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[Dutchling]

Everything that happens* on the map to the merchants is your fault so yes it is going to hurt your relationship but not by much.
I once killed every elf trader that came to my fort and ever killing 25 of them they still kept coming :S
Killing a human liaison however will seriously piss them off, at least that is what other people say. I have never had the humans trade with me.

AFAI you cannot heal merchants

*if he is able to leave the map it wont matter but if merchants die or leave stuff behind without trading it away it does matter

[Noir]

There! In this photo you can admire my magma forge, together with the z-level immediately below. You can notice, other than the magma channel, the special room for the 4 operators (complete with dining room and food storage), as well as the bars and mineral ores stockpiles

[Noir]

A couple of questions:

-under my new, shiny drawbridge there are a number of items which I bought from a caravan; they are under my ownership, yet nobody takes them. They are a bag of clothes and a chest of leather - what sort of stockpile do I have to define for them?

-I am producing far too much food, and always the same. Why is the extra food "overspilling" on other stockpiles? Is this a bug?
And other than growing underground mushrooms, which other way of producing food is reliable and requires very little attention?

-I created a specific food stockpile near my magma forge deep underground, but so far only food was moved there. Can I ask someone to move one or two barrels of dwarven wine there?

[Noir]

Wow, first successful raid today - it was a blast!! 6 goblin crossbowmen and a goblin captain with an axe. They first proceeded to slaughter my tamed animals that could not run away fast enough, but at some point I managed to close my drawbridge.

I quickly studied how to define a burrow, and did so. Activated my 5 squads (17 soldier dwarves in total) and thought about the next move...

...only problem: I have, like, a total of 2-3 valid weapons among ALL my dwarves as I am just starting the smelting process right now.
But never mind: I decide to try anyway, with the help of my drawbridge and traps I feel confident.

First two goblins go on the bridge: I had the idea, after practicing a bit, to leave the one mechanic in charge of the levers locked inside the room with the lever (the barracks), so that I could stage a fast reaction between the time I ask the command and the time it gets executed. It works: the two goblins get flung REALLY FAR in the air, one of them breaking its spine (!!) and the other a leg. I laugh, and lower the bridge again.

The goblin chieftain easily dodges rock traps (those are REALLY worthless...), while his men shoot puppies and cats inside my fortress through the entrance (note to self: make a "L" turn entrance soon. Like, really soon.). Lucky me, I had prepared two layers of cage traps: the leader and one of the crossbowmen are taken prisoner this way.
Three other crossbowmen are lagging behind, so I send my dwarves in! One manages to enter the fortress and is ambushed by (unarmed) soldiers, who manage to throw him through the ground and, after some bruising, successfully beat him to death (with the help of a guy with a morning star that came on later).

My militia captain is the one brandishing a steel battle axe, and pretty much by himself proceeds to slaughter the other two single-handedly! It was really awesome to watch step-by-step.
We eventually find the two guys flung in the air before (one of them even went on to kill one of my cows, the bastard).

Casualties: about 20 tamed animals, a few bruises among my boys, and a broken leg with nerve damage in one of the wrestlers. Saved the game, tomorrow I will continue.

This fight prompts questions though:

1) How do I safely bring my wounded away? Is there a way to carry him away without risking to make his fracture worse?
2) How do I clean the mess? Blood, body parts, broken bolts..?
3) How do I kill the caged goblins (and loot them)? Ideally I would use them as target practice for my future crossbowmen. How do I keep them alive until then?
4) What is the standard practice to keep your animals away from the slaughter? Walled grazing area?

Now that I'm thinking, as I do not know how to open cages of animals, I have about 16+ livestock caged downstairs. Surprised they are still alive - never bothered checking how to open as I always had something important to think to...

[Lord_Phoenix]

This fight prompts questions though:

1) How do I safely bring my wounded away? Is there a way to carry him away without risking to make his fracture worse?
2) How do I clean the mess? Blood, body parts, broken bolts..?
3) How do I kill the caged goblins (and loot them)? Ideally I would use them as target practice for my future crossbowmen. How do I keep them alive until then?
4) What is the standard practice to keep your animals away from the slaughter? Walled grazing area?

Now that I'm thinking, as I do not know how to open cages of animals, I have about 16+ livestock caged downstairs. Surprised they are still alive - never bothered checking how to open as I always had something important to think to...

