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[Economic Snake]

I recently got my first Forgotten Beast attack in a while (a huge three-eyed pterosaur with a square shell for anyone interested), and some strange things occurred.

I immediately set my squads onto attacking it, which they did, after a lengthy descent into the caves. Things were going as expected (a dwarf died, but military mostly held its own) but after about a minute I noticed that everyone stopped moving, forgotten beast and dwarves. After pausing and looking around a bit, I found that I was being spammed with thousands upon thousands of alerts telling me that members of my military (only three specific names though) were cancelling the "pickup equipment" task because they couldn't find a path.

I'm not talking announcement spam like when you run out of barrels, I got 50 pages of announcements in the span of like 30 seconds. The game might just be slowing down, and that's why no one is moving, but I have no clue how to address the problem. Interestingly, the dwarves (actually one dwarf and two goblins) are being called by their civilian titles (i.e. dancer, poet) instead of their military titles. I'll try restarting the game, but not sure if that'll do any good (regardless, it'd be nice if it didn't happen again).

Is this a known bug, or is this some strange anomaly?
Thanks for any advice!

[Economic Snake]

Update: restarting the game has stopped the flow of announcements, but not unfrozen the dwarves. Game time is passing, but not sure if the Forgotten Beast is moving or not.

[Salmeuk]

I doubt there is a syndrome that might cause these things. Have you cleared all burrow designations or assignments?

I would try removing them from the military, re-assigning them, then ordering them to move around and see what happens.

It might be the case that these three dwarves are assigned specific weapons, instead of say a uniform, and are desperate to re-acquire whatever sword or shield they lost in the fight. Changing equipment might help this.

[Shazial]

The fact it's cancelled due to not finding a path would lead me to believe something is blocking a path, or they're going for an item that's out of reach for some reason. Dwarves tend to replace items when a better one becomes available, so did the dead dwarf maybe drop a high quality item the three might be going after, but the item is in an odd place? Did you maybe forbid a door or a hatch somewhere to block people entering, thus accidentally locking your soldiers out? Did a pathway somehow get blocked (staircase unbuilt, a statue or non-passable piece of furniture built somewhere)? Maybe a tree grew on a pathway in the cave and sealed it off so now they're sort of in a pocket? Silly random things can cause things like this. Or like Salmeuk above said, maybe they are stuck in a burrow?

[Economic Snake]

Update 2: The dwarves don't seem to be frozen anymore per se, but (unless I just don't understand dwarf fortress combat) they don't seem to be doing much. They'll dodge attacks, but apart from my markspeople they won't attack. There are more announcements now also, including dwarves cancelling jobs due to not finding a path.

I doubt there is a syndrome that might cause these things. Have you cleared all burrow designations or assignments?

I don't currently have any burrow assignments...

I would try removing them from the military, re-assigning them, then ordering them to move around and see what happens.

I thought this might work... but it doesn't seem to have any effect.

It might be the case that these three dwarves are assigned specific weapons, instead of say a uniform, and are desperate to re-acquire whatever sword or shield they lost in the fight. Changing equipment might help this.

They're assigned a type of weapon (warhammers and spears, not sure if that's what you mean by specific weapons), I would imagine unassigning and reassigning them to the squad would fix it if this were the problem, but it doesn't seem to fix it. Thanks for the suggestions though.

The fact it's cancelled due to not finding a path would lead me to believe something is blocking a path, or they're going for an item that's out of reach for some reason. Dwarves tend to replace items when a better one becomes available, so did the dead dwarf maybe drop a high quality item the three might be going after, but the item is in an odd place?

This was my initial thought as well, especially since some of my dwarves have no armor at all (I've got tons of silver, but no iron or copper), they might be trying to pick up some of the salvaged armor of dead dwarves. That being said I'm not sure how the path could be blocked, the military dwarves made their way to the beast to begin with. Thanks anyway.

[anewaname]

Doing 'd' 'b' 'f' over the area where the dwarf died should start the "healing", and consider setting the 'o' 'F' options so your own dwarfs auto-forbid their stuff and their corpse when they die. You do not want military dwarfs seeking out equipment upgrades or citizens trying to bury the dead, not while an FB is standing over the dead dwarf.

Check the FB's description, it might be creating the blocked path with some effect (smoke, gas, fire), or it might be using flight or swim to move just enough to block interrupt pathing attempts so your soldiers can't path to it (when military dwarfs are within visible sight of an FB, they will path using climbing, but they will not path using climbing when they are still out of sight of the FB and will not attempt to move closer, so sometimes the method to get the FB out of a tree is to order a move to underneath the tree so the dwarfs can see the beast).

[Salmeuk]

Hmm. This really seems like an equip issue imo. I would honestly just scrap any existing military equipment assignments, even generic ones like "warhammers" or "shields". then disband the squad. essentially returning the dwarf to vanilla status. I don't like recommending this because it takes quite some effort to assign equips in the first place

otherwise, you might have truly found a bug. if you can reproduce this gamestate then it is worth reporting

[Thisfox]

Paths can be blocked by fire or extreme heat. If the FB had some sort of fire effect, it might have made the items inaccessible due to extreme temperatures. I once had a reindeer cheese burn so firey and bright and eternal that no one could go within a few squares of it, ended up building a wall around the perimeter and putting in a new staircase that wasn't astronomically hot.

[Economic Snake]

Doing 'd' 'b' 'f' over the area where the dwarf died should start the "healing", and consider setting the 'o' 'F' options so your own dwarfs auto-forbid their stuff and their corpse when they die.

This seems to have worked! I think some ☼silver warhammer☼ or something was dropped in combat.

Check the FB's description, it might be creating the blocked path with some effect (smoke, gas, fire), or it might be using flight or swim to move just enough to block interrupt pathing attempts so your soldiers can't path to it.

I was wondering about this, my FB has both flight and fire-breathing, and my passages in that area are only 2 tiles wide. Does smoke just always count as a wall in terms of pathing?

I would honestly just scrap any existing military equipment assignments, even generic ones like "warhammers" or "shields". then disband the squad. essentially returning the dwarf to vanilla status.

Hopefully anewaname's fix works, otherwise I might have to try this.

otherwise, you might have truly found a bug. if you can reproduce this gamestate then it is worth reporting

I wonder if it's still a bug even though it was fixable. Are announcements supposed to repeat that frequently?

I once had a reindeer cheese burn so firey and bright and eternal that no one could go within a few squares of it, ended up building a wall around the perimeter and putting in a new staircase that wasn't astronomically hot.

Yikes, tasty but deadly.