Gaaaah. I need some help. How do I get my dwarves to go into burrows?
I expected them to run immediately to the burrows, but they literally take forever. I assigned 45 dwarves to the burrow, and only two went. The other 34 just stopped all tasks, and were slaughtered. I now have a carpenter and a woodcutter alive, and 43 dead dwarves upstairs.
Why didn't they go? It wasn't blocked, because the two intelligent ones were able to get it through their booze-sodden brains to go "Hey! Goblins! Let's RUN AWAY!"...
urgh.
Regular burrow usage only restricts the jobs available to dwarves. They won't go to the burrow unless there is a job waiting for them there- this system is most useful for making your skilled dwarves only use the valuable materials in their crafts, or for making your Chief Medical Dwarf only take jobs in the Hospital.
It sounds like you were trying to use burrows to evade Goblins, which is very doable. To do that, set up your emergency burrow, then go to the 'm'ilitary screen. From there, go to 'a'lerts. On the left, you'll see Inactive and Active- notice that the Inactive alert has [CIV] next to it. That is the civilian alert level, and can be used to restrict where civilian dwarves go- since there are no burrows associated with the Inactive alert, your dwarves can go wherever. Now, go down one so that Active is highlighted, then press the right arrow key until your cursor is under the Burrows Tab. Press enter on the burrow you want associated with this alert- when you see the green 'A' to the right, you know the burrow is Active. Press the left arrow until you are back under the Alerts heading, with the Active alert highlighted, and press enter. This should set the Civilian alert to Active (the [CIV] will move there,) and this will force all civilians to drop what they are doing and report to their assigned burrow(s).
Give it a go with your survivors- once you get the hang of it, you can make a bunch of different alerts corresponding to different threat levels, or keep them out of some constantly dangerous map areas altogether. The alert system is also very useful for setting up routine military activities- check out
the wiki article when you feel up to it.
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Topic: The DF2010 Little Questions Thread (Read 1126552 times)