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[Thaim]

He's confessed, he's chained up, but he still has the artefact.  Should I send my military after him?

I'd really like the item back.  I'm working on a piston to drop on his accomplice who stole it twice, and has done a stint in jail, and suffered a beating.  Screw that dwarf.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Does bulk dumping all his possessions work?
Otherwise dropping him down a very, very deep pit is satisfying and won't damage your artifact.

[PatrikLundell]

Artifacts can't be dumped using the DF UI. You can dump mark it with DFHack, but in vanilla you'll have to kill the bugger (doesn't really matter: there are thousands more where that one came from).

[knutor]

Depends what kind of artie it is. Book? Did ya interview him? Lotsa lore and flavor txt, lost if you dont talk to your thieving bastards.

This works for both, but is sick and twisted. And voids the criminal counter criminal gameplay aspects.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Murder him. Use a noble in your noble-only squad, nobles are immune to justice.

[Thaim]

It's a bone shield.

I did interview him twice, so I was surprised it wasn't confiscated.

On the bright side, he's fallen into a depression due to being chained up.  So he should die on his own.

I'm curios if it will be picked up and put back in the display case when he dies.

BTW I tried to dfhack dump it, and that didn't work.  Learning new things constantly

[knutor]

Did his name change? He may have given you leads to other, turncoats.

Ya, it'll get put back in your armor Stockpiles, but not the display. Gotta do that d, furniture display thing, over, again.

Specific Item assign it to your Champion, they should be a walking artifact hanger.

[PatrikLundell]

A bone shield should be a good artifact, as it's presumably light weight and indestructible (assuming you don't want your militia to move slowly but do occasional hard shield bashes), so assigning it to a militia member is a good move. I typically assign items to the creator.

[Thon]

Wait until he's served his sentence. Then they get put in cages ( at least that's how it happens for me ). Then d-b-c claim the cage and it's contents, d-b-d over the cage ( follow up by selecting the cage and remove dump from only the cage itself ) should work. Worked about 90% percent of the time on my previous embark, the same kangaroo bone bracelet was being stolen twice every year. I was contemplating just letting them have it so I didn't have to imprison two dwarves every year but it felt undwarflike...

If you can't get the item peacefully, my solution was to build fortifications with empty square in middle and an empty entry to the said fortification, build the cage with the offender in it (Who's still very much refusing to hand over the damn kangaroo bone bracelet), rig it to open with a lever , wall the entry. Pull the lever and call marksdwarves to target practice. Remove the wall, tell dwarves to move the artifact to the pedestal farthest away from the inn and wait for the next ' Stupid useless artifact is missing '.

On a side note, since then I started a new fort, one of the repeat offender goblins whom I arrested and beat up due to theft seems to have seen the error of his ways, came to the new fort as a poet, became a citizen and now a master crafts...goblin I guess. Still keeping an eye on him though in case he's planning a long con. Checking legends say he has left the criminal organization.

[knutor]

do any of you QSP your theftable artifacts? Have a dumb theory. Pitch um all in a doorless hole. Remove u/d stairs. Close/open retracting bridge over the hole. Secure, fortress Urists value stays high, for royalty visits.

[Bumber]

do any of you QSP your theftable artifacts? Have a dumb theory. Pitch um all in a doorless hole. Remove u/d stairs. Close/open retracting bridge over the hole. Secure, fortress Urists value stays high, for royalty visits.

Might as well put them in an inaccessible pedestal and have them increase room value. Use a raising drawbridge to access it, and add a statue or window to allow it to be part of the room.

[Alex6544]

This problem has been giving me headache. Did some googling and reading, including this thread. I haven't been able to fully figure out what methods others have tried... honestly, I wish people were more specific when they write stuff like "DFHack dump it". What is that? Which command/script? Does it mean setting the dump flag on the item (actually possible to do in DF UI, I believe, but when it's a visitor's inventory they just ignore it, I think; makes sense that they would). Or does it mean something like transfer an item to the ground?

Anyhow, after failing to find any existing and working solutions, whether they do exist or not, I ended up writing my own script for this. The idea was to conveniently find and drop artifacts to the ground. Works like a charm for me, so far. I will share it here, so maybe it can be useful to someone else too. For dropping the items, it uses moveToGround call which is relatively common in various DFHack scripts, so I suppose it should not be too dangerous save corruption-wise. That being said, can't have too many save backups .

https://pastebin.com/LzuQLe0V (dropartifact.lua)

[Salmeuk]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

neCROOOOOOOOOOOOO

might be better off posted in the DFhack thread

[Hero]

I've also had trouble pretty frequently with visitors nabbing artifacts and not giving them up even when discovered through the justice system. Not to mention, it's pretty frustrating when your captain of the guard breaks the thief during interrogation, the thief gives up who he's working for and he's still there, but the artifact's already been handed off and the mastermind is probably preparing to split in a jiffy. Four times out of five, even if you immediately schedule him for an interview, he'll be long gone before your captain of the guard can catch up with him.

The only foolproof way I've found to get stolen artifacts back is to unleash the military to hunt thieves down as soon as you find who's holding the item and kill him on the spot. But the problem with that, of course, is that it has a chance of leading to devastating loyalty cascades.

It's a real pickle. Given how artifact thefts seem to be overturned in the current version, coming several times a year if you have a double handful on display, it seems like maybe the best option is to just throw all your artifacts into a sealed vault where visitors won't be able to find them.

[brewer bob]

It's just best to kill all visiting necromancers and intelligent undead straight away. They're pretty much guaranteed to have bad intentions (I think I've seen only one int dead who actually wasn't trying to steal something or have other nefarious plans).

(Also, getting rid of enough of them makes room for regular visitors in my experience.)

[Hero]

Goblins, too, for that matter. While some do seem to be genuinely innocent, using a skilled interrogator reveals that they're involved up to the neck in plots well over half the time. And the same goes for the other creatures that are described as evil by nature, too, like serpent men and so on.