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[Uthimienure]

I'm learning more about the usefulness of burrows. The civilian alert works well, and assign the military squads to the burrow as well if you don't want them to encounter the enemy until you're ready without having to Station them.

Just made a new one (to me) that worked good... the Vacation burrow.  Since the burrow's areas don't need to be connected to each other, it's easy.  Includes the following areas: Library, Temple, Tavern, Bedrooms, Mayor's Office for complaints, Lever rooms, CoG's office if they need interrogating, and perhaps workshops that keep the vacationers happy.

Of the first 5 unhappy dorfs put on vacation, 3 had their stress drop drastically in a couple of months, the other 2 aren't working out because of their personal tendencies.  But if I can save 60% of the ones starting the spiral down, it's an easy therapy.

[nickbii]

I'm learning more about the usefulness of burrows. The civilian alert works well, and assign the military squads to the burrow as well if you don't want them to encounter the enemy until you're ready without having to Station them.

Just made a new one (to me) that worked good... the Vacation burrow.  Since the burrow's areas don't need to be connected to each other, it's easy.  Includes the following areas: Library, Temple, Tavern, Bedrooms, Mayor's Office for complaints, Lever rooms, CoG's office if they need interrogating, and perhaps workshops that keep the vacationers happy.

Of the first 5 unhappy dorfs put on vacation, 3 had their stress drop drastically in a couple of months, the other 2 aren't working out because of their personal tendencies.  But if I can save 60% of the ones starting the spiral down, it's an easy therapy.

That's...fucking brilliant...

I got about 6 people I have to send on vacay for about a year.

[Starver]

As a counterpoint, I never use Civilian Alert burrow stuff because they do nothing for me (possibly because I don't fully understand them, yet?) and happily stick to the 'pure' burrow behaviour to do more or less everything I want.

The only burrows that I use are for civilian alerts. They're great for forcing dwarves underground, or for keeping them off a battlefield. The key is realizing that you can designate burrows in three dimensions. So you can easily create a burrow that covers the entire map, from the surface all the way down to the magma. Then carve out the areas where you don't want the civilians to go. When the invaders show up, set that burrow on alert to keep your civilians from trying to reset traps or clean up blood during the battle.

Now, you see, I do all that for normal burrows. I don't understand why you'd need to use the alert thingy...

I think it's a one-touch operation, as an advantage, but I already did all the work to keep everyone but lumberjacks and certain builders 'inside' (and a similar set of conditions to keep anyone from unwise cavern exploration, whilever I have caverns that can be unwisely explored) so I already did all the 'hard' work. The rest is just accountancy...

Which is not to say that I haven't missed the Killer App (or Livesaver App) bit, because I avoided the alerts bit entirely.

[PatrikLundell]

Well, if you keep everyone inside and keep them there, then a normal burrow would work. If, however, you want your dorfs to harvest fruit, log (and use those logs) under normal circumstances but call them back inside when bad things appear, you need civilian alerts. Those alerts differ from regular ones in that they actually order the morons to move inside the burrow, rather than just keep twiddling their thumbs and staring blankly ahead of themselves until there's actually something to do inside the burrow.

I use 4 standard civilian alert burrows, Surface, Cavern 1, Cavern 2, and Cavern 3. None of them are active normally. The surface one covers the whole map except the surface and entrance tunnels, while Cavern 1/2/3 cover everything but their cavern. I normally have the access to caverns closed, but when I start working on securing a cavern I order building of walls along the cavern edges, keeping a close eye at the local wildlife to determine when to withdraw (using a civilian alert). Once a cavern is secured there's obviously no need for that alert burrow, but that can take many decades.
Oh, and the new FB behavior requires access to the fortress to lure them into my FB killer traps, which is a painful exercise in single tick micro management, in addition to having to remember to activate the appropriate civ alert to block the morons from trying to clean up the mess the FB is causing.

If normal burrows could be enabled/disabled their usability would increase considerable, as it's a pain to manually add and remove dorfs as needs change (Hey, Mr & Mrs Breeder, it's time to breed another one: into your burrow [which still is a pain due to cancellation spam and refusal to move, including illegal socialize/prayer/reading activities]!).

I actually have a regular burrow that keeps members inside permanently: the kid burrow. Kids are added to that burrow as they mature into children and are removed as they turn into adults. The kids tend to have to be released when they mood, though.

[Starver]

Already covered logging. A normal burrow that defines a woodcutting area outside gives me even finer control, and I can switch 'membership' off from that (or one of several) if I need them to vacate the area (or concentrate on another priority one).

Fruit harvesting isn't really a big thing for me, but I tend to surround any 'orchard' area that I decide to keep with my massive protective walls/ditches/(roofing|bridging)-overs, as appropriate, like I do my grazing lands, 'aboveground'[1] fields. They'd be 'inside' for the purpose of burrows. Anybody working there is as safe as anybody else.


