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[CatKate]

This is Kate's stupid questions thread. Welcome!


Cleaning Question: partially answered.
Farming on Tower: partially answered, if any more ideas are around, feel free to resurrect! 
Cats Management: answered
New questions: - Dwarf Liason not talking
                       - Legendary Miner killed Cyclops
                       - newly created worlds feature only beak dogs
                       - removing stairs

The old question about Cleaning:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I have a question about cleaning. My dwarfs do not seem to be able to clean tiles which are "Inside/Light/Above Ground". I have a suitable dwarf stationed near a blood pool there and burrowed, then de-stationed, with only the "Cleaning" labor enabled. He is doing nothing, for a very long time. The same thing inside and dark, stationing him and burrowing him, then de-stationing him, works just fine, a cleaning job will be created very quickly and blood gets cleaned away.

I thought the wiki reads "interior and subterranean" when talking about where cleaning is possible, and excludes "outside" from being cleaned. Does that really mean that cleaning above ground is not possible? Any chance to build an above ground fortress without painting it red with seas of blood?

Thanks for your insights!
Cheers,
Cat

The question about the Tower Farms (Farming on constructed floors outside):

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A second question, if I may:
I have started to construct a tower and muddied one of its floors. I am able to construct farm plots on the mud. However, when I want to start farming, I always get the "no seeds available for this location" message. Why is that? There is a farm right at the bottom of the tower, able to produce six or seven different above-ground crops. There is no locked door in between, the farm plots are reachable for my farmers (they have built them in the first place, right?), there are no relevant burrows ... I am at a loss, since internet queries showed me several threads where people tell that it is possible to farm on muddied constructed floors ... Any ideas, anyone?
What has been done and not worked out:
--> farm plot was created, so farmers reached site
--> seeds were brought to plots by dumping and reclaiming, so seeds could reach site, too
--> used constructed floor as floor and constructed walls as floor
--> built the farm plot exactly on same x-and-y coordinates as ground-level plot which works fine (i.e., ruling out a different biome)

The question about cats management:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I'd also like to ask about cats management: I have safely pastured away all my cats behind a locked door. Now I am willing to let some tomcats into my fortress to hunt for vermin. Is there any way to sort cats by gender? Most other animals get different names (bitch and boar, etc ...), but no cats. Neither pasture, pit nor cage menues list the cats gender. I can only see it in the z-screen, but there I cannot move the cat (except for butchering, which is not precisely the intention). So do I miss something? Any ideas there?
Thanks for your help!

[New Question] Dwarven Liaison not talking:
Since autumn the dwarven liason is around my fortress. I admit I didn't trade with the caravan this year due to a slow broker and me missing the "is leaving soon" warning. Now the liason (listed as "Sarvesh Konlitast, outpost liaison, diplomat, under others) is hanging around in my statue garden, not even trying to talk to my guys. I had all two of my barons idle around, my mayor idle around and my broker idle around, but the liaison simply didn't want to talk. Is that usual behaviour? What can I do to make him talk? Should I simply wait until next year?

[New Question] Legendary Miner killed Cyclops:
Yeah, great thing, too. However, is that really how it should be? A semi-megabeast, killed in two (or was it three?) strikes by a leg miner with a steel pick? I had my invasion alarm set off, my military collect at the entry, and one of the guys gets bored, marches off on his own and simply kills it? I would have expected this to be more ... fun. And: One of the Cyclops' attacks hit some body part and "passes right through". What is that supposed to mean? The guy wasn't injured afterwards ...

[New Question] Newly generated worlds only contain Beak Dogs
... which isn't completely true, because there were also Grimelings and Foul Blenders around, but surely no dwarfs, humans, elves or goblins. On Embark, my people consisted of only beak dogs, who weren't able to be given work commands. I tried two pocket starts and a medium one, all with the same results. I did no other fiddling around. What did go wrong there? Three times in a row?

[New Question] Removing stairs
The reason I did these new worlds was because I wanted to find out how to remove stairs if there is no space on the same z-level. Since I cannot simulate with only Beak Dogs I'm sorry I have to ask: Can I remove them from one z-level up? Or down? I am channeling a huge space for about 15 z-levels and want my miners to have access to my fortress during that time, but will want to have that stairs removed afterwards completely. Is that possible with dug stairs? Or constructed ones? Only with ups or downs or also the ups/downs?

Thanks for your input, guys!
Cheers,
Cat

[PatrikLundell]

Second question, as I don't really know the answer to the first one (except that DFHack Performance Tweaks will remove all smears on startup, and I think there is such a command interactively as well):
I was in the process of trying this out (2, that is), and had muddied a tile on my courtyard roof. I was able to make it a farm plot, as well as to select outdoor plants to grow (which I ultimately reversed, since I don't want a plot exposed to potential hostiles). I'm still on 0.40.15, but doubt that makes a difference if you're on a reasonably recent version.
There are two things I can think of:
1. You're out of eligible seeds at that moment (all tied up in farm plots, etc).
2. You're at the end of winter, where an odd feature makes it impossible to plant anything new (in that case all your farm plots will show up only red seed entries).

[CatKate]

Thank you for your answer!

I do have enough seeds. Another farm plot on ground level can produce some five or six different crops. My seeds do not show up in red on the specific farm plot - instead of any seeds I get the message "no seeds available for this location".

On the other hand, some weeks later it IS winter now, and on the ground level farm the seeds are shown in red. Lets wait until spring and see what will happen then ...

