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[rungus]

So I built a library to see what that's all about, and because I had a few migrants with wordsmith skills.

I now have one visitor who is a necromancer, and I just wonder if the book they brought will convert my fortress to the dark arts, or if I don't need to worry about that.

And I just happened to click on another visitor and he has my artifact silver mace 'strapped to their body'. At least, I'm pretty sure that one of my dwarves made that mace.

Now, I've never got far enough into the game to have anyone try to steal one of my things, and I'm not sure what to do. I've set up a captain of the guard, but what now? Should I just attack them? Or wait and see how it plays out?

And should I hide all my artifacts somewhere? I've put my artifacts in a little stockpile of their own in my dining room to try to avoid accidentally selling them to traders, but I wonder if I should do something more sensible with them.

edit: Actually, I'm beginning to think that maybe it wasn't one my of artifacts, but was one that he just turned up with. Which reminds me of another question I kept wanting to ask: I keep getting new migrants who have already had a strange mood. It doesn't tell me what they created, but they might be a master bowyer or a master weaponsmith, but they still have an unrealised dream of mastering a skill, or creating a great work of art. Is that something that happens often?

Oh, and what's the easiest way to stop my dwarves from carrying every useless tooth from a fight in the caverns up to my refuse stockpiles? If I cancel teeth in my refuse stockpiles, then is there a downside to that? I like them having the order to bring corpses from outside for butchering because that's good meat there, and my dwarves don't like waste, but bringing 50 hungry head teeth up from the caverns when I'm not paying attention is pretty annoying.

[orius]

Well, I don't have a lot of experience with safeguarding artifacts yet, but my plan is to make a museum to house the artifacts in display cases.  Said museum is to have 1 single entrance accessed only from the main training hall for my army, open only to the residents of my fort, and have a corridor with pastured war dogs and other war beasts leading into it.  Let the thieves run the gauntlet and get slaughtered.

If you see a visitor stealing your stuff, I say go ahead and kill them, especially if they don't belong to a civilization that interacts with you.  You'll probably want to maintain backup saves to monitor things in Legends mode or to export info into Legends Viewer if you use that.

The necromancer might just be looking to party, but it's more likely they're there to corrupt your dwarves.  That's something else that you'll need to plow through the Legends info to find out though.  Go ahead and kill them if you want, necro books don't have the secrets of life or death anyway (the slabs have that), and it's just free reading material for your dorfs.

I'm pretty sure teeth don't rot and produce miasma, so you don't have to worry about that.  The only downside is the clutter, but if you can live with it, then it shouldn't be a problem.  You can set corpses and body parts to be forbidden on death from the "o" menu, but you'll have to unforbid rottable stuff that's in your fort manually.  Or you can make sure the refuse stockpiles don't have teeth activated I think.

[PatrikLundell]

- Necromancers often write a lot of books, and some of those are about the secret of life and death, so that book could definitely be one of those. The name should give an indication (in one fortress the human caravan regularly brought books with the secret of life and death, and all of those books were copies of books written by a necro. Presumably, the humans had conquered the necro tower and seized the books as plunder). The slab is the original given to the necro, but the knowledge can be transferred into books.

- The artifact weapon was probably stolen by one of the dorfs and given to the villain contact who's now carrying it. If the theft hasn't been reported yet and no other crime has been either, you can do absolutely nothing except killing the villain. If you have an injustice system in place and have at least one unresolved crime reported you can use the injustice system to interrogate and sentence the villain. According to some reports you can get the artifact back if you sentence the villain directly, but if you interrogate the villain first he won't give it up, so you have to kill him to get it back (it might be possible to use sentence the villain and use DFHack to dump the artifact to get it from the villain, but there's no vanilla way to get it back).

- There is no way to protect your artifacts that does not involve locking them away. Furniture can be placed, and won't be stolen, and artifact military equipment assigned and equipped to militia is probably safe (if the dorf corrupted to steal it is the wearer that might not work). Nothing else that can be stolen can't be protected unless locked away. Convicting dorfs of crimes has no deterring effect whatsoever (unless beatings are lethal, of course), and killing villains and their agents doesn't either, as there are hundreds upon hundreds of them (I've teleported them into the magma sea for about 50 years in my 0.47.04 fortress, and they're still coming, even though I'm running out of regular visitors since they've died off due to old age and sieges [as well as lethal evil weather]). Dorfs also have very little defense against corruption, and villains just try again if corruption attempts fail, as there are no consequences for failures.
As you can see, I find the current Villains functionality to be completely unbalanced.