1.  You need to designate a hospital zone.  Place a few beds in it, a couple traction benches (made in mechanist workshop), and some coffers or bags to hold the tools of the trade (crutches, splints, thread, etc.).  Dwarves will either walk themselves or be carried to the hospital.  You'll also need a Chief Medical Dwarf.  Note: without a bit of soap they can't do too much.
2.  Body parts and stuff will be carted off to the refuse stockpile if inside the fort, and they'll eventually rot away.
3.  Build the cages somewhere.  You can get them to easily dump everything that the goblins have by mass dumping the cage spots (d-B-d) and then using t to look at the cages and turn dump off for the cage itself.  Then build a lever, and link it to the cages, and use the lever to release the now naked goblins in the cages, or you can pit the goblins in the cages through a hole in the ground.
4.  Pretty much, yeah.

[cdrcjsn]

A few things:
1)  Hospital
*  once you designate the hospital zone, you'll need to build some coffers, chests, or bags in there.  They'll be stocked with buckets, splints, crutches, thread, cloth, and soap taken from your other stockpiles.
*  injured dwarves only drink water, so you'll probably need a well, or at least designate a zone for drinking water.
*  these dwarves will be given water by others, so you'll need to have some spare buckets
*  injured dwarves will most likely die due to infections unless you have soap
*  dwarves with broken bones will need traction benches
*  you need 1 restraint (rope/chain), 1 mechanism, 1 table for 1 traction bench.
*  you need 1 lye and 1 (animal fat tallow or plant oil) to make 1 soap.  Lye is made from ash at an Ashery.

2)  The mess is the least of your problems right now...  The dwarves will clean them up eventually.

3)  When you mark the cages for dumping, make sure to unmark the cages!  Dwarves have an annoying tendency to throw away cages before they disarm goblins.  Designate an animal stockpile in the mean time until you have more time for the goblins.  Your dwarves will move the occupied cages there and reset your cage traps with empty cages.

4)  I keep all my birds indoors in their own rooms with nestboxes, often with a corner window and they double as sentries.  I place all non-grazing animals inside a constructed cage (puppies, dogs, etc) until I have need of them.

Regarding the caged animals, you can designate them to a pen and dwarves will put them there eventually (i->N)

[Psieye]

-I created a specific food stockpile near my magma forge deep underground, but so far only food was moved there. Can I ask someone to move one or two barrels of dwarven wine there?

If your primary food pile hasn't overflooded yet, then you must use the 'take from pile' order on stockpiles after disabling drinks at your primary stockpile. Ideally though, you should overproduce booze so you fill up both stockpiles.

[wuphonsreach]

You should have a large number of small booze stockpiles spread around the fort, preferably near main travel paths.  Dwarves like to just dunk their head in the barrel on the stockpile, and they drink twice as often as they eat, so it's worth making their drink trips as short as possible.  I make a lot of small 1x3 up to 2x4 drink stockpiles in all sorts of nooks and crannies.

For food stockpiles, OTOH, you should keep them near dining rooms as the dwarf will take the food to the nearest chair (based on absolute distance, not by path distanace).  That doesn't mean you can't have spread out stockpiles, you'll just need multiple dining rooms.

[Noir]

Ok, no one in my fort is doing anything, and I am getting a truckload of "Item Inaccessible" spam.

It looks like my burrow is still active, despite the fact that I have already removed the alert, and un-defined the burrow from the default "Inactive" alert.

There is a point though: I have manually added ALL my non-military dwarves to the burrow - does this mean that the burrow is active on them? I thought that manually adding the dwarves to the burrow was a pre-requisite for the burrow to work.

Do I have to remove them from the burrow? If they are not manually added, will they still respect it when it is added to an alert?

[Lord_Phoenix]

Ok, no one in my fort is doing anything, and I am getting a truckload of "Item Inaccessible" spam.

It looks like my burrow is still active, despite the fact that I have already removed the alert, and un-defined the burrow from the default "Inactive" alert.

There is a point though: I have manually added ALL my non-military dwarves to the burrow - does this mean that the burrow is active on them? I thought that manually adding the dwarves to the burrow was a pre-requisite for the burrow to work.

Do I have to remove them from the burrow? If they are not manually added, will they still respect it when it is added to an alert?

