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[greycat]

I also have some wild animals (mainly lizards) that have been caught and caged there. Can I butcher them for meat and skins? If so, how?

There are actually two separate animal -> meat (etc.) conversion processes: "Butcher" and "Slaughter".  "Butcher" can be done to the corpse of an animal that was not tame at the moment of death.  Just build a butcher shop near the corpse, or haul the corpse close to an existing butcher shop.  If the default setting (auto-butcher) is still on, then DF will automatically queue up a "Butcher Animal" job, and hopefully some dwarf with that labor enabled will get to it before the corpse rots.  Once the corpse starts to rot, you can't butcher it until it rots all the way down to a skeleton, or partial skeleton.  At that point, you can butcher the skellie into bones.  Butchering takes quite a while, especially for larger corpses that clutter the workshop.

"Slaughter" is performed on a live tame animal.  When you mark an animal for slaughter (either from the (v) (p) (l) menu, or from the (z) (Animals) menu), a dwarf will walk the live animal to a butcher shop (you don't get to pick which one, other than by using burrows, or forbidding the shop's constituent building material, etc.), and kill it.  Slaughtering is instantaneous -- the animal just splits apart into neat little bone, fat, meat, etc. stacks.

So, if the animal is tamable, then you get to choose: tame and then slaughter it, or kill it manually and then butcher it.  If the animal is not tamable, then you will have to go with option #2.  Option #2 has the advantage of giving your military more practice, if you use the military to do the killing, rather than traps or gravity or water or ....

[greycat]

If water moves over a tile, then contaminants on that tile disappear, right? I ask because the entrance to my fort is rather...BLOODY (thinking of switching to silver/iron spiked balls instead of discs...because, come on, this is getting ridiculous, there little 5x5 area in front of it has a pool on EVERY tile).

NO. Water will MULTIPLY contaminants.

Allowing water to wash over a contaminated tile will indeed create more contamination downstream.

Forcing contaminated animals (including dwarves) to walk through a 2/7 or 3/7 non-flowing water tile will remove all the contaminants from the animal and deposit them in the water's tile.  Then, if it's underground, some dwarf may come along and clean them up, some day.

[Lord Shonus]

Suppos I should have added that clarifiacation, but I wanted to make sure the answer to his question was crystal clear.

[Legless]

Hi guys. Don't want to dirty up the board with another newfag-thread, so i'll ask it there.
I have rather big five-year fortress with access to three caverns and magma sea.
And I've encountered with such a problem a la "Urist McStupidHauler cancels stock item in a stockpile. Item inaccessible."
And every five-seven second another stupid hauler considers to remind me again.
I suppose there is a some kind of item, which lies in caverns and the path to it has been blocked by cavern's wood.
How can i find this shitty item? Anouncer shows only Urist, but not his aim. Though these anouncements are irritating, I can't disable it at all, as i can miss "Interruption of work by another creepy-unknown-thing-from-the-caverns"
Will be grateful for advice. Sorry for possible mistakes.

[DTF]

Few questions:
Do you use burrows? If so, try deactivating them for a while to see if it helps.
Do you have a bridge that is currently raised (which may block the path)?
Are there spiderwebs in the caverns? The dwarfs might want to retrieve them (you can deny that via orders menu; o->W-> something else if I remember correctly).

If nothing really helps there is still the method of mass-forbidding every item in the caverns/outside that you dont need: d->b->f.

==================

I have a question myself:
How long does it take for poults (young turkeys) to mature? I had them in a cage for a good while now - or is the caging a problem here?

[shadenight123]

proceed through the sherlock holmes method:
look at your stockpiles.
count them
them start removing designation from one.
does the message stop? it's that one.
they don't? reassign the stockpile like it was and proceed with another one.
when the messages stop, you have found the stockpile incriminated.
Start by re-adding half the stockpile size, see if message begin again.
if they do, it's that half, and halve it again.
proceed until all that remains is the tile incriminated.
"once you remove the impossible, what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth, watson"
"but...this dwarfs are on fire HOLMES!"
"by amok, that's possible."

[Legless]

That's a logic!
There is no bridges and webs. So, the cavern tree must be blocking the path. Oh, may be some piece of FB lies on the wall.
Anyway, thank you guys for advice! At least I found an entertainment for myself. It shall be mini-megaproject. I'll call one "Sherlock", another dwarf will be "Watson". I'll assign them into squad and will send them into caverns roleplaying the Investigation "The Mistery of Lost Unknown Thing".
 
Young turkeys grow two years.

[Jelle]

Question about water flow. I want to improve my dwarven bath house design.

