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[Koozer]

I've had great fun making underground water reservoirs (and having babies fall in and drown...then everyone went stark raving bonkers), complex pumping and water level regulating mechanisms (I set a pressure plate up wrong and flooded half the fortress...I think that's when the babies started falling in) and accidentally flooding a dining hall with magma, but I have a lot of questions about this game

Jobs
Is it best to leave immigrants alone if they already have a job? What's the point of peasants? Is it best to leave Dwarves to get jobs themselves or should I give every peasant something useful to do? How do I make soldiers equipped with crossbows practice in the target range? If a soldier has a rubbish bone crossbow and there's a copper one in storage does he automatically upgrade?

Livestock
Are animals like horses and camels only there for the meat? How do pits work exactly? How do I get fish for a pond? How do I stop the Dwarves eating meat faster than it can reproduce?

There's probably more but I can't think of them right now...

EDIT: is there any way of blocking off a channel full of magma so I can drain the attached room without it refilling?

[(name here)]

1. generally, but only if you need that job.
2. peasants can be trained for a proffession, used as haulers, or recruited into the military
3. the only jobs they take without intervention are hauling and health care.
4. quivers, and no held items in their empty hand. also, no metal bolts.
5. no. them not doing that sort of thing shall become the bane of your existence.

[Derakon]

Immigrants: depends on what you need and what the immigrants do, but typically immigrants don't do anything useful skill-wise. If you have a weaponsmith already, for example, and an immigrant weaponsmith shows up, then he'll mainly just get in the way by making low-quality goods, unless you configure your workshops properly. Even worse for the "craftsdwarf" immigrants who have every single crafting skill enabled and are Novice in three of them, unskilled in the rest. Also keep in mind that a large fortress tends to need lots of haulers, and most construction projects need lots of unskilled masons.

You need to set up your crossbow target as a range, and make certain it's pointing in the right direction. Then, off-duty marksdwarves will go there on occasion to practice, if you have wooden or bone bolts available (they won't use metal bolts in practice).

You can dump the bone crossbow and he'll get a new one, or switch his weapon type (e.g. to unarmed), causing him to drop his crossbow, then forbid it, then tell him to get a new one. However, copper has no different quality from bone; they both do half-damage in melee and are equally good at range.

Livestock are useful for meat, bone, skin, fat, as sentries, and, rarely, for defense.

Pits are activity zones placed next to a change in elevation. You can assign a creature to a pit, and a dwarf will come along, grab the creature, and throw it into the pit. This works poorly with thieves, though, who tend to escape.

Dwarves with fishing enabled will automatically find valid fishing areas. Alternately, you can define fishing zones the same way you define pits.

Dwarves eat when they're hungry. If you don't want them to eat meat, have something else available. Keeping them from eating at all is generally a bad idea.

[Golgath]

EDIT: is there any way of blocking off a channel full of magma so I can drain the attached room without it refilling?

If you can find a way to dump a good bit of water onto the magma in the channel, it will solidify into obsidian, which will allow you to drain your room.  I'm not entirely sure, but when I've used the pond feature to do this, it didn't seem sufficient, so try to rig up a way to dump a bunch of water on the magma.

[Skanky]

If you dump water directly onto magma, the water will evaporate. If you dump the water next to the magma, it will spill over onto the magma and solidify it. So I have heard, anyway.

[Hectonkhyres]

If you want to save one type of food for a special occasion just put a stockpile for only that food in a room with doors. Lock the doors and you have yourself a meat timecapsule ready to send to The Year Two-Thousand Thousand Thousand Thousand...

[E-mouse]

Would forbidding the meat stack or barrel it's in also work for preserving specific types of meat? Just make sure they have SOMETHING to eat.

If you want more production of a certain type of creature (and thus their meat), get more adult females for breeding.

[Bigulp]

Immigrants can be employed in production just fine if you take the time to micro manage workshops, stockpiles, and the dwarfs themselves. Most of the time I assign my extra guys to produce something that builds skill but doesn't take to much space up, and once they become masters they get their own workshop to produce quality items. I would say half become haulers for life, a fraction are drafted, quite a few get jobs as farmers, a handful become crafters. Take the time to consider what you want to build and manage your dwarfs in a way that will accomplish it quickly. If you're trying to build a giant tower you will need more than one mason.

Livestock can be tricky, it is easy for it to get out of hand and kill your fps, the way in which pets function and make it even more difficult to control herd populations.  If you want to use your livestock to feed your dwarfs pick a large animal to breed because it yields more and will allow you to keep your dwarfs feed with a smaller herd. I would make sure that you have some sort of automated system to handle your livestock, from breeding to slaughter other wise you could end up with pets which will only lead to more frustration. Cage your animals immediately after you arrive at your fort!

