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[Gus Smedstad]

... when it's a problem with the game engine.

I had an accidental breach of a cavern while there were a couple of Forgotten Beasts in there.  I generally leave those alone, since there's really nothing in the caverns I can't get by tunneling elsewhere.  So it's not uncommon for me to have a couple of Beasts roaming around in there with nothing to do.

I sent a squad of steel-equipped dwarves down for security while I sealed the breach.  They killed the first beast easily, but the second one simply would not die.  It was a "blob" with a body and two wings, and apparently it doesn't matter how much damage those take, it won't bleed and there's nothing vital.  Wings and body were "fractured" and "broken open" 20-30 times each, but it still kept fighting and eventually killed a couple of the guards.

Meanwhile, I walled the cavern off... and discovered that half of my dwarf population had wandered into the cavern.  The way slopes are in there, it's often hard to see what's going on since each ground level is pretty small. They all seemed to be "storing item to stockpile," I'm not sure what.

By this time the blob wasn't too mobile, so with some work I rescued a fair number of the idiots, and walled the corridor off further back since the blob had chased some into the shafts.  This is where the not-fun part comes in.

There were some that I couldn't rescue, and apparently that was screwing up the job assignment logic.  A lot of tasks like digging, hauling, and construction would no longer resolve.  If I had to guess, the game was assigning tasks to the doomed dwarves, and then dropping them when it proved impossible for them to path to the job site.  I ended up abandoning the fort.  I could have lived with the losses, it was the fact that lots of critical other tasks weren't being done due to the game not handling this well that made it seem like a waste of time to continue.

In retrospect, if that was indeed the problem, maybe I could have fixed it by turning all the tasks (including haulage) off for the stranded dwarves.  It's OK, I guess, the fort was too stable and boring and that point anyway - I got into trouble in the first place because I was constructing a magma pump stack from level 7 to level 120, and I dug into an unseen cavern on the way up.  That's the sort of project you undertake when there's nothing much else to do.

 - Gus

[nekoexmachina]

I simply disallow almost all hauling tasks for most of my dwarves, having just ~10 or something dealing with haul-that jobs. And 1-job-per-dwarf rocks, as i get >30 of them.
Also that is not a problem of game engine: it's a problem of player to control the dwarven jobs.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

While I sympathize with your loss of your dwarves, I have to agree with Nekoexmachina: That entire event does not contain any aspect of the game engine failing, but rather mistakes you made in managing your dwarves and the situation.

Deathworks

[Gus Smedstad]

How is the fact that I couldn't dig or build walls because of the trapped dwarves not a failing of the game engine?  I had miners and masons outside of the trapped dwarves; the engine just repeatedly failed to allow them to do anything.

 - Gus

[Broadsword]

Hi!

While I sympathize with your loss of your dwarves, I have to agree with Nekoexmachina: That entire event does not contain any aspect of the game engine failing, but rather mistakes you made in managing your dwarves and the situation.

Deathworks

Well unkillable enemies are pretty lame and I believe they are the result of a glitch as well.

[Narmy]

Turn off "automatic web collection", they may have been collecting webs to bring to the loom.

[ItchyBeard]

Hi!

While I sympathize with your loss of your dwarves, I have to agree with Nekoexmachina: That entire event does not contain any aspect of the game engine failing, but rather mistakes you made in managing your dwarves and the situation.

Deathworks

Well unkillable enemies are pretty lame and I believe they are the result of a glitch as well.

Nothing is unkillable, especially in a cavern. Simply introduce the beast to the ceiling (or the ceiling to the beast? Hmmm).

[Deathworks]

Hi!

How is the fact that I couldn't dig or build walls because of the trapped dwarves not a failing of the game engine?  I had miners and masons outside of the trapped dwarves; the engine just repeatedly failed to allow them to do anything.

While Broadsword does point out a valid point, namely that the unkillable forgotten beasts may be considered a bug (also you could argue that it is correct for them to be unkillable, making them a natural disaster), the management requirements are yours:

In such a situation, you are the one who should deactivate all labors on the trapped dwarves, except for woodcutting and mining (otherwise they would drop their axes and picks which would need recollection later) as well as interrupt all digging that would compete with the rescue operation. Once you are forced to abandon some dwarves for good, you disable their mining and woodcutting and for good measure forbid their picks and axes.

If a dwarf under any circumstances disrupts your fortress by trying to do a certain job, it should be a natural thing to deactivate that labor at least temporarily with that dwarf. I encountered some pathing problems with a dwarf who wanted to collect webs and for some reason couldn't figure out how to reach the already breached caverns, spamming me with cancellations. Turning this off didn't require a lot of work, and suddenly, things worked smoothly again.

Yes, the game is not perfect and the AI sometimes doesn't get the hint, but it is not so that that failure of the AI had made it necessary for you to abandon or even endure serious problems (although you would probably have gotten a bit of message spam from the trapped dwarves when they try to eat and drink).

Deathworks

[Mishy]

Dig the perimeter of a huge circle that spans 20 odd z levels
1 hour later, dig out the bottom level, link support, pull lever
Everything remains intact with only the first z level crushed
My face

[Ieb]

Sounds like a pathfinding bug. I recall sealing and then unsealing a door is supposed to fix that, or saving and loading the game back up again.

Anyway. If the dwarves were trapped because of a built wall, couldn't you just designate a burrow into the fort itself, throw up the Alarm and gotten everyone fleeing back there like the idiots they are? You could have designate another burrow then with a mason near the closed-off section and sealed it back up once everyone was back where they were supposed to be.

But yeah. Sounds like they were after something stupid. I bet it was rat corpses from spider webs or something equally as stupid.

[gtmattz]

TBH, the scenario in the original post was just some mild fun, and nowhere near actual Fun.

Also, you have to keep in mind at all times that DF is a game that is in development, which means there will be all kind of odd glitches and bugs that you have to contend with.  We should all be grateful that toady is letting  us help him test his awesome game and not keeping it to himself and just take things like this in stride.

[Psieye]

I can't comment much on playstyle differences, but switching off labours on and off to meet the immediate situation is common sense to me. Yes it's a huge pain to update custom names after ever labour change but it's immensely helpful for these situations where I want to remember what Dwarf 14's normal labours are. Alternatively, Dwarf Therapist is an excellent add-on that handles such management issues I hear.

Burrows with alerts would have been the ideal solution for this case though. You could also have checked via the job list menu what the dwarves were trying to store in a stockpile.

[Quatch]

Back in 31.01 I had a similar problem with all designations being canceled. I had accidentally cut off access to my fort, and had a group of miner/masons outside, and a second group inside. The ones inside were canceling designations outside, and the outside ones were canceling the inside orders. I couldn't build anything to fix the sealed door(well, moat.).

Burrows are the correct solution. In this case I made a burrow over the work area, assigned a dwarf, and then only he could cancel the orders inside, which he didn't, because he could get to one side and start!

Far as I know, that got fixed in 31.02 though.

[Hyndis]

The pathfinding issue should be fixed in the current version which is 31.03.

If you have a case of socks of doom, where dwarves keep running out to claim the socks from a previous dwarf killed by a megabeast, then you just need to forbid that stuff or have everyone fall back to your safe room using a civilian alert on the military screen. Your safe room should have a well and a supply of emergency rations so your civilians can wait it out in safety.

[tastypaste]

If you make your fort a burrow and restrict your civilians to it in the Alerts screen, you can prevent your suicidally greedy dwarfs from making a trip to loot the corpses of their fallen comrades. Nothing worse than having one dwarf struck down and then losing 10 more who run off to grab his socks.