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[Sil3nt]

Hello guys,

once every while the DF's call is too strong to resist, and i find myself back into the game! (also it's nice to find out what latest patches have brought into the game)

So i started this new fort and everything is going pretty much bug-free, except a strange behavior i'm experiencing with marksdwarves and leather armors. I have 2 squads of 5 members each, wearing leather suits to keep their movements fast enough. I made for them leather armors, helms, gloves, trousers and high boots. Now the problem is: a good half of my marksdwarves won't wear the trousers and/or the gloves (or a single glove, generally on the buckler's arm), no matter how many of those i produce. So i'm thinking what could be causing it: maeby as soon as one of the item is produced a civilian dwarf "steals it" for himself? Or maeby could be a bug about mixing materials? In fact crossbows and bucklers are made out of iron, and i read somewhere that mixing armor materials could cause a bug...

Other than that, in 44.12 the shooters are doing greatly. They chew up on bolts constantly with a single "train 5 minimum" order on a two months train/one rest schedule. Both archery targets and regular barracks assigned, but it seems they spend most of the time shooting, in fact i hardly keep up with their needs and i have 4 crafting stations...

About the equipment issue, every though is more than welcomed.
Thank you and good digging!

[PatrikLundell]

There's a long standing issue with the "over clothing" armor setting that tends to result in half of the assigned equipment not being worn. "Replace Clothing" typically works a lot better. I'm not aware of any bugs regarding armor materials, but there has been a bug regarding training/war bolts that's presumed to be solved (I don't use marksdwarves due to their suicide charges and refusals to move into range of targets out of pathing (such as the flying pests you actually want to use missiles against)).

[Sil3nt]

Hi and thank you for the answer,

Unfortunately i never used overclothing for military, i replace civ clothes by default, and leave uniformed even when off duty.
I don't know what to try then, maybe forging some copper suits and see if it changes?

[PatrikLundell]

My early uniform uses helmets, gauntlets, and greaves made out of bone rather than regular clothes made out of leather for those parts. However, that shouldn't make a difference.

[Saiko Kila]

You should write what exactly is composition of your uniform. However, I presume that's the issue with conflicting civilian and military clothing. The solution then would be NOT to assign gloves or trousers to the uniform at all. I personally not assign civilian clothes (except cloaks and hoods, but they don't conflict generally, and hoods can be used with helmets) and have no problems with equipment of marksdwarves. My armour is:
- mail shirt (from specific metal, like bismuth bronze)
- leather armor
- leather cloak
- steel helm
- hood
- white greaves (i.e. made from bone)
- gauntlet (from specific metal, like steel)
- high boot (from specific metal, like bismuth bronze)
- wood shield (stronger dwarves have it changed to metal shield)
- crossbow (either bone or specific metal, most new ones have bone crossbow)

Citizens have Over clothing setting, while mercenaries have Replace clothing (they wouldn't change most armour otherwise).

Citizens keep equipping whatever they like to complement armour on their own, including gloves (which I mass produce, they don't conflict with issued gauntlets) and trousers (also mass produced, don't conflict with issued greaves). Every single of my citizen soldiers has both greaves and trousers, and both gauntlets and gloves, despite gloves and trousers being absent in the armour template. Sometimes they equip or keep other previously equipped items like dresses, depending on availability. The only one thing conflicting there seems to be shoes, they have hard time throwing away their old shoes, and equipping boots. It resolves in time, but slowly (probably as the old shoes wear off).

Mercenaries throw away everything they had, and equip only what's allowed. They don't really need trousers with this setup.

[Sarmatian123]

My choice of military outfit:

 - helm, armor/chain+breastplate+graves, high boots (not always available, probably to give leggings a shot), gauntlets, shield, weapon.

For civilian cloths z-stocks menu and mark for dumping:

- all mittens, all caps and all shoes.

Then sell them all to caravan. In military menu assign for each position in each squad all equipment individually. It is a tedious harassment, but it works always.

