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[Sphalerite]

Can anybody point me to a guide for catching and using cave spiders? My cats always slaughter them before I get too many webs.

To maximize cave spider silk production, don't catch them.  Just keep an eye out for where cave spider webs tend to appear, and dig out open collection areas where the spiders are.  Webs will randomly appear and be harvested.  Kill the cats, or pasture them somewhere far away from where the spiders tend to appear.

[Farmerbob]

Is there a way to put chests in a barracks so the soldiers can put food and eat, without the food rotting? Should I just put a food stockpile in the barracks?

Also, re: equipment, I have a squad of 10 dwarves and I made 10 steel breastplates/helms etc for them. For some reason there's always roughly a full set in the stockpile, though. Why?

I assume the randomly missing items (but mostly intact uniforms) is just bugs?

I don't create militaries because they are simply too muh of a headache, but I have provided for militaries others have created in community forts.  Put a little dining room with a food and booze stockpile in it, and make good tables and chairs and fill it with statues and carvings etc.  Basically your military dwarves will go get the food and drink from there and pass through a small dining area with high value items in it which can improve their moods.  Add a mist generator if you expect your military to experience lots of pain and suffering, or if you expect to draft a lot of dwarves with very high civilian skills, or keep them on duty for extreme amounts of time.

[Telgin]

Got a peculiar situation going on right now:  I'm getting spammed by my beekeeper failing to collect hive products: job item lost or destroyed.  Hundreds of times... thousands of times.  What the heck is her problem?  The hives are accessible... empty jugs are available I'm pretty sure.  Anything else potentially the problem?

[Garath]

yeah, there is a problem. the hives and beekeeping skill are bugged

[Telgin]

Ok, I was afraid that was the case.  Any way to make her shut up other than turning off beekeeping for her?  I'd rather not have the hives just sit around uselessly.

[Yaotzin]

How can I kill fish? Carp, stingrays etc?

[Sphalerite]

Got a peculiar situation going on right now:  I'm getting spammed by my beekeeper failing to collect hive products: job item lost or destroyed.  Hundreds of times... thousands of times.  What the heck is her problem?  The hives are accessible... empty jugs are available I'm pretty sure.  Anything else potentially the problem?

This tends to happen when you have more than one dwarf with the beekeeping skill.  Two dwarves try to harvest the same hive at once.  One gets to it first, and harvests it.  The second gets to it, finds it gone, and then sits there spamming failure messages.

First, make sure that you don't have more than one dwarf with the beekeeping skill.

Second, go through the jobs list under the job manager screen, find the job that your beekeeper is trying to do, and cancel it.

If you're still getting the job cancellation spam, go through all your beehives and set them to be deconstructed.  Don't actually deconstruct them, just set them all for deconstruction, wait for the job spam to stop, then go back and cancel the deconstruction order on the hives.

[greycat]

Another reason you might want to leave your fields fallow is when you're switching between crops in the same plot during different seasons, so the dwarves don't dump the old crop before it has a chance to finish growing.

Dwarves do not "dump the old crop".  When spring changes to summer, any seeds that were planted during the spring which could also have been planted in the summer (even if they weren't) will grow to maturity.  Planted seeds will only disappear if they cannot grow in the new season at all.  And then it's not the dwarves "dumping" them -- it's the game making them magically vanish.  Leaving the field fallow has no effect on that as far as I'm aware.

[Telgin]

Got a peculiar situation going on right now:  I'm getting spammed by my beekeeper failing to collect hive products: job item lost or destroyed.  Hundreds of times... thousands of times.  What the heck is her problem?  The hives are accessible... empty jugs are available I'm pretty sure.  Anything else potentially the problem?

This tends to happen when you have more than one dwarf with the beekeeping skill.  Two dwarves try to harvest the same hive at once.  One gets to it first, and harvests it.  The second gets to it, finds it gone, and then sits there spamming failure messages.

First, make sure that you don't have more than one dwarf with the beekeeping skill.

Second, go through the jobs list under the job manager screen, find the job that your beekeeper is trying to do, and cancel it.

If you're still getting the job cancellation spam, go through all your beehives and set them to be deconstructed.  Don't actually deconstruct them, just set them all for deconstruction, wait for the job spam to stop, then go back and cancel the deconstruction order on the hives.

Thanks, I'll check all of that out.  I set all of my hives to not collect hive products, which seems to have shut her up for the time being at least.  I think I do have two set to beekeeping, which may well have been the problem from the get go.

Related question: where does honey show up in the stocks screen?  I've made a number of wooden jugs to store the honey in, but it's hard to keep track of it all.  I suppose I could just queue up mead jobs with the press jobs, but I think the honey ends up getting cooked or something and making them get out of sync.

And two other questions while I'm at it: is royal jelly good for anything?  Cooking?  And is there a better storage medium than wooden jugs?  From my understanding rock / earthenware jugs need to be glazed first?  And metal is just wasteful.

[i2amroy]

Earthenware jugs need to be glazed first, yes, but stone ones will hold liquids without it IIRC.

[Sphalerite]

Honey should be stored under Extracts - Animal.

Metal may seem wasteful now, but wait till you have a fortress with no wood, thousands of pieces of gold ore, and some magma smelters and magma forges just sitting around idle.  I know you could just make stone jugs, but storing booze in gold barrels is far dwarfier.

[Garath]

I put butcher dead animal on repeat after a siege with a lot of mounts.

For some reason, they're dragging skeletons from the last siege over... Do I get the bones then? And why not butcher a more recent kill and get some meat?

[Loud Whispers]

I put butcher dead animal on repeat after a siege with a lot of mounts.

For some reason, they're dragging skeletons from the last siege over... Do I get the bones then? And why not butcher a more recent kill and get some meat?

Yup, you get the bones. Also, try extract and butcher animal both on repeat

[orius]

Can anybody point me to a guide for catching and using cave spiders? My cats always slaughter them before I get too many webs.

Keep the cats pastured.  The only purpose a cat has in the fort is to kill off vermin in the food supplies (and cheap meat if you want), not to enslave dwarves.  So keep cats pastured where you have you food stored and kill the extras off.  When they're pastured they don't roam around wherever they want, slowing down the framerate, and it keeps them killing the vermin that need to be killed.  I think perhaps pasturing them slows down their adoption of dwarves, so there may be the added benefit of them adopting less dorfs as butcher immunity.

[Farmerbob]

Can anybody point me to a guide for catching and using cave spiders? My cats always slaughter them before I get too many webs.

Keep the cats pastured.  The only purpose a cat has in the fort is to kill off vermin in the food supplies (and cheap meat if you want), not to enslave dwarves.  So keep cats pastured where you have you food stored and kill the extras off.  When they're pastured they don't roam around wherever they want, slowing down the framerate, and it keeps them killing the vermin that need to be killed.  I think perhaps pasturing them slows down their adoption of dwarves, so there may be the added benefit of them adopting less dorfs as butcher immunity.

If/when your fort becomes overrun with vermin, you can always set entrances to caves and outdoors as forbidden to animals, and release the cats from pasture for a little while to let them clean up, then re-pasture them.