If I were to fill a room to 3/7, then make sure it is connected to another body of water downwards, however blocked by a floodgate. Above the bathouse I would have another body of water blocked by a floodgate, wich would make a fine waterfall in the middle of the bath for mist generation. Both the waterfall watersource and the drainage in the lower body of water would be equal in size. (say theoritically one tile)

If I were to open both floodgate simeltaniously, would the water level in the bath remain roughly at 3/7? I'm not talking about fluctuations from the water spreading out and draining out, I mean would total drainage by equal to total input?

I roughly know how water pressure works so I should be able to manage the waterpressure precisely so that the source is one level up and the drain one level down. Naturally I'll be working with grates, wether it will be wall grates or floor grates I don't know, ideally I'd use wall grates but I know they have a bug that causes flow to push creatures through them.

I'll make a rough sketch of what I had in mind.

  higher lvl body
     of water
 ___    ___        z+1
      |   |
___|--| ___
|     |   |     |
|    mini     |
| waterfall |       z
|   in 3/7    |
|                |
|__      ___|
     |---|
     |    |
___|   |___
   lower body of water     z-1

[monk12]

Question about water flow. I want to improve my dwarven bath house design.

If I were to fill a room to 3/7, then make sure it is connected to another body of water downwards, however blocked by a floodgate. Above the bathouse I would have another body of water blocked by a floodgate, wich would make a fine waterfall in the middle of the bath for mist generation. Both the waterfall watersource and the drainage in the lower body of water would be equal in size. (say theoritically one tile)

If I were to open both floodgate simeltaniously, would the water level in the bath remain roughly at 3/7? I'm not talking about fluctuations from the water spreading out and draining out, I mean would total drainage by equal to total input?

I roughly know how water pressure works so I should be able to manage the waterpressure precisely so that the source is one level up and the drain one level down. Naturally I'll be working with grates, wether it will be wall grates or floor grates I don't know, ideally I'd use wall grates but I know they have a bug that causes flow to push creatures through them.

I haven't worked with water enough to know the answer to the larger question, but as regards the grate bug I've heard you can minimize/avoid the danger by putting 2 wall grates next to each other. Anybody else know about this, or am I whistling dixie?

[Jelle]

I guess it's time for some science, will report back once done.


Small scale test shows water stable at 2/7. Pretty good. I'll try larger scale.
I'm starting to think this might have a lot to do with the length of the tunnel I have the water flow through. The further in the input tunnel the lower the water level. Weird.

w00t got it to a stable 3/7, exactly what I wanted. All I can conclude is that the water flow through a channel depends largely on the length and width of the channel, flowtrhough being slower the longer it is, and faster the wider it is.
Weird I thought it would just flow on a universal waterlevel throughout the channel, instead of 6/7 at the entrance and only 2/7 at the exit. Looks like water acts more like a viscous liquid in DF instead of a smooth flowing non viscous liquid. Water isn't disappearing so I gues it needs really high pressure to move it forward.

[Mister Always]

Just read this on the wiki, on rivers:

"A dammed river will cease to produce additional water once all of its tiles reach 7/7, even if the dam is subsequently opened. Once the water level near the river's source drops below 7/7, though, the river will start producing water again."

Now, I've got a tunnel leading from my tiny, shitty brook into the huge cistern I made under my well (it'll never go dry again...), and yes, it's pretty well-defended (a floodgate and three grates), don't worry. It fills up way slowly, though, I think it's because it's just 1X1 wide and is connected at a right angle to the brook. Now the plan was this, where X is brook, O is wall, and T is tunnel...

XXXX
XXXX
XXXXTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
OOOO

The walls being the dam, of course. Now if I'm correct, the water flowin' into the brook will now seek the path of least resistance (the only path, in fact) into the cistern tunnel. This is correck, right?

[Jelle]

Yes it should flow into your channel and eventually overflow.

[Jelle]

Tried out the bath house, it's working perfectly. the dwarves love it, instant ecstacy because of a fine bath+wonderful waterful.

I love it when a piece of dwarven engineering falls in place perfectly.

If someone could give me some more insight as to why it stays on a nice 3/7 level feel free, this was mostly trial and error. Waterworks still elude me.

[Mister Always]

Yes it should flow into your channel and eventually overflow.

Nah. The bottom of the cistern is on the same level as the brook. Once the tunnel and the cistern is completely full, I shut the floodgate into the tunnel and open the dam.

[DTF]

Why shouldnt it stay 3/7? As long as the input equals the output nothing changes.
Only concern I had with your idea was that in the instant the hatches open, water will immediatley flow downwards OUT of your bath while the new water from the input would be still on its way to reach the bath - the amount of water in your pool would have dropped slightly depending on how far up the input hatch would be.

But nice engineering, I might try that