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[PatrikLundell]

I've given up on mass pitting and have moved to a minecart shotgun design throwing the victims out of their cages into an atom smashing execution device. Since ogres are too large to be atom smashed I execute those by releasing from built cages with a lever to a repeating menacing spike trap near a bait door. The number of ogres is sufficiently small that it's a working solution.

[Bumber]

I've given up on mass pitting and have moved to a minecart shotgun design throwing the victims out of their cages into an atom smashing execution device. Since ogres are too large to be atom smashed I execute those by releasing from built cages with a lever to a repeating menacing spike trap near a bait door. The number of ogres is sufficiently small that it's a working solution.

According to the wiki, you can atom smash any creature while they're in a cage (if you don't mind losing the cage.)

It was also followed by this nugget:

Creatures in cages are affected by extreme temperatures, and atom smashing the cage will also obliterate the occupants, even if they are normally immune to smashing. Casting a cage in obsidian will not harm the occupants (though the temperature might if the cage is subjected to magma for very long).

Beware of cages that contain creature(s) with very high internal temperature, such as fire imps. They cannot harm your dwarves directly while caged, but their body heat can, by heating up the tile that the cage occupies.

Fire imp-powered execution device? Minecart magma dunking? (Extra points if it's an amusement ride that takes a long time to kill, nicknamed "Mr. Armok's Wild Ride". It only leaves the loop once a pressure plate reads the cart as empty.)

Wiki also says you can get liquids in a cage by triggering a cage trap in them. Magma is untested, and I'm not sure if it would stay hot.

[PatrikLundell]

I do mind losing the cages, unfortunately, but it's interesting info regardless. I've seen what happens to caged creatures when the temperature is extreme: puddles of melted fat, death, and reanimation (which teleports the reanimated critter out of the cage), assuming the biome is reanimating, of course.

[Bumber]

I do mind losing the cages, unfortunately, but it's interesting info regardless. I've seen what happens to caged creatures when the temperature is extreme: puddles of melted fat, death, and reanimation (which teleports the reanimated critter out of the cage), assuming the biome is reanimating, of course.

Well, flooding a nickel/iron cage room with magma is still an option. (Apparently, you might also be able to use a glass terrarium in a cage trap.) Even if they reanimate, the magma still melts them.
Edit: It might be more efficient to just [d]ump the cages in a magma pit with smoothed walls. Retrieving the cages afterwards would still require pumps, though.

Minecart dunking still works, too. You just need to make sure they aren't able to escape the magma pool after reanimation. Cages are retrieved automatically, but you need magma-proof rollers and power.

[PatrikLundell]

The magma idea is interesting. Unfortunately, most of my cages are always wooden ones, although I set up production of glass terraria after a while, it still takes a lot of time to catch up to demand (I use MANY cage traps...). I don't have an issue with reanimation in my normal fortresses, unless I'm careless and builds facilities in the evil biome section, which may be reanimating.

[Fleeting Frames]

Ñ gestures, due below the quote

Regarding the "run carts with cages through magma" idea, one thing to consider is that cages have 3k size, i.e. they don't divide perfectly into minecart's capacity. This means that unless something like lone gabbro mechanism to 16 cages, it's going to pick up magma[83].

Having magma in the same cart is going to heat up the items (which makes for a method of organic garbage disposal, but there is a tradeoff between heat and the largest corpse you can store), and is going to create "a pool of magma" when dumped out with Trackstop. Though the latter can't even melt ice, testing it, and this means you'll lose part of your magma on each run.

(There's also magma-immune creatures, but for those one generally doesn't have to worry about bad thoughts at seeing their corpses.)

I used DF wiki to set pit up and I had same problems with pitting like you. I read on forums, I tried a lot of things. Some players were reporting they never hit this bug and they threw goblins down the pit always without accident. Not me. Then by accident I discovered something. I wrote a bug report on it and I hoped this issue was solved by now. It is not. Yesterday, when captured a goblin party I noticed the same thing, so I guess it is not fixed yet for some reason.

https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=10564

Acknowledged, but still open.

