Does anyone know if artifacts are still restricted to champions? Trying to get a dwarf who made a warhammer during a fey mood to pick up her work and wield it...but she won't.
Do you have an Arsenal Dwarf appointed? If that's not the problem, try putting that dwarf in a squad and activating her with a Move command, then cancel it. I've had that work for convincing a hunter to pick up bolts...it forces Pick Up Equipment jobs sometimes.
My question: is there a combination of settings which will convince dwarves assigned to military squads to do individual drills consistently? After two years of frustration in my latest fortress, I finally managed to get them to activate (by designating 3+ overlapping barracks) only to find that the group drills they organize never start, and I'm going to have to give up on the game until it's patched unless I can find a way to get fighting skills raised.
Set them as inactive and they'll train individually in their spare time. It's a pain in the ass to get to work, but I managed to do it and I'm not going to tinker with it at all until they've skilled up significantly.
I think the animal has to be a full corpse, skeletons aren't any good. Someone else may have more insight though, I've only butchered large live animals, so far.
The wiki says you can butcher skeletons after they are put on a refuse stockpile. This gives bones. I just can't figure out how t do it.
I think you'll be safe against some things, but it wouldn't suprise me in the slightest if some enemies existed that would path through water without blinking, so it's probably not ideal. Also, you're right that if they're knocked in they might come inward rather than go outward, which is another good reason to fix it.
With my POP-CAP of 40 I'll probably be fine.
"Fixing" this would require digging a new moat, adding walls, or extremely creative (and dangerous) engineering; because this part of my moat is right by my river. And I didn't think to install floodgates.
Nick
I've managed to butcher skeletons with the "Butcher a dead animal" command after my butcher's laziness caused a few carcasses to rot.
For the river, I'd suggest using screw pumps to move the water of the ditch/prevent more water from flowing in. On the point where the ditch meets the river, build a pump on each input tile and set them to pump back in towards the river (You may need a short wall to prevent the water from flowing back in). After that, add in one more pump near the input to drain the ditch (Here you'll likely need a longer wall to prevent the water from flowing back into the ditch. Although, unlike the input pumps, this one won't be pumping constantly.). The pumps on the input *must* be powered by a windmill, but you can get away with manual power for the ditch.