- Teeth probably decay, but it takes a very long time. Bags get worn one X level in about 20 years, while wood is said to take a few hundred, and teeth are probably stronger than that still. A refuse stockpile ought to speed the decay of teeth as well, but it likely takes too long to matter if it does.
If you remove teeth from the refuse stockpile the dorfs will still pick up teeth from sapients and haul them to the corpse stockpile, which is probably what you want. One downside to not have any stockpile place for teeth is that you probably won't have any ivory for the craftdwarf workshop, which is probably not much of an issue. Another is that you'll have clutter that may look unsightly, which probably isn't much of an issue either, and I believe the 'h'ide functionality is there to not make it unsightly either (but you'd have to hide each tooth individually, unless you write a DFHack script for it).

[Thisfox]

If the artifacts are just in a stockpile in the main room then yeah, they're pretty easy to steal. An artifact stockpile room with a lot of guarding dogs might be a better plan, and some players even wall them into vaults, making them inaccessible, but also not stealable.

I've had a few nasties turn up at my fort who were carrying artifacts. Giants, Ettins, and so on can carry something in, and after they're slaughtered, the artifact is mine. I also found artifacts in the caverns, courtesy of Monster Hunters carrying an artifact in, dying to cave crocodile or spider attack, and leaving a neat pile of belongings for me to unforbid. Perhaps you can organise an "accident" for this visitor?

[PatrikLundell]

Note that neither display cases nor pedestals do anything to protect displayed artifacts. They may, if you're lucky, increase the chance that someone sees the artifact being taken (and report it to whoever runs the injustice system), but they won't do anything directly.
I doubt guard animals would do anything, because the thief is one of your own dorfs, who hands the stolen artifact over to the villain (or the villain's henchman, henceforth just called villain as well). Once villains have received the stolen artifact they tend to leave soon after, although it might be that they stay a little time in the tavern. I've definitely had cases that pausing the game immediately when the theft is reported hasn't been soon enough, because the villain is already outside of the fortress (and its long entrance tunnels), with no way to either lock them in or catch them, and I think I've even had a case where the villain wasn't even on the map when the theft was reported.

Like Thisfox, I've had a case or two of semi megabeasts carrying artifacts (which could be gotten from their cages with DFHackery), and I too have seen visitors bringing artifacts (most found among the piles left where they died entering/exiting the fortress during sieges, although some croaked due to old age on entrance or while the year turned over while they were in the tavern). As mentioned, it's possible to liberate visitors of their artifacts, although I don't think the non lethal option is available through pure vanilla means.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Doesn't stripping the cage prisoner in the normal vanilla way rob them of their artifacts?

[PatrikLundell]

I don't think so, because you can't dump artifacts in vanilla. It just refuses to set the flag on artifacts (possibly because it's refusing to treat artifacts as refuse).

[Shonai_Dweller]

I don't think so, because you can't dump artifacts in vanilla. It just refuses to set the flag on artifacts (possibly because it's refusing to treat artifacts as refuse).

Can you claim it, then mark it to be carried to the trade depot maybe?

[PatrikLundell]

I don't think so, because you can't dump artifacts in vanilla. It just refuses to set the flag on artifacts (possibly because it's refusing to treat artifacts as refuse).

Can you claim it, then mark it to be carried to the trade depot maybe?

I don't know for certain. Using DFHack to claim and dump works, but I don't know if claiming has restrictions similar to dumping, although my guess is that it doesn't. If claiming it works you ought to be able to designate it for being placed on display as well, which wouldn't rely on the trade depot being open for trade. I guess someone ought to test it.

However, since the cage stripping method involves dumping, there ought to be something that blocks ordinary hauling to stockpiles (or the dumping step would be redundant), so the fact that the item is in an inventory presumably blocks some operations on them, so it would be a matter of finding out which operations work and which don't.

In the OP situation, the stolen item already ought to be marked as yours, and, in the case of something on display, already is marked for being supposed to be on display, but doesn't cause dorfs to flock to the thief to retrieve the artifact.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Will try next time I catch an Ettin that's been wielding the secrets of life and death on a slab. A strangely not so rare occurrence...