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[Hexus]

These little buggers came to my depot during the first autumn. (I like getting a trade depot up quickly)

Then they just didn't go. Six years now, and no one else has come from the mountainhome.

I tried -

Removing the depot.

Clearing out every tree in multiple paths five tiles wide from my depot to the edge of the map in 3 of four directions. (The 4th is up a mountain)

Rebuilding the depot on top of the wagons and dwarves.

Building a second depot which works fine. Elves and human people come and go like clockwork.

As a last ditch effort, I dug a trench around the whole 5x5 room and dumped everything onto the floor below. Not only did the guards who fell just get up and continue to stand there two levels below, but now all of the wagons are FLOATING IN MIDAIR with riders sitting on them.

I'm not sure what to do, as this is my most successful fortress to date, having a magma pipe, a chasm AND a bottomless pit, all of which has, by exposing ore, led me to the motherlode of all motherlodes. Gems and precious metals galore so far. I've got four magma smelters running non stop making bars, and I have so much silver I'm paving the halls with it wherever I can't engrave.

Also, I don't know if it's related, but I've had no migrants since around the same time. The only new dwarves are babies. This also sucks because I've only got 50 dwarves and production is slowing to a crawl because I like giving orders too much.

I'm playing 40d16 vanilla. No funny business or cheating. Any suggestions? There's no easy way to dump magma on these schmoes.

[Retro]

I've encountered this before. Happened when I built the trade depot outside and a piece of land under the depot turned into a boulder. Had to open up a different path for them to leave. Don't know if that's you're problem (the floating wagons is an old bug), but you can always try building walls under them now so they have somewhere to go. Also try building a new depot somewhere else and using D to see if the merchants have a path out (don't look near the map edge, look near the wagons). Don't know for certain if any of those will work, but let us know how things progress.

[freeze]

Ugh.. well, last time this happened to me there was one merchant who was "stuck." I'm not sure if some of the items he was tryin to load got moved away from the depot or he just forgot what he was doing.

Most likely they're trying to leave and one of them is stuck if it's been six years and no berserks yet.

hard way: Go thru all of your stuff in the stocks screen, making sure all "red" items (items considered to be belonging to the caravan) are still at the depot. Find the offending red item(s) and move it/them back to the depot so they can finish loading and leave

easy way: build some handy walls/channels and wait for something dangerous to show up, or, apply magma.

[Skorpion]

I had this once; they were stuck on a channel, so I had to build a wall on the level below.

[KenboCalrissian]

The traders haven't gone insane after six years??  Weird...

Try a cave-in?  Maybe not directly over them, but near enough that the dust will push them.  If that doesn't work, then cave-in to kill.

If that fails... you said you have magma, right?

[vand]

Quite a similar situation occurred in my fortress as well recently, coincidentally

Here's the situation.  The dwarf caravan arrives, and the wagons reach my trade depot and the "blah blah are unloading goods" message appears.  However, I accidentally pulled up my main entrance (the only entrance into my fort) drawbridge that hangs over magma while the merchants with pack animals were still passing over it. After realizing, I looked at my drawbridge and saw that steel items were in the magma, but a few merchant guards and the merchants with only pack animals were outside my fort.  I assumed that one of the merchants was killed and the items carried by it were dropped into the magma, but I'm not precisely certain.  After lowering the drawbridge again, the pack animal merchants remained outside the fortress and didn't move.  The wagon merchants already at the depot had frozen in the middle of unpacking.

After time passed and the messages "the merchants are leaving soon" and "the merchants have embarked" even passed, the merchants remained in their places.  I even tried channeling them to see if they would float after reading this thread, and they do indeed float.

Just thought this would be able to divulge any possible information.

[Retro]

Merchants are jumpy critters. If you do something they're not expecting, they get all panicky and break physics. They really only seem to understand how to go to and from the trade depot, and how to fend off (or flee from) attackers along the way. Outside of that, anything's game.

[Hexus]

I felt terrible about having to do it, but I walled off the room and dropped the ceiling on them.

I felt much worse when they didn't all die...

So I rebuilt the roof and dropped it on them again. The second time left one guard as a horribly wounded straggler. Oddly enough, after the rest of the caravan and wagons were smooshed, he was happy to leave of his own accord.

Took him a while, what with all the stopping to bleed and pass out.

I did, however get a new caravan and migrants within ten minutes. Problem solved, I guess. :-O