The thing is a still suspiciously blinking war dog on chain after siege ended. Normally war dogs don't blink. Pasturing it and then retying it back to chain fixes issue with pit escaping prisoners. Like a magic.

Though, I build my pit (size 9x9 with 9 hatches) underground. My pit has 2 floors depth and on lowest floor I have 10x9 bridge. Also I have no mud around hatches on my pit or other slippery spills. Hatches are forbidden and not pet passable. Call me paranoid, but my pit works now 100% all the time.

I looked at your dog with dfhack. It's not just the troll-bridge having a relation; the dog has pathing goal 1 tile to the south that somehow goes out of the south entrance, turns around outer wall SW corner to the north, then again NW corner to the west, and ends on 2. floor tile on its run hugging the fortress north side outside.

||
This square here

Walling off that square freezes the game(in 44.09), to the point of fpause not working (unlike with 1x1 tavern freeze).

Building a wall or placing obsidian with gui/liquids on exactly that square, and no others, stops the dog blinking and removes crash by raising the bridge. However, Snang still escapes, regardless if bridge is raised first or second.

Digging a ramp next to the chain so dog has alternate theoretical unchained path to the square makes it stand on the ramp, and allows safely closing the bridge. Snang escapes in this case too.

(Unintuitively, it's not where the dog goes when placed to pasture then let go - in that case they'll sniff a pond near the south end of map before sniffing around dwarves and going to dining room on 2nd floor.)


The case with the dog seems rather similar to animals getting stuck on pet-sealable doors. Indeed, disabling pet-passability on doors built in the way has no effect, while forbidding them either way stops the game.

To stop the pathing, one needs to set chained units' idle area to their current position. So wrote a script to this fix (once, or periodically with repeat plugin):

Spoiler: pathchain.lua (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

--Fixes all chained units that want to idle elsewhere.

local chainfixes = 0

function checkPathing(unit, unitChain)
if unitChain.z ~= unit.idle_area.z or math.abs(unitChain.x1-unit.idle_area.x)>1 or math.abs(unitChain.y1-unit.idle_area.y)>1 then
unit.idle_area.x, unit.idle_area.y, unit.idle_area.z = unit.pos.x, unit.pos.y, unit.pos.z
chainfixes = chainfixes + 1
print("Fixed unit " .. unit.id .. " attempting to idle outside chained area.")
end
end

for i, chain in pairs (df.global.world.buildings.other.CHAIN) do
if chain.assigned and chain.assigned == chain.chained then
checkPathing(chain.chained, chain)
end
end

if chainfixes ~= 0 then print("Fixed " .. chainfixes .. " chained units idling.") end

I'd save it in hack/scripts/fix and run it with repeat -time 1 -timeUnits days -command [ fix/pathchain ] -name pathchain in onMapLoad.init

Whether this approach could solve other fps freezing issues or cause others on their own I don't know.

PS: Btw, seems like the lone doggo made your fort take around 15% longer for next five days, based on like two tests.
PPS: As for Snang, I got interrupts both by pasturing and rechaining and even butchering the dog. Couldn't figure out how to make them behave like other trolls, either.

[Bumber]

Having magma in the same cart is going to heat up the items (which makes for a method of organic garbage disposal, but there is a tradeoff between heat and the largest corpse you can store), and is going to create "a pool of magma" when dumped out with Trackstop. Though the latter can't even melt ice, testing it, and this means you'll lose part of your magma on each run.

What do you mean by a tradeoff between heat and largest corpse?

Is it possible to have dwarves manually remove the cages from the cart to an adjacent stockpile without issue? If you can leave the magma[83] in, then it can prevent the cart from picking up any more.

[Fleeting Frames]

Tradeoff: With 165 wooden cages (dwarves gathered plants instead of storing one more) and magma[83], the cart and cages temperature on underground magma-less floor gets into equilibrium at 73°C, not the usual 1111° that is what you normally see with cartful of magma. With 16/[33], it is 71°C. In either case, one can retrieve a cage by hand with give to stockpile link, and temperature isn't hot enough to even burn wood.

