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[Harken]

When you activate a burrow dwarves should be smart enough to drop whatever they are carrying, the priority being to get to safety as quickly as possible and not be burdened by whatever they are hauling.

Case in point, I had a couple guys down in my caverns cleaning up bodies and other rubbish. A good distance away a forgotten beast rolls in, I activate the burrow and all but the guy hauling a draltha corpse makes it to safety. I waited as long as I could but eventually had to close the gate - it sucks because if he had been a little less dedicated in dragging that skeleton and more on just booking it inside he'd still be alive right now.

Am I missing something, is there a way to force them to drop what they are carrying? How would you guys of handled this situation?

[Urist McVoyager]

Why is he carrying the corpse? That right there could help. If it was a hunting kill, then he was screwed no matter what. If it was just a corpse hauling job to a refuse pile, you could have used p for piles, x to erase, and cleared out all the empty spaces in the stockpile. With nowhere to put the body, he'd have taken a one-second pause to figure himself out, then booked it inside.

[Harken]

Why is he carrying the corpse? That right there could help. If it was a hunting kill, then he was screwed no matter what. If it was just a corpse hauling job to a refuse pile, you could have used p for piles, x to erase, and cleared out all the empty spaces in the stockpile. With nowhere to put the body, he'd have taken a one-second pause to figure himself out, then booked it inside.

Did you even read my post? Basically answered your questions in the original. Doing p-x wouldn't of worked as this wouldn't have erased the job until he reached the stockpile and discovered the lack of space. Either way that is a clunky method, he should of just dropped the corpse when the burrow call came.

[Urist McVoyager]

Right, clearing bodies.

Did you read my whole post? I basically gave you the answer for future cases like this. Take away the stockpile itself and you cancel the job.

[Harken]

..Doing p-x wouldn't of worked as this wouldn't have erased the job until he reached the stockpile and discovered the lack of space..

Once again.

[Urist McVoyager]

You edited that in right AFTER my post, so no, not Once Again but for the very first time.

And are you sure that wouldn't have worked? Because I often times erase stockpiles because I'm moving them elsewhere, and my dorfs start idling soon after. They drop their stuff and have to redo the job from there.

[Harken]

You edited that in right AFTER my post, so no, not Once Again but for the very first time.

No I added the last sentence. But I'm not going to argue with you over something so meaningless.
We've completely derailed this topic, so thank you for the input.
Have a good one.

Back on track. Please.

[Urist McVoyager]

And are you sure that wouldn't have worked? Because I often times erase stockpiles because I'm moving them elsewhere, and my dorfs seem to start idling soon after. They drop their stuff and have to redo the job from there.

[Harken]

And are you sure that wouldn't have worked? Because I often times erase stockpiles because I'm moving them elsewhere, and my dorfs start idling soon after. They drop their stuff and have to redo the job from there.

They start idling once they reached the target and fail to complete the task, not mid-hauling due to a stockpile removal.

[SixOfSpades]

I've found that {forbidding} items can sometimes make dwarves cancel their current hauling jobs . . . but only sometimes. I think the only reliable way is to Interrupt them with their catching sight of an enemy, so if you were really committed to this, you could build a whole bunch of 1-tile rooms in your caverns, give them each a door, and then pit a naked goblin into each one. With the doors forbidden, the goblins will stay forever, but if you ever need to spook your wayward Haulers & Woodcutters, just make all the doors Passable, and all the goblins will step outside & say hi. Of course, the danger with that method is even though your civilians have been (hopefully) scared indoors to the burrow, any military dwarves caught outside will be busy chasing down terrified goblins. But at least militiadwarves will stand a chance against a FB.

Seriously, when I saw this post & read that you'd named the dude as your General, I was expecting him to kick that FB's ass, or at least die in a horrible/hilarious way.

Also, this post is in the wrong forum. This belongs in Dwarf Mode Discussion, not Suggestions.

[StagnantSoul]

This turned into a discussion, it started as Harken suggesting to make dwarves 100% drop what they're doing and go to the burrows.

[SixOfSpades]

This turned into a discussion, it started as Harken suggesting to make dwarves 100% drop what they're doing and go to the burrows.

Almost. He asked "is there a way" and "how would you guys have handled", not "there should be a way" and "how would you guys want to see it handled".  Of course, he also said "When you activate a burrow dwarves should be smart enough to drop whatever they are carrying". While the "dwarves should be smart" clause is somewhat debatable, let's go with this.

Existing Workable But Rather Silly Method: Goblin Jack-in-the-Boxes, to "reboot" civilians mid-job.
More Realistic Method That Doesn't Yet Exist: Alarms. While it would be unreasonable for dwarves to have mysterious, telepathic, instant communication that a Civilian Alert burrow has been activated somewhere in the fort, this would be a perfect use for all those trumpets. They could be built in place in prominent locations, ideally with militiadwarves or idlers nearby to sound them without delay. Each one would have an earshot radius (although the volume would be halved in tiles that did not have direct line-of-sight to the trumpet), and everyone who heard the call (and was old enough to know what it meant) would drop what they were doing & hustle inside.

