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[DwarfUli]

I had a horrible event take place tonight (beautiful). I was working on my first attempt at an elaborate aquaduct system, 13 z-level up in the sky, when one of my chickens jumped into one of the water basins. I observed and laughed...then another chicken jumped in....were they trying to drink water? Oh well, the loss of two chickens to finish this part of my aquaduct was no big deal, it was then that my expedition leader/broker/book-keeper(/animal care-taker.....something i forgot) decided to jump after them and tried saving them (?? I still don't know why he went after them really, only thing I can think of was that he was only one with animal care-taking on). I panicked and created a burrow, trying to get him to give up his quest of diving into a 2 z-level deep wooden tunnel after two stupid chickens as the tiles filled from 1/7 to 7/7 in 10-20 seconds. Every dorf in my fort went to the burrow, but despite him being assigned to the burrow, he kept going after the chickens? He died, and now my broker is a peasant dorf who can barely speak or write.

What's the best way to quickly get to move a dorf away from danger? Even if they don't really want to?

[Schmaven]

What's the best way to quickly get to move a dorf away from danger? Even if they don't really want to?

Unless that danger is a hostile unit, assigning them to a squad and issuing a station order is about the best you can do.

[PatrikLundell]

An ordinary burrow assignment is utterly useless when it comes to force dorfs into it. Dorfs engaged in activities will continue with them until done or the activity specifies a target location that's outside of the burrow. When the target is outside of the burrow the activity will be broken off, but half of the time it's replaced by extremely high rate cancellation spam when the dorf was set to deliver something to that location, and is too stupid to drop the item, so a new attempt is performed every tick.
In the remaining cases (when the current task is broken off), the dorf will usually stand still staring vacantly into the distance most of the time, as it can't find any activity inside the burrow, and is forbidden to take any jobs outside of it. If the activity was broken off in an activity zone, the dorf often takes up that zone's activity, even though the zone is outside of the burrow (i.e. socializing, praying).
If a burrow contains things like food, drink, owned beds, or activity zones a dorf will eventually have stood frozen for long enough for an associated need to kick in, at which time the "job" to fulfill it will finally get the bugger to drag its sorry ass into the burrow.

Civilian alerts cause dorfs to actually break off their activities and move to the burrow, but they're still not smart enough to drop heavy weights, so the dorf tasked with constructing a wall in a cavern will very slowly carry the construction rock back into the burrow when the civilian alert is activated.

[coalboat]

Using burrow to move dwarfs around is not easy at all. I very rarely use burrow. In this case, I think it's possible that the chickens and dwarf didn't go there voluntarily. Maybe they were pushed by water flow. When the water is half filled, dwarfs think they can wade it. Then the water flows and shoves them around causing accidents. It might be a good idea to make the aqueduct inaccessible to dwarfs, until it's completely filled.

[HmH]

I've seen dwarves do a lot of stupid things, but suicide by cock is a first for me.

Maybe the dwarf was trying to pick up one of the chickens' corpses? Look at the combat reports - the chicken might have been crushed by one of the boulders that got moved around by flowing water.

[Thisfox]

Sounds like a pathing issue to me: They thought it was the fastest route to an unknown location. Although if one of the chickens died it's possible the dorf was retrieving the corpse. The chickens don't need to drink water from a pool of water, and can usually swim quite well, although they don't tend to be good at directed horizontal movement while swimming. Incidentally, always design a fast way of draining a cistern or moat. I once had a cistern with a useful artifact at the bottom of it (hilarious series of unfortunate events involving werebeasts led to an iron axe being at the bottom of the hospitals private well) and it was frustrating and dangerous trying to build a well drainage system after the fact.

Burrows (horrid newfangled things) are really not designed for dorf extraction. Instead, if it must happen, a new career in the military is the best way to go (as people are saying here). Also in most cases dorfs are expendable. An illiterate peasant expedition leader won't be a big deal, someone else can do the managing, bookkeeping and trading for him. He's just a figurehead.

