can someone tell me the steps for the mass pitting cage since I can't get it right despite following the instrctions on the wiki. My glass maker had also ran into a problem with the lack of sand carrying bags error despite having enough sand or something similar
So, to paraphrase: "I followed the instructions and it "didn't work", so can someone please give me the instructions again?"
OK:
1. Dig out a room and another room of at least the same size directly below it.
2. In the upper room channel out 6 openings into the lower room which are spaced exactly 2 tiles away from each other.
3. Build floor hatches and place them over all of the openings.
4. Place one big animal stockpile over the room such that every tile in the stockpile is adjacent (orthogonally and diagonally) to one of the hatches. Disable empty cages on the stockpile.
5. Create one large pit zone that covers all of the openings such that all of them are part of the same pit zone.
6. Disable all other animal stockpiles except for one empty-cage-only stockpile somewhere.
7. Close the lower room off, fill it with traps, your military, turn it into a flood chamber, an arena, a 50 z-level pit, put a live dragon in it, or whatever sadistic sort of thing you want. This lower room is where the creatures will end up, so you get the idea.
Of course, those are the same instructions, so I doubt it will help much. Maybe if you tell us exactly what happened that makes you say you can't get it right, we might be able to tell you what you did wrong. But if we don't know what you did wrong, telling you the steps to take is pointless. You have already seen them on the wiki.
At a guess, I suspect you might be trying to pit either big animals or goblin thieves. Either of those will usually escape from your dwarves. The mass pitting system only really works with goblin soldiers and the less dangerous animals. I get 100% reliability with goblin soldiers, and pretty much 100% failure with goblin thieves. I don't know how to tell which animals it will work with, but giant olms are generally bad. I'd suspect anything that a goblin arrives mounted on would fail.