Now, the cute thing is to buy all leather not only for leather armor, but also for leather cloths. They will work in combat checks like leather armor too. Except socks, as you can't make those out of leather. Now your dwarves will have doubled leather armor with their civilian clothing. Later on, under metal armor the military dwarves will have civilian leather clothing protection. Except feet of course.

So always buy leathers from all caravans, keep 10 dwarves on hunting duty and maintain excessive pastures for butcher-able animals. You could go with pigs & dogs underground pastures for starters. Though if civilian cloths lasted 5 years instead of 2 years (what dwarven fashion divas!), then maybe demand for leather would be less crazy. Leather is a smart choice.

[Sil3nt]

Hello guys,

I followed your suggestions and removed trousers and gloves from marksdwarfs uniform, added metal gauntlets and greaves instead. No clothing issues with the other pieces of armor now, i only hope their movement speed won't be slowed too much.

I have other quetions on shooters if u mind to help:

1- since in 44.12 they seems to work perfectly, is the ammunition bug (Combat/Training) been adressed or not yet? I mean, in Military menu, ammunition sub-section, can i set wooden bolts for training and metal bolts for combat? Whill they carry both of them and switch them automatically on needs?
2- if point 1 is still bugged, how can i reliably switch bolts when enemies approach? I read the wiki and i cannot understand the suggested method (Dumping/Forbidding).

Thank you again and cheers.

[Sarmatian123]

You can have your legendary bone carver carve out of bone some bone gauntlets, which have protective value and weight (500 density?) like leather too. Also as part of leather armor, you can fit metal chain mail, which is part of metal armor. So long it is not your weaklings' crossbow"hammer"dwarves police squad, lead by your fortress's equally weak captain, then military dwarves (normal & strong) should have no issue lifting 20 units of chain mail weight under leather armor too.

Combat/Training bug is still on. You don't assign combat ammo in the same time with training ammo. If you do, then dwarves will put 25 bolts of one sort and then 25 bolts of another sort, then spam you during training "equipment assignment failure". In combat they will also spam you with "equipment assignment failure" and empty 5 training bolts futilely at enemy, before closing to close combat range and using their crossbows to hammer repeatedly enemy.

1. Assign only training (wooden & bone) ammo to hunters and military squads.
2. When your hunters reach legendary levels, assign them metal bolts. It is ok then, specially if you keep smelting all recovered single metal bolts.
3. When you want your crossbowdwarves to change for combat ammo, then you need to
- in archery disable training.
- in military menu remove training ammo and add combat ammo.
- in u-units menu, find all crossbowdwarves and mark all training ammo in their quivers for dumping.
- station the crossbowdwarves
- make few checks on them all, if their training ammo is dumped yet and if military ammo is loaded yet.
- if the checks are go, then you can use them for combat, sentry assignment or hunting dangerous savage animals, which in a large group just entered your map.

I know, it is a lot of tedious micro management, but like forcefully hammering too big bolt into too small hole, you can make it work... eventually.

To reverse the change.
- in military menu change combat -> training ammo.
- in u-units find all xbow dwarves and mark in all quivers combat ammo for dumping.
- keep every while or so checking if they have dumped metal ammo yet.
- if check is ok, then enable archery training for the squad.

[Sil3nt]

Ok thank you... i guess the C/T ammo bug must be really difficult to adress, because marksdwarves are so cool they deserve a better treatment and a priority fix! My sharpshooters squads are hitting legendary rank now, i thought they needed a greater challenge so i made the archery room 20 tiles long and extended the lenght from archery targets to the maximum... it's so cool to watch the arrows' rain fly for such a distance, when 15 of them are training at the same time :-D ( too bad shooting distance doesn't influence exp gain)

[anewaname]

...I have 2 squads of 5 members each, wearing leather suits to keep their movements fast enough. I made for them leather armors, helms, gloves, trousers and high boots. Now the problem is: a good half of my marksdwarves won't wear the trousers and/or the gloves...

