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[Tirion]

Weapon traps: what are the best dwarf-made blunt weapons one could place in them? Hammers vs Maces are depending on strenght/agility with dwarfs, but how do they check out in traps? Does mechanism quality affect performance?

[Grumbledwarfskin]

despite having adequate dwarven wine, they all died. i made a thread about it and no one can think of the reason~

If you only had dwarven wine, then the dwarves got tired of drinking it. When they get "tired of drinking the same old booze lately", they'll refuse to drink that type of booze again, and will die of thirst if you don't have access to water or a second kind of booze.

So, if you don't have access to water, be sure to brew both plump helmets and cave wheat or pig tails. If you get too much of an imbalance (say you're producing a lot more plump helmets than cave wheat/pig tails, and the brewer is ignoring the wheat/tails even though you have some), then turn off brewing for the type that you have too much of temporarily, in the (z)->kitchen screen. Assuming you have other things to brew, of course.

[Sphalerite]

despite having adequate dwarven wine, they all died. i made a thread about it and no one can think of the reason~

If you only had dwarven wine, then the dwarves got tired of drinking it. When they get "tired of drinking the same old booze lately", they'll refuse to drink that type of booze again, and will die of thirst if you don't have access to water or a second kind of booze.

No.  Dwarves will get bad thoughts from drinking the same old wine over and over, but will never die of thirst rather than drink booze.

[Sutremaine]

It doesn't matter what the status screen says if you don't have enough barrels to go round.

Drinking from the barrel takes a long time. The barrel is claimed by a dwarf the moment said dwarf decides to drink, and if the dwarf is on the opposite side of the map this adds more time. Booze is produced in batches of at least 5 units, and if it's bought or home-brewed from whole stacks of bought plants then the barrel starts with 25 units. That's a lot of alcohol being taken out of circulation. Make enough barrels to allow 25% of the population to drink at once, and then make more.

[Buttery_Mess]

Weapon traps: what are the best dwarf-made blunt weapons one could place in them? Hammers vs Maces are depending on strenght/agility with dwarfs, but how do they check out in traps? Does mechanism quality affect performance?

Mechanism quality determines how likely the weapons are to hit. Trap weapons (corkscrews, serrated discs and the like) are far superior to regular weapons. I don't know off the top of my head which are best as blunt weapons. You can always use piles of enemy weapons in traps though (my favourite!)

[Tirion]

Weapon traps: what are the best dwarf-made blunt weapons one could place in them? Hammers vs Maces are depending on strenght/agility with dwarfs, but how do they check out in traps? Does mechanism quality affect performance?

Mechanism quality determines how likely the weapons are to hit. Trap weapons (corkscrews, serrated discs and the like) are far superior to regular weapons. I don't know off the top of my head which are best as blunt weapons. You can always use piles of enemy weapons in traps though (my favourite!)

Good. Does decorating the mechanism count?

[Gizogin]

Weapon traps: what are the best dwarf-made blunt weapons one could place in them? Hammers vs Maces are depending on strenght/agility with dwarfs, but how do they check out in traps? Does mechanism quality affect performance?

Mechanism quality determines how likely the weapons are to hit. Trap weapons (corkscrews, serrated discs and the like) are far superior to regular weapons. I don't know off the top of my head which are best as blunt weapons. You can always use piles of enemy weapons in traps though (my favourite!)

Good. Does decorating the mechanism count?

...No.
The undecorated quality is what matters for trap accuracy.  Decorations will add a lot of value, however, which can be helpful if you need to, for example, increase a room's quality.

[jeffreyac]

OK, how about this...  Just got a notification that a dwarven child has died of thirst.

...he was 7 steps away from a full well (two, actually), and I have about 4 or 5 different types of booze in my fully stocked larder, about 15 steps away. I've got about a hundred dwarfs, and about 80% of them have all hauling activated (inc. feed/water). 

I'm a little confused by that one...

Also: I've got a human siege, but they just sit on the edge of the map lighting campfires. No big deal, my fort at this point is self-sufficient, though it's annoying they'll keep the caravans from coming through. I just make sure no one has a job that takes them near the area they're in. (I didn't restrict the dwarves inside, as I wanted to keep chopping the wood on the far sde of the map from the humans, and it was close enough I could sound the alarm and get back before they got to the gate.)