[DwarfUli]

Burrows (horrid newfangled things) are really not designed for dorf extraction. Instead, if it must happen, a new career in the military is the best way to go (as people are saying here). Also in most cases dorfs are expendable. An illiterate peasant expedition leader won't be a big deal, someone else can do the managing, bookkeeping and trading for him. He's just a figurehead.

Thank you everyone for the good advice. I have started learning some of the ins and outs of running a military, so I can extract dorfs quickly and quite frankly, I need better defense than; "There
come the goblins! raise the drawbridge!". I am at around 60-70 citizens now and created 2 militia squads.


Thisfox, what you said about someone else doing his jobs for him, you were totally right. In all honesty, I always assumed that the broker/manager/book-keeper dorf was the most "delicately" trained dorf; being a decent judge of intent, having knowledge of techniques of persuasion (the skills even sound somewhat "elvish") etc. but he was quite easily replaced to be honest (At this point I had about 50-60 dorfs). This sort of made me wonder if the points I use at embark preparation to raise a dorf's skill levels could be better used towards taking more equipment with me on the journey, or maybe even more important, more animals. I must say, having 8-10 chickens laying eggs makes worrying about food much less of a problem early on. I struggle getting fabric production going, same with glass, and often wish I could bring more stuff on my journey (without using hacks). Animals I could shear and such, especially sheep would be fun.

It seems that most people use all available points to train their dorfs, and then use the leftover points for gear and animals. I personally never give a dorf at embark over an expert "8" level assignment in anything. My best two miners start at 8, my carpenter starts at 8 etc. I need to look into embark more I suppose.

I also seem to pretty much never have anything to trade at the first visit of a trader. Maybe I should grab some things at embark just for that reason. Maybe some large cut gems or something valuable.

[Schmaven]

Points spent on Dwarf skills are limited, and therefore don't compete much with points spent on embark items.  I usually just give the dwarves hard to acquire skills like swimming, dodging, or discipline, depending on the embark hazards.  I wouldn't waste points on bringing items to trade unless in their raw form: ie. bringing wood logs to make spiked wooden balls.  But even then, I'd rather just bring an axe if there are trees on the embark.  To stretch your points, you can save a lot by bringing ores and crafting your armor / weapons rather than bringing them already formed.  Also, sand bags are cheaper than regular bags.

[DwarfUli]

Points spent on Dwarf skills are limited, and therefore don't compete much with points spent on embark items.  I usually just give the dwarves hard to acquire skills like swimming, dodging, or discipline, depending on the embark hazards.  I wouldn't waste points on bringing items to trade unless in their raw form: ie. bringing wood logs to make spiked wooden balls.  But even then, I'd rather just bring an axe if there are trees on the embark.  To stretch your points, you can save a lot by bringing ores and crafting your armor / weapons rather than bringing them already formed.  Also, sand bags are cheaper than regular bags.

Super useful, thanks Schmaven. I didn't know about sand bags being cheaper and I tend to train only one starting dorf, my axeman military dorf, in things like dodging and I don't think I have ever trained discipline  I tend to have 2 miner dorfs and one of them I give novice swimming for obvious reasons. 

[Thisfox]

As others have said, I give the first seven dorfs the hard-to-acquire skills, such as swimming, musicianship, singing, and so on. I do try to have at least one very accomplished trader and some speardorfs with teaching skills though.

Interesting that you want your miners so well trained. I turn up with no training for my miners, and assign them after the fact. For the first 7 it's okay to have one dorf do all the office jobs including brokering, but as soon as you can, spread the jobs around, as one single member of the fort doing all the things leads to that dorf having serious stress problems. YMMV, of course.

For my first trade, if I have wood, I sell wheelbarrows. They're easy to make, the carpenter gets better at carpentry, and they sell well. Buckets and stepladders are good idea (but be careful not to sell the ones the fruit-pickers are currently using or they'll get stuck up a tree). I also like the roleplaying aspect of watching a caravan leave with a couple dozen wheelbarrows, I guess. I often also sell tables and chairs and empty stone pots, and coffins and anthing else we can make in a hurry.