There can be a protective difference between clothing" and "armor" items. For legs, trousers are "clothing" and leggings and greaves are "armor", and for hands, gloves and mittens are "clothing" and gauntlets are "armor". The "armor" items can provide better protection (some are thicker and some provide better deflection properties) and your dwarfs will apply their Armor skill to increase the benefits.

So i'm thinking what could be causing it: maeby as soon as one of the item is produced a civilian dwarf "steals it" for himself?

Yeah, that happens. Civilian dwarfs will usually grab "clothing" items before military dwarfs and it has to do with the value of the item, so if you want leather cloaks for your military uniforms, you should make about 1.5 times your population in cloaks (of leather or cloth), because every migrant who arrived with a plain cloth cloak (valued at 92 urists) will want that exceptional leather cloak (valued at 190 urists).

[Sil3nt]

Thank you again to all the people who helped me 

For those who have a couple minutes to spare, i have a few more sparse questions that i cannot find answers for using google, and it is better to not open another thread i believe:

1- since i pick up every fallen training bolt to recycle it, i noticed that in the ammo stockpile they get put single, instead of in stacks of 25. Is there a way to adress this behavior? It's very annoying because the pile fills in a blink.

2- i got very offended from an elven merchant, so i decided to slain the entire caravan and dump everything (corpses, items and whatever) into my atom smasher. I was sure to get a Siege the next year, but instead another elf caravan showed up and even traded with me. In the CIV screen doesn't seem i'm at war with any elven civilisation. Is it normal??

3- looking at my prepared food barrels, i noticed that in the food description some meals have the grey string "Not edible", while other have the "Edible raw or cooked" string. Does it mean that the dwarves won't eat the not edible ones? How prepared food come out not edible?

Annoying for the older players, i know. But it would really help me understanding things better.
Thank you a lot!

[Sarmatian123]

1. It has probably something to do with amount of ammo you assign in military menu or direction the bolts are dropped into stockpile. Hard to say. I go along with default 50 and just use wooden/bone automated quantum stockpile (you need to build stop with directional dumping and in hauling menu assign mining cart to it).

You could set level below archery munitions stockpile, there training bolts are falling down. When main stockpile runs dry, then they will get the fallen bolts and you don't need to bother with collecting them.

2. It is so, when the trade is extremely fruitful, though some people reported of still getting new caravans, after some "accident happened" before getting finally sieges. It was about human merchants though in that case. Elven caravans bring you rarity fruits and many exotic pets, which after psycho system introduction in 0.44.11 suddenly is important to have access to.

3. About prepared food barrels. When using "k", all I get is their content, which upon further inspection shows all ingredients used with their quality. I have no idea how it could be gray in any part or inedible.

[PatrikLundell]

1. No DF doesn't provide any means to stack ammo (or anything else) apart from the stacks generated at creation.
2. It is normal. Before raids were implemented some people tried to goad elves into going to war against them by offending them as deeply as possible, while still having significant troubles. Interestingly, I got into war with the humies after doing them the service of eliminating their vampire diplomat (who'd killed hundreds of people), despite everything else being quite profitable for them.
3. Rotten food isn't edible. Also, there are some "food" items that are not intended as food, but still stored in that stockpile, such as barrels of blood/ichor/venom, and things like lye. I'm not aware of any actual food that can't be eaten (or drunk, in case of liquids). This doesn't mean there aren't any, though.

[Sil3nt]

Thanks to both of you!

This game's learning curve is truly infinite, after so many forts i understand i'm still a total noob. It make me appreciate even more all the dwarven science the community shares on the forum.

Cheers 

[doublestrafe]

3. Rotten food isn't edible. Also, there are some "food" items that are not intended as food, but still stored in that stockpile, such as barrels of blood/ichor/venom, and things like lye. I'm not aware of any actual food that can't be eaten (or drunk, in case of liquids). This doesn't mean there aren't any, though.

Raw fish, eggs? Not entirely sure about eggs. The wiki says they are only edible if some component (white, yolk, shell) is edible, but then fails to say whether they are or not.