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[Kat]

playing v47.

Thief stole an artifact. Thief confessed, is imprisoned... but still holds the artifact. How do I get it back, other than sending the police squad to beat them to death ?

Ditto for thieves who are citizens. Do they return the artifact when released from prison ?

[Panando]

Typically thieves drop an artifact if their theft is interrupted, but it may be left invisible (dwarves will still return it to its display place)

If they haven't dropped it, I'm not sure. Things to try would be startling them by showing them enemies (e.g. through windows or fortifications) or dropping them into water, this often causes dwarves to drop what they are carrying.

[brewer bob]

Ditto for thieves who are citizens. Do they return the artifact when released from prison ?

They'll continue to try to deliver the stolen item to the visitor who corrupted them, iirc. You can get them to drop the item at least with civilian alerts (when they reach the burrow, they drop it), but as long as the scheming visitor is alive/at the fort they'll keep on stealing it.

(I guess we'll just have to wait for this to be fixed since there's quite a bit before Toady gets to finishing the villains release...)

[Thisfox]

Depending on the artifact, it might be possible to drown the thief and retrieve it. Alternatively, you could put thief cage-and-all on your pedestal and display the lot....

If you want to stop this irritating stealing thing from happening, grab a chain/rope and a tame animal. Tether said animal so that it can walk over the pedestal where your artifact is. I have once or twice done this with animals that periodically lost their tameness, and although watching a series of thieves come up to steal and loose a limb to the chained alligator was hilarious, I recommend some beast that will stay tame. A parrot or a monkey works well (I shop from the elves). So does a puppy. For some reason after I started chaining my menagerie over my artifacts, I never had another theft. I get the idea the thieves want to avoid being watched by an animal while stealing, but a caged animal doesn't work, so perhaps they want to avoid being touched by an animal. I just don't know, but it is effective.

[Superdorf]

A parrot or a monkey works well (I shop from the elves).

Look... if you were a would-be artifact thief, would you wanna mess with this? I wouldn't