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[denito]

So I embarked on a lake/multiple rivers site with 3 pages of carp, and I'm having trouble keeping the dwarf population up.  I want to armor my dwarves to help protect them but I can't spare the labor force to keep many in the military at one time.  Two questions:  if a dwarf is drafted, and puts on armor, will it come off immediately upon their returning to being a civilian, or will they wear it for a while?  And secondly, the wiki says that even a sock has some armor value.  If I made all my dwarves' clothes from leather - leather shirts, leather dresses (can you make leather socks?!) does that provide the civilians some small protection from the unspeakable horrors that lurk within these pools and streams.

(BTW embarking on a river delta full of carp is AWESOME if you hate it when fortresses get overcrowded.  In theory, I could get rid of extra immigrants almost immediately just by designating them as fisherdwarfs.  Although what's actually happened is my mason took 2 steps away from the wagon and got swallowed whole by a pike, and only 4 migrants showed up in 2-3 years...)

[puke]

making things out of leather does give you better protection than cloth.  so does giving them layers to wear.  you can actually make cloth (and then make clothes) out of adamantine, if youve got more of it than you know what to do with.

i used to draft civilians to get them to armor up a little, but honestly im not sure if it ever worked or if it was just a hopefull act of superstition.

[Jim Groovester]

You can enable hunting on all your dwarves and they'll be able to equip armor. I used this to keep some of my goblins from freezing to death on a tundra map.

However, it has several serious drawbacks. They'll spend all their time killing all the wildlife on their map, and they won't sleep in their rooms, so it's only really practical if all the wildlife is already dead. If you're trying to give them a little extra protection from goblin ambushes and the like, it's probably a better idea just to tightly regulate flow into and out of your fortress.

I don't think making leather clothes provides any inherent boost to protection over cloth. If you could make cloth armor, which is probably possible with a simple tweak to the raws, it would provide the same protection as leather, I think.

[Derakon]

Even if you do make leather clothes, you have to convince your dwarves to wear it. They'll only replace clothing when their current clothes wear out. The only way we have to get civilians to wear armor is to make them huntsdwarves.

Drafted dwarves, when undrafted, will nearly immediately drop all of their military equipment.

[Footkerchief]

There's no good way to accomplish this right now.  However, eventually you should have the option:

# Req81, ARTISANS WEARING ARMOR, (Future): Option to let dwarves always wear armor, but they won't like to do it unless they feel threatened.

[Sensei]

Wasn't it in the dev_notes that you can now apply military options such as weapons and armor to everyone, even if they aren't militarily active?

[Footkerchief]

Don't think so, although I could have missed something.  There's much better equipment handling for soldiers, at least.

[HAMMERMILL]

If you give your dwarves the Hunting labor and they will wear leather armor as civilians all the time. Boots, Helm, Armor and Leggings. They will also equip sheilds or bucklers. You can also equip and use weapons you assign them as civilian hunters. The downside is that hunting-enabled dwarves will go out and hunt. They will also have other odd side effects, like they will sleep wherever they are standing when they are tired and will never use their beds again. So expect to see Urists taking naps in their workshops, ect.

If you enable hunting for everyone, make sure to build a couple extra butcher shops and tanneries and enable the tanning and butchery professions with all these dwarves. If you have a fortress of hunting dwarves you will be drowning in a sea of dead animals and you need to be prepared to process them before they rot.

Also, making normal clothing out of leather doesn't effect its effectiveness as armor at all. Silk, cloth, leather all have a material rating of 50% So save your leather for making leather Armor instead. Getting your dwarves to wear clothing takes time also since they won't replace their clothing untill its rotted off them.

Also, if its only carp killing your dudes, armor isn't going to help. Carp kill by "dragging" the dwarf into the water where they drown. Well, actually its the Dwarf leaping into the water to tackle and wrestle the carp to death. Best solution to a carp problem is a big squad of marksdwarves.

[Fossaman]

they won't like to do it unless they feel threatened

Does feeding a few dwarves into a death chamber make the rest feel threatened? Because, you know...totally worth it. Most of us do this for fun anyway.

[Grendus]

Carp count as wildlife. Since you're trying to protect your dwarves from them, that's probably not the option you want to take.


If you want a clever solution, dam the river and airdrown the carp. The best part of this solution is it applies MAGMA!

However, leather and cloth both give 50% protection. This will change next version, but for now civvies won't wear armor unless they're set as hunters. You can give them weapons by assigning them all mining or woodcutting labors, but that has the downside of sending all your dwarves into the mines or out to the woods when you designate those tasks.

Fraid I don't have good news. However, a single marksdwarf could clear a section of the river, if you can supply him with bolts. Carp and pike don't move around too much, so you should be fine.

[Urist son of Urist]

My favorite solution to carp is drowning them.

Seriously, just go next to their little pond, dig out an underground chamber and break the wall between the pond and the chamber.  Bam, no more carp.

It doesn't work with rivers, but river-carp seem less aggressive, anyway.

[IronyOwl]

A more practical solution is probably to draft your dwarves long enough for them to train their wrestling skill up. It will help them fare better against carp, requires no odd equipment options, and increases their stats at the same time.

Of course, they'll refuse to go back to menial labor if they hit legendary, but that's not an issue unless you forget about them or they regularly have to use their new skills over a period of time.

[silhouette]

Or you could teach them to swim...

[Jim Groovester]

Or you could just carve slopes into the river bank so that if a dwarf falls in he can swim out.

[HAMMERMILL]

Carving slopes isn't a bad idea unless the miner decides to stand on the banks of the river and is eaten while doing so.

Also, I think the attacked dwarf will simply try to wrestle the fish to death untill it drowns and might ignore the chance to escape.

Its still a good practice to provide escape routes from bodies of water incase of the rare instance where a solider might "dodge" into the river during a goblin ambush or whatnot.