What I find missing from burrows is 'combinatorial' functions. Defining a burrow as the Union or Intersection of two(/more) preously defined burrows. Or Inversions (define "cavern burrow" that is used as a set-difference with various more general "fortress column" burrows to exclude cavernour areas from all those others while only 'painting' one extra burrow with the details to do so). And a Therapist-like interface for reviewing memberships across all dwarves, because that's where you can fall over if you gae access to "Dining" burrow, "Bedrooms" burrow, "Trading" burrow, and whichever work-related burrow(s) you want a dwarf for (by going into each and adding her in) and then later remove them from some but not all of those, forgetting they're still tied into one of them.

But I work around that easily enough. Long practice. And I love micromanagement.


[1] Not quite right. Aboveground crops tend to be tended to in fields sunken into the soily ground, on a level with the subteranean soily farms. Having dug the recessed field I can floor over the 'ground' level and it's enclosed but "outside", and I've been known to reuse the 'new ground' now built of stone blocks for other things.

[anewaname]

An example of burrows used for an ocean embark with husking fogs. It is also currently under siege and FBs roam the caverns, so many of the burrows are disabled...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Above - everything above sea-level.
Below - everything below sea-level (Above and Below include everything in the embark).
Inside - most of the internal fort.
Above-ImmediateTmp - some plant/fruit zones near the fort's walls and temporary wood hauling areas.
CandyMill - candy gathering areas, where risk was involved.
fixerBurrow - was a temporary area for a water project in the depths, where risk was involved.
tempCaveWood - Used when the Below Burrow is disabled, to limit what cavern stuff the dwarfs attempt to haul.

So, you don't need to create a civilian alert at all. As soon as you disable any of the burrows for the Inactive alert, the civilians are limited to the remaining burrows.

None of these burrows have citizens assigned to them, mostly because of my unwillingness to spend the time on it.

The Above and Below burrows were created in the first few months of the fort and have not been changed since then. They are disabled most of the time now, but sometimes I enable one for a while to allow a mob of haulers to clean up the "siege is over and there is litter everywhere" situations.

[Uthimienure]

I'm learning more about the usefulness of burrows. The civilian alert works well, and assign the military squads to the burrow as well if you don't want them to encounter the enemy until you're ready without having to Station them.

Just made a new one (to me) that worked good... the Vacation burrow.  Since the burrow's areas don't need to be connected to each other, it's easy.  Includes the following areas: Library, Temple, Tavern, Bedrooms, Mayor's Office for complaints, Lever rooms, CoG's office if they need interrogating, and perhaps workshops that keep the vacationers happy.

Of the first 5 unhappy dorfs put on vacation, 3 had their stress drop drastically in a couple of months, the other 2 aren't working out because of their personal tendencies.  But if I can save 60% of the ones starting the spiral down, it's an easy therapy.

That's...fucking brilliant...

I got about 6 people I have to send on vacay for about a year.

@nickbii  ---------  I forgot to say that I turn off all labors for vacationers except: Levers, a craft for those that have the Need, Plant Gathering if they need to Wander, etc. But only a bare minimum because most of the time they need to socialize and pray.  The ones that have too many gods can't pray to them all and this won't cure them.

----
Also, for this fort I'm trying for the first time to make 90% of the dorfs spend enough time above-ground to shed their cave adaptation.  They work faster building the castle and gathering wood.  I may be sorry for this later, but it's what I'm doing. One easy way is to have almost everyone in a squads with staggered training months, with a barracks in each roofless tower. This way they all get over their puking and live without adaptation so they can move fast and kill without it dragging them down. There's always 2 squads training up there so response time is quick when baddies come.

We'll see if I get mass hysteria from the rain, but so far 8 years in (the last 3 years with the above-ground training) I've only had 2 of 60 who went nuts, with 1 more on the way. Not bad.

It's almost constantly raining - a barren volcano embark with nothing but some dead trees.  I'm using the caves for pasturing a large Yak herd.

[muldrake]

I'm learning more about the usefulness of burrows. The civilian alert works well, and assign the military squads to the burrow as well if you don't want them to encounter the enemy until you're ready without having to Station them.

I usually do this, this is the only burrow I create early on.  Then I might have another for candy extraction and manufacture, especially if I set up a small set of quarters and workshops for that purpose.  And I might have another couple for military purposes, like archer towers, if I bother doing that.

But this idea sounds great:

Just made a new one (to me) that worked good... the Vacation burrow.  Since the burrow's areas don't need to be connected to each other, it's easy.  Includes the following areas: Library, Temple, Tavern, Bedrooms, Mayor's Office for complaints, Lever rooms, CoG's office if they need interrogating, and perhaps workshops that keep the vacationers happy.

I'll certainly give this a try next opportunity I have.