump helmet spawns and ammunition.
If you are just getting no plump helmets as a job cancelling message, it doesn't actually mean you don't have any plump helmet spawn, just that all of them are in use. This can happen if the seeds are in bags in barrels and the barrels are used otherwise, for example putting food inside. It's not dangerous, just annoying. One way to avoid some of the spam is to make a separate stockpile where you disable barrels and everything but seeds and disable seeds in all other food stockpiles. if seeds aren't disabled, dwarfs will prefer to put them in the stockpiles with barrels allowed. This does take a lot of space though.
Does the surface count as Outside?
Yes.
there doesn't seem to be an activity zone on the square.
to dump down a shaft you put the zone adjacent to the hole, dwarfs will then dump stuff down the shaft. They will also always prefer to dump in a garbage dump with a shaft, even if another is close by, which is why they are ignoring yours.
Can you reclaim an individual item inside a bin while it's in a dump?
Yes. The easiest way to empty bins is to designate them for dumping through the [d] menu and then undump them manually. This removes the dump order on the bins, but not on the items inside and those are carried off, leaving the bin empty.
Hard to tell if anyone died...
In the units screen is one screen for deceased and your people should show up there but you won't know how or when they died(the list is last death on top, first at the bottom but nothing specific) and this screen shows
all dead so yours are likely buried and difficult to find. You could also check if the squads are still fully manned. And, of course, you could look for bodies.
To fix this I'll make a seed stockpile somewhere and disallow storage containers
Correct! (I'm writing as I'm reading so I apologize for repetitions.) You also need to turn off seeds in all the other stockpiles because dwarfs will prefer to put things in barrels.
Nail (Berbekar) died.
Noooooooo!
Still, the war dog and stray kitten are not being buried
Animals only get put in coffins when they belonged to a dwarf (basically if they have a name) and you allow it.
rat weed seeds
Rat weeds are above ground crops and since we're on a glacier those won't do us any good.
Can't we melt it into water somehow?
Well, there
is a way to make usable water on a glacier, but it involves magma, lag and more ways to go wrong than most other projects in Dwarf Fortress, so this is probably not something for you to attempt. Also it takes
ages. For a good story that features this (fairly late though) see
The Rise and Fall of Roomcarnage.
Not sure if his showing up had to do with my digging into the caverns on z-level 27 to reach the water source.
FBs automatically path into your fortress when they have access.
A human caravan arrived today, but our site was inaccessible so it was bypassed?
This means there is something in the way in the path to your depot. Dwarf and Human caravans need a three tile wide passage so their wagons can get to you. To check if your depot is accesible, press [D ].
"The mayor meets with the outpost liaison. Let's talk about your situation."
The dwarves send out a diplomat along with their caravan. You can request goods from him witch the caravan will bring the next year, tough at higher cost.
Will they ever leave, or like, starve to death?
They will leave eventually. And they can't get past a raised drawbridge.
We have quite a few captives in our cage stockpile. Not sure what use they are. I can assign them to um, graze at a pen/pasture, but that doesn't seem like a great idea for some reason.
Yes. It is not. You can use the same method as with the bins(designate the cages through the [d ] menu and undump manually) to disarm the captives.
Otherwise, you can throw them down a pit or build an arena for your troops to train with them. Not really important jet.
Wonder if Forgotten Beasts are catchable?
Yes, but with great difficulty and you can't tame them. They have the trapavoid tag, so they aren't usually captured by cage traps. To do so you need to web the cage trap, something quite difficult.
what's a masterpiece?
This is the highest quality level. Dwarfs will get a happy thought for walking by masterpiece furniture, for example. Masterpiece weapons are much stronger than their normal counterparts. In general Masterpiece=good.