So, as I'm watching the human force, I notice a dwarf come wandering out. I pause, and check him - he has no job, evidently he just elected to go for a long walk outside directly towards the human camp for no reason...     I scrambled my marksdwarves and managed to kill the couple of attackers chasing him (strangely, again, none of the others moved) and drag his wounded body to the hospital, where he's being treated - so I may have saved him, but it's too early to say. Anyway, a) why woud he wander far from the fort for no reason? He's got food, water, booze, and had no job...   and b) can I do anything non-suicidal to induce the humans to attack? I'd like to get rid of them, but don't want to lose any of my military - and if I attack, though I think I'd win, I'm sure I'd take losses of 25 to 30 percent; the cost is too steep....

[Sutremaine]

OK, how about this...  Just got a notification that a dwarven child has died of thirst.

Failed mood?

b) can I do anything non-suicidal to induce the humans to attack? I'd like to get rid of them, but don't want to lose any of my military - and if I attack, though I think I'd win, I'm sure I'd take losses of 25 to 30 percent; the cost is too steep....

Do you have only marksdwarves? I have an idea, though I've never tested it.

Step 1. Move ranged and melee squads to just outside shooting / charging range of humans.
Step 2. Move ranged squad a few squares closer to the humans, so that they start firing.

In theory, the humans would get up and rush the marksdwarves, coming within charging range of the melee dwarves. Then the melee dwarves would charge, passing the marksdwarves and hitting the approaching humans before they had a chance to reach the marksdwarves.

[Telgin]

I've never actually tried to use ballistae before, but perhaps you could build one that could take pot shots at them?  They supposedly have very long range, and maybe if you start shooting they'll come come running at which point you can pull the siege operators back and hope that they continue to charge into whatever defenses you have set up.

[jeffreyac]

Yep, I as going to try that - but then, as luck would have it (well, that and my refusal to learn!) another dwarf wandered by the camp, aggroing about half of them. I sent out my military, which engaged, but ended up being a general scrum - and, happily, I'm pleased to report they did better than I thought, fighting off the besiegers with only one wounded (who, I hope, is recovering in the hospital...)  So, though I was playing with options involving moving my lone ballista out there, it seems to have resolved itself...

As for the thirsty kid, I have no idea...  I didn't get a notification he was 'in the mood' as it were, and I do have a goodly selection of workshops and materials he could use (though I don't know nearly enough about the game to be able to say I had it completely covered....)

[Ploder]

I've gotten my first squad to start training in their barracks without much trouble, but I can't get them to train with the training swords I made for them. What gives?

[Telgin]

Interestingly, I've had two kids randomly die of thirst.  I don't know for sure why, but I think they were in snatcher bags who were in cages at the time.

That's complete conjecture of course.  I've read that you can inspect the bags of a snatcher to see if a kid is in there, but I didn't even know such a thing was possible.  I nabbed a few snatchers, forgot about them instead of using them as training fodder, and some time later I got notifications that some kids died of thirst.  This happened on two separate occasions, but is seems to fit the evidence nicely.

If you know he was standing just out of reach of water though, I have no clue.  Was it a baby?  Babies need their mothers don't they?  Or can other dwarves feed / water them?

[nickbii]

As for the thirsty kid, I have no idea...  I didn't get a notification he was 'in the mood' as it were, and I do have a goodly selection of workshops and materials he could use (though I don't know nearly enough about the game to be able to say I had it completely covered....)

Either he got Melancholy and refused to drink, or he got injured and couldn't walk.

Melancholy usually comes from a failed mood, but since the game pauses and zooms to a moody character it's hard to miss those. IIR it can also result from a lot of bad things happening to a character, so if his parents just died or something that could be it.

An injury would probably come from a  fight, which would leave a combat report. Check this out. It's possible you have a small meeting space, your tame Yak and all your kids were there, and the Yak got pissed and head-butted one of them, breaking his leg.

I doubt he was in a snatcher bag, because that would be in either a cage tap or an animal stockpile.

If he wasn't a kid I'd suspect he'd been in jail. But kids tend not to get blamed when the Count's mandate gets ignored.

Of course sometimes weird shit happens in DF and you can't figure out exactly what's going on.

Nick

[AWellTrainedFerret]

Ok, I need a little help here. I'm trying to open up a magma pipe into some magma sewers I made. But the technique that used to work for me a few years ago is now getting all my miners killed. I used to do this by carving out an up-ramp next to the magma pipe with it's obsidian wall on one side and a fortification leading into the sewers on the other. In the past, when ordered to crack open the wall, the miners would immediately run up the ramp to the floor above and the magma would flow through the fortification.

But this no longer seems to be working. Is there any way to do this now without spending the next few years pumping it out from the top down?