Though, hm...Wonder whether you could have unmoving minecart take full cages, and give away empty cages, with the work being done by magma inside.

Seems you can burn a wooden cage inside an iron minecart inside an iron minecart, or a dog inside an iron cage inside an iron minecart, if you hold the minecart in the same tile as 4/7 magma with magma[33] and magma[83] inside.

With that amount of magma, a wooden dog cage will be eventually destroyed with dog being unharmed until destruction, so one can't pick an amount of magma that is safe for wooden cages but not creatures.

Adding another magma[50] to that, no dice.

Skipping near the end, with just iron dog cage, iron minecart (w wooden cage) and rest magma, or even with just a cage with yak cow (I only had two dogs handy) results in no harm to either thing in container's containers'. Though dumping them out does result in the two quickly being lost, as the 1/7 magma on the same tile destroys both.

At the very least, you can still take out the single cage, so there's that. Though automating "return only after burnt" probably would require some kind of undermagma bumper system taking advantage of cart weight decreasing enough that second cart's impulse will bump it out of magma despite the friction (problem being then how one prevents second cart from permanently occupying the tile the burnination cart just left).

Or maybe using a pressure plate that reads cart weight, but that requires power or furniture.

[Bumber]

Though automating "return only after burnt" probably would require some kind of undermagma bumper system taking advantage of cart weight decreasing enough that second cart's impulse will bump it out of magma despite the friction (problem being then how one prevents second cart from permanently occupying the tile the burnination cart just left).

Undermagma rollers?

[Fleeting Frames]

Not necessarily*; cart could be moved by bumps above magma. The bumper cart doesn't even have to be in magma.

Thinking a bit and doing a small test to be sure, one could even use minecart bumping through floor to move the cart out of magma, as that impacts sideways velocity too. I.e. Track design like this:

partially filled zmagma (with two northern tiles E: all but the SE tile being track/ramps):
###
###
#╗║
#╝║
 
zabove:
╔=╗
║#╝, in from first tile, out from second tile. After the trip it slams against the wall.
║▼▼ track/ramp, but plain ╚ might work better, haven't tested.
##= again, track ramp. Lighter cart comes from east, lands on ramp, gives push below by hitting through the floor, goes east again. Pick cart weight and landing speed so that math.floor(weightratio*speed given) is just barely bigger than magma+floor friction only when all the cages are empty. Though this does require one to use cages with same weight.

There's probably more elegant and smaller ways to design this, though; just first thoughts.

* (though you could link the rollers' power train so that the moment the cage cart gets out of magma the rollers stop, thus preventing the bumper from exiting)

[Sarmatian123]

There are some creatures, whom are too large to be smashed with atom smasher. So long they are alive that is. No corpse currently is large enough for bridge. I just leave these creatures in mass pit. Even toughest get sorted out, when 72 goblins with their beak dogs get dumped on their heads. That is, if you use mass pit in ordered and cautious manner.

However lately I have second thoughts about corpses of famous "fun" creatures or even about killing all the rare monsters. Having burial ground or zoo for them, seems more valid, especially they do not mysteriously spawn out of screen from their existing numbers and you can't breed them. Though you can't exactly cage every single of them for some reason.

Currently only legendary cages release their captives, so I was thinking steel cages of master quality would be nice maybe for such a zoo? How that work? Do monsters inside of cages scare dwarves? Where to install those cages for the best effect? Library maybe for inspiration?

[Fleeting Frames]

Unless it has changed, monsters inside cages don't scare dwarves - Roomcarnage had happy thoughts from undead hair in cages.

JSYK, retire-unretire doesn't care about cage quality when it comes to releasing what is inside it. Not what you referred to, tho.

Off the bat, I'd install them where they'd be orthogonally adjacent to idling dwarves - I doubt they'd be able to observe the creatures from further away based on other buildings, but I haven't tested this and may be wrong.