Aha! Everyone floods their fortress, see!?
Heh. My previous fort taught me the important engineering principle that one should not dig upwards unless one knows
exactly what z-level(s) the aquifer is on. (I thought it was below me, obviously - turns out it was quite near the surface on that side of the map).
So.. Is there any way to more reliably draw in the undead aside from an open pathway for them?
My roped peacock is not doing the greatest as a lure. The doors I keep locking and unlocking do better, but I have lost a dwarf on accident to my very special contraption just behind it.
I would expect burrows to keep your dwarves out of the way so that you can go ahead and keep that open pathway. From what I read of the thread apparently that isn't working for you though. The animal bait should work eventually. My impression is that undead will chase the nearest living thing to them, so wild animals arriving on the map (or existing ones wandering closer) will distract them, but eventually the zombies will come back.
I'm impressed that your minecart system works so well. I thought about trying something like that but figured it would surely get jammed up running into/over corpses and corpse parts. And obviously there'd be no way for a dwarf to go in and get it running again.
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On topic: Another brief, unsatisfactory, and largely unproductive session.
Lessons learned:
1. Neither o-r-c nor forbidding them from the enhanced stocks menu will prevent dwarves from going outside to haul in those precious yak teeth and boar tusks. Laboriously d-b-f ing every z-level of the surface did work, though.
2. Rain arrives slightly before any announcement or visible indication. I
really need to claim a section of Cavern 2 or Cavern 3 (for some reason nothing grows in Cavern 1) to establish an underground tree farm.
3. On the mass pitting wiki page, "All but the first z-level can actually be staircases" is a bit confusing. As best I can tell one needs to remove the up/down stairs on both the z-level of the mass pitting stockpile and pit zone, and the z-level below it. I got a lot of "cancels pit/pond, inappropriate building" message spam getting that worked out...
4. Pitting caged enemies is not safe. The first two splatted 28 z-levels down into Cavern 1 as intended, the third somehow escaped and started rampaging through the fort.
Looks like I'll be leaning heavily on backup saves getting this crap sorted out.
Still no progress on continuing the dig toward magma or otherwise improving the fort in any way. Delay thus far: 13 months (3 months re-flooring all dirt floors as moss/fungus started sprouting; 8 month siege; 2 months and counting for post-siege cleanup). Sigh.