[Harken]

I've found that {forbidding} items can sometimes make dwarves cancel their current hauling jobs . . . but only sometimes.

I'll try this next time. I'm curious that you say sometimes, in what circumstances would it succeed or fail?

I think the only reliable way is to Interrupt them with their catching sight of an enemy, so if you were really committed to this, you could build a whole bunch of 1-tile rooms in your caverns, give them each a door, and then pit a naked goblin into each one.

Have you actually done this? I suppose its a solution of sorts if an obnoxious and inefficient one.

Seriously, when I saw this post & read that you'd named the dude as your General, I was expecting him to kick that FB's ass, or at least die in a horrible/hilarious way.

He did die hence the topic title. But considering he burned to death the combat log wasn't particularly exciting and left out for the sake of brevity.

Also, this post is in the wrong forum. This belongs in Dwarf Mode Discussion, not Suggestions.

The post is in the correct thread. The primary suggestion is about the dwarves dropping hauling jobs when a burrow is activated. Suggestion thread, suggestion posted. The addendum questions are just that, separate and included to satisfy my own curiosity. This is not a topic I wish to drag out so let's simply agree to disagree without interrupting the discussion.

More Realistic Method That Doesn't Yet Exist: Alarms. While it would be unreasonable for dwarves to have mysterious, telepathic, instant communication that a Civilian Alert burrow has been activated somewhere in the fort, this would be a perfect use for all those trumpets. They could be built in place in prominent locations, ideally with militiadwarves or idlers nearby to sound them without delay. Each one would have an earshot radius (although the volume would be halved in tiles that did not have direct line-of-sight to the trumpet), and everyone who heard the call (and was old enough to know what it meant) would drop what they were doing & hustle inside.

I'm assuming that in this trumpet system the dwarves would be smart enough to drop haul jobs, or would they keep carrying them due to some 'debatable dwarven intelligence' overcoming natural self preservation.

[Dirst]

Also, this post is in the wrong forum. This belongs in Dwarf Mode Discussion, not Suggestions.

The post is in the correct thread. The primary suggestion is about the dwarves dropping hauling jobs when a burrow is activated. Suggestion thread, suggestion posted. The addendum questions are just that, separate and included to satisfy my own curiosity. This is not a topic I wish to drag out so let's simply agree to disagree without interrupting the discussion.

More Realistic Method That Doesn't Yet Exist: Alarms. While it would be unreasonable for dwarves to have mysterious, telepathic, instant communication that a Civilian Alert burrow has been activated somewhere in the fort, this would be a perfect use for all those trumpets. They could be built in place in prominent locations, ideally with militiadwarves or idlers nearby to sound them without delay. Each one would have an earshot radius (although the volume would be halved in tiles that did not have direct line-of-sight to the trumpet), and everyone who heard the call (and was old enough to know what it meant) would drop what they were doing & hustle inside.

I'm assuming that in this trumpet system the dwarves would be smart enough to drop haul jobs, or would they keep carrying them due to some 'debatable dwarven intelligence' overcoming natural self preservation.

Yes, burrowing is not really the kind of fire-drill that everyone expects it to be.  It would be un-DF-like for your to be able to [k] over the Dwarf and tell him to drop what he's doing, but some actual honest-to-goodness Alarm would be a welcome feature.  The ideal one would be something like:

1. An Alarm building that incorporates a musical instrument and a mechanism can alert Dwarves in a certain radius.  These can be activated locally or linked to Levers and whatever other signals your megaproject architect can dream up.
2. Any Dwarf who knows of the alarm, sees an un-alarmed Dwarf, and is not "hiding" shouts a warning which is functionally identical to an Alarm.
3. A coverage map similar to Depot Access.

This creates the behavior that people intend with civilian alerts, but it is never instant because a lever-pull or something needs to be completed.

"Get on your feet!  Move it, vermin!  Don't you hear the alarm?!  The ≡gabbro piccolo≡ is sounding!"

[Urist McVoyager]

Not to beat a dead horse, but this morning I did Science on the matter of stockpile erasure. Four times I built a wood pile, and while people were on their way to the wood, I erased said pile. And you know what? In that very instant the idler count went back up, and people went back to the meeting place. I even did it while one of them was carrying wood, and he dropped it right there and went back to other stuff. Every single time.

So, yeah, deleting a stockpile WILL cancel the job in an instant. At least with wood. Later on I'll do it with other stuff and see if it's dependent on material. This is in the latest build, 40.14. I remember it happening on earlier versions too. So, if this holds up, then you do have a way of cancelling hauling jobs. It's clumsy, but it seem to work. The one that doesn't work is disabling hauling in the middle of a job. In that case, they will finish the job before doing something else.

This in no way cancels the validity of the suggestion. Modders have done plenty of work trying to create this sort of thing. DF Hack has an alarm built in that cancels parties, but I don't think it cancels jobs in progress, or I would have mentioned it earlier.

Building on the earlier suggestion of dwarves passing on alarm information, I think that should be expanded so that any time a dwarf sees a change to the landscape/fortress, they should tell others that they pass. It'd tell haulers and the like when they need to change their path early, rather than letting them run into a wall or locked door and get confused for a split second.