Cheers!
Cat

[CatKate]

And no. Spring has arrived, the ground level plot offers a lot of differend crops, the plots in the tower don't ... Grrrrr ...!

[smeeprocket]

other than dfhack, dwarves kind of clean very casually. I never get them to do it even if that and hauling are their only labors.

The only time I've ever actually seen them clean is when they are too injured to do anything else, in which case they will default to trying to clean and spam me with too injured messages or they were doctors and there was blood splatter around the patient. I had three injured dwarves brawling on the operating tables and blood was getting everywhere, so the doctors kept patching them up and cleaning the area around them.

[Badger Storm]

Ugh, I feel you there.  I've got otter blood and warthog barf all over my embarks.  DFHack 40.16 can't come out soon enough.

Perhaps someone should ask Toady to make cleaning less of a headache?

[smeeprocket]

I kind of like the blood. It pleases Armok, and we all want that. Vomit needs to be cleaned though. My dwarves got all cave adapted and everytime they'd go outside there'd be puke everywhere.

[m-logik]

Unfortunately cleaning doesn't work well at the moment. Your best bet to get some targeted cleaning done is to set the place you want cleaning as a meeting area. Engravings also encourage cleaning. I *think* cleaning jobs target a 3x3 area, so that may help you with placing engravings/meeting halls judiciously.

As for the farms, I've never tried to farm on constructed floors, and have always thought that it couldn't be done. If your plots were built then I guess that must be wrong. Some guesses as to what may be happening though:
Have you looked at the tile attributes for the plots to ensure that you have the appropriate seeds? If the tower is dark, then your aboveground seeds won't be plantable there.
Are you building near the edge of a biome? Aboveground plants care about which biome they're being planted in, and with mountain biomes especially some plants will not grow.
Do you have a stockpile linking scheme set up for your seeds? If so, try deleting links and seeing if it helps.

[PatrikLundell]

Another though: I assume the floor was muddied and/or made into a farm plot when covered by a roof? Which order did you construct the roof and floor in?
What I'm guessing at here is that you might have gotten yourself an underground plot by accident.

I think I'll make a couple of experiments tomorrow (I've got an entrance roof at z+1 and the top roof at z+3, and the entrance one was built before the whole courtyard was decked over, and thus is "outdoors". I can also use the stairs I used while building the place to construct a new floor indoors (just a single tile), and drop water on it from z+2). I think that would be considered !!SCIENCE!!, although the lightweight version.

Dwarves tended to clean themselves after having been attacked by the bunker busting trees up to 0.40.13, and I assume they still will if you choke them with dust from a "normal" cave in.

[CatKate]

Hey guys, thank you very much for all the answers!

About the farms:
The farm plots were built. There are no "give/take" seed schemes around. I even have dumped some seeds on the same level next to the farm plots, but they are still unavailable. The attributes are "inside/light/above ground", optionally "outside/light/above ground", since I thought that could be the problem and removed the roof. Although when I had one-tile cave-ins due to falling trees in my former farms, those farms would forever be eligible for outside crops, no roofing-over would ever change that. Change of biome could theoretically be, but if I remember the embark correctly, the biome borders should be someplace else. And nope, just tried, farm plots on all sides will offer the same variability as the first one, only the ones on the tower won't grow ...

Thanks for your answers so far! 
Cheers,
Cat

[PatrikLundell]

A farm plot generated on a floor (at z+1) recently built with a roof (or floor) above (at z+3) already in place still allows me the option to select the usual range of outdoor plants for planting.
I don't know if dumped seeds are usable for planting though (they certainly aren't if they're still 'f'orbidden, of course), as the source seeds might have to come from a stockpile (speculation).

I think there is some kind of seed access problem, although I can't think of anything that hasn't already been ruled out.

[CatKate]

Well, the dumped seeds were unforbidden ... And there were enough seeds in my stockpiles ... I even unbuilt the farm plot and built it again ... same results. The farmers definitively reach the plots, the seeds reach the plots, but I am not allowed to use them ... Any more ideas, anybody?

Thanks for all your help!
Cheers,
Cat

[Loci]

I thought the wiki reads "interior and subterranean" when talking about where cleaning is possible, and excludes "outside" from being cleaned. Does that really mean that cleaning above ground is not possible? Any chance to build an above ground fortress without painting it red with seas of blood?

Well, bug 1140 was marked "fixed", but it isn't clear what exactly the fix was.

Anyway, you can construct paved roads to clean tiles, then remove them. You can also remove constructions and then reconstruct them to clean their tiles. Or, my favorite solution, just use dfhack to clean.

[CatKate]

Thank you, Loci. Only problem is that DHack used to crush my system on a regular basis. Well, I'll give it a try, just to clean away that stuff.

Anybody else any ideas why I cannot farm my tower? Should I upload a save? Report it as a bug? BTW, I put another storey onto the tower, this time consisting only of constructed walls. I watered these, then built a farm plot. Results are the same as the constructed floors: "No seeds available for this location" ...

[CatKate]

I'd also like to ask about cats management: I have safely pastured away all my cats behind a locked door. Now I am willing to let some tomcats into my fortress to hunt for vermin. Is there any way to sort cats by gender? Most other animals get different names (bitch and boar, etc ...), but no cats. Neither pasture, pit nor cage menues list the cats gender. I can only see it in the z-screen, but there I cannot move the cat (except for butchering, which is not precisely the intention). So do I miss something? Any ideas there?
Thanks for your help!