[slink]

This is my method of livestock management.

After every calving/foaling, I cage all the young and release all the adults, for every species of food animal (we don't eat cats or dogs in my fortresses).  That keeps the young safe from marauding goblins and so forth, and allows the adults to get on with breeding for the next season.  If you don't have cages at first, this is not critical.

Then I go through the Animal list under (z) Status, starting from the bottom up.  For every species, I count backwards through 6 male adults.  Those will be the youngest six adult males.  Every male above that on the list is marked for slaughter, unless it has a name.  I do the same for females, only I leave 24 adult females alive.  This is tedious but results a lower number of non-productive animals and prevents perfectly good meat from dying of old age.

With these herds I have more than enough meat to feed 215 dwarves with their choice of horse, donkey, cow, muskox, and one-humped camel.  I also buy exotic meat from caravans, so my dwarves can satisfy any urges for a midnight snack of hoary marmot or what have you.

[Deon]

Would forbidding the meat stack or barrel it's in also work for preserving specific types of meat? Just make sure they have SOMETHING to eat.

If you want more production of a certain type of creature (and thus their meat), get more adult females for breeding.

Make sure you forbid the meat INSIDE of the barrel. If you forbid the barrel only your dwarves will not move it around but will happly eat everything inside of it.

[Hague]

Okay, here's what I do. Peasants, while innately useless, can be very useful. It only takes 27 bars of a particular metal to turn a sniveling peasant into the possibility of an artifact weapon. Have your peasant work in a shop and make 27 maces, 27 pairs of gauntlets (if you're going for an armorer) or 27 metal chains/buckets (for a metal crafter). Since this skill will be their highest skill they will increase the odds of your strange moods producing an artifact weapon/armor/metalwork. Even if you only intend on using these peasants for haulers, having them know a useful skill will save you from getting another stonecrafter mood or otherwise.

[Agent_Irons]

Training animals in DF is so much fun. Marauding Rhesus macaques were driving me crazy by striking when I least expected it. Eventually I got my defenses in order, and now I'm killing them off when they show up, and caging the ringleaders.

Caged named fire imps. Got you.

He's chained outside the fort. Come Siege time (50 dwarves and counting up!) he'll be the first. (against the wall when the revolution comes).

I keep the puppies and kittens in a cage to save my FPS. When they get old enough I let them out. I'm pretty close to critical mass (dwarf food needs balance against breeding levels) I should prolly cage most of the adult males too? War dogs still breed, right? If they do, I'll train up a bunch of war dogs and assign one to each person likely to go outside ever.

[MagicJuggler]

I modded Fire Imps and gave them the Pet_Exotic tag. I use them as flamethrowers turrets of a sort; keep them chained up and when it is time to fire away, one opens the doors blocking line-of-sight.

For immigrants, it depends. If you have something useless like "Soap Maker" on a map with no sand (and therefore no way to make an alchemist's laboratory) then you would be better served switching his job around). Also, disabling hunting in undead-infested areas is a good policy to keep track of. 

Livestock are only for the meat...and the bones...and the leather (useful for quivers/backpacks/bags). Or with chains/rope you can use them as a primitive thief-detection system. Chain one outside the door to your base, and when a Goblin or Kobold tries to sneak past, it detects it for you.

[pushy]

I keep the puppies and kittens in a cage to save my FPS. When they get old enough I let them out. I'm pretty close to critical mass (dwarf food needs balance against breeding levels) I should prolly cage most of the adult males too? War dogs still breed, right? If they do, I'll train up a bunch of war dogs and assign one to each person likely to go outside ever.

...you keep kittens? Are you mad?!?
My livestock farming operation has been running for a few years. I've got 2 males and 10 females of: dogs, horses, cows and donkeys. I've got 1 male and 1 female of cats (the female came with my initial wagon and WAS going to be slaughtered after I got the male via trading, but it adopted my legendary glassmaker as its owner just in time to save itself). These produce LOADS of infants to keep my butchers going (hell, I've got three butchers workshops and three tanners just to keep up. Even with just 5 females I imagine a single butcher would still have his/her hands full)

War dogs still breed, yes.

Regarding caging the adult males, for any creatures that serve no purpose except as livestock, kill all but a couple of the adult males (leaving those ones for breeding). Keeping war dogs and having them assigned to dwarves, it might be better to use males for that, and keeping females locked away in your fort so when they have puppies your butchers (or animal haulers) aren't going halfway across the map to collect the pups that are following their mum who's accompanying a woodcutter or fisherdwarf out for a little stroll.