I'm also very interested in this topic. I know military in general & marksdwarves & bolts specifically have always been pretty fickle, but I've been successfully using them up through 47.04. However, so far in Premium I have not been able to get any marksdwarves to pick up bolts, either by attempting to follow my old habits, or trying some of the rumored fixes for Premium such as:
- Place extra coffers in the barracks assigned to the marksdwarves for them to put bolts in
- Place stockpiles for bolts inside the barracks assigned to your marksdwarves
- Place separate stockpiles for metal or wood/bone bolts, metal in the barracks, wood/bone within an archery zone
- Use the default "Archer" uniform for marksdwarves, not a custom one
- Use "Move" orders to move your marksdwarves near the stockpiles with the bolts
- Toggle your marksdwarves squad from Off Duty to Active/Training to get them to equip bolts
- Click "Update Equipment" in the uniform menu for their squad
I've been trying all of these, but still no luck.
However, I keep seeing messages from people on reddit, etc. claiming they have gotten marksdwarves to equip ammo, and often attributing their success to one of these tips, so maybe it is possible? It might be worth trying to get anybody who HAS gotten them to equip ammo to chime in and say / post a screenshot of exactly what their uniform/squad settings are, and what their barracks/archery range/bolt stockpile settings / locations are, and hopefully we could pin down a common trait? (Also a
similar thread here, maybe we could try to consolidate info?)
Of course it's also quite possible that there's just some obscure bug that is active in most saves, but randomly not affecting some saves, in which case it wouldn't matter even if we all used the same settings