Yes, if they are added to the burrow then they are restricted to it.  The alert automatically adds all dwarves to the burrow, and removes them after it's cancelled.

[Jiharn]

You don't need to manually assign dwarves to a burrow for them to stick to it in an alert.  One you set the burrow to alert for all civilians, they will immediately drop what they're doing if outside that burrow and will stick to it as long as the alert is up, ignoring any other burrows they may be assigned to.  I don't know whether they can enter area that's in a manually-assigned burrow but outside the alert burrow, but I think they completely disregard non-alert burrows for the alert duration.

If you have a dwarf manually assigned to a burrow, then yes, they are limited to that burrow (and any other burrows they may be simultaneously assigned to).  Unassign your dwarves from all burrows to let them do things outside of burrow space.

A word of warning: if you have a dwarf assigned to a specific burrow normally for, say, the sake of using specific materials, he won't be limited to that small burrow when a bigger burrow is on alert.  I'm still haunted by the memories of my moody mason grabbing talc instead of the intended platinum nuggets during an alert.

Also, if you want to remove an animal from a cage without having to assign it to a specific pen/pasture/pit, build the cage, check its tasks with q, select the "assign" option, and then you can remove the mark next to the name of the animal to free.  Its cellmates will still be condemned to their prison, and the released animal (once a dwarf with no specific labor needed releases it) will start wandering around from the cage's tile.

[Noir]

Thanks, it works now - my woundeds are being attended to.

Just one more thing: I have... around 5 finished bins in my carpenter workshop, and LOTS of piles of stuff that could definitely use one (notably metal bars and gems - they are full).
Why aren't my dwarves making good use of them? Can I set them manually? Has this something to do with the minimum/maximum number of bins in all other stockpiles?

[Jiharn]

Unless you have bins reserved via the general stockpile menu (and there's no reason you should have any reserved), and the bar/gem/etc stockpiles haven't hit their bin limits yet, those spare bins can still be used for the stockpiles, yeah.  I don't know of any way to force them over to the stockpile to get used, though.  Just give it time and don't keep your haulers too distracted, and hopefully some dwarf will have a pair of neurons collide in his brain and think to use the bin.  In the meantime, if you really want to gather up the gems or bars from workshops or the ground, just make more stockpiles in random spots, or utilize quantum storage (make only one garbage dump active, say in this case near the gem stockpile, set all gems to be dumped in the stocks screen, turn off the dump on anything else, then remove the Dump status on your stockpiled gems with d-b-D).

I've tried making the stockpiles store furniture -> bins as well, by the way, and it didn't quite work out as I had hoped.  They just moved the bins to the stockpile, and seemed to consider it as just an item on the pile rather than a viable storage container.

[wuphonsreach]

Furniture, mechanisms, cages are the sort of stockpiles that don't really use bins.

When you setup a stockpile and tell it to use bins/barrels, it will immediately claim a single container.  When that container fills up, it generates a job to get another container hauled to it.  So if you suddenly create a lot of stockpiles, you can quickly run dry on barrels/bins.  (Which causes havoc with food-industry if you run out of barrels, hence the "reserved" setting which lets you tell the stockpiles to shut up about needing barrels if there are less then N barrels free.)

Dwarves will eventually take any spare bins and start consolidating loose items on a stockpile, but it's not instant and it takes a while (seems to be a low priority job).

And a picture for Noir. Here's one of my early, failed forts.  Note the distinct lack of L-bends or U-bends.  It was a shooting gallery.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

vs my overly complex fort entrances from after a month of play

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Noir]

Furniture, mechanisms, cages are the sort of stockpiles that don't really use bins.

When you setup a stockpile and tell it to use bins/barrels, it will immediately claim a single container.  When that container fills up, it generates a job to get another container hauled to it.  So if you suddenly create a lot of stockpiles, you can quickly run dry on barrels/bins.  (Which causes havoc with food-industry if you run out of barrels, hence the "reserved" setting which lets you tell the stockpiles to shut up about needing barrels if there are less then N barrels free.)

Dwarves will eventually take any spare bins and start consolidating loose items on a stockpile, but it's not instant and it takes a while (seems to be a low priority job).

And a picture for Noir. Here's one of my early, failed forts.  Note the distinct lack of L-bends or U-bends.  It was a shooting gallery.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

vs my overly complex fort entrances from after a month of play

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Thanks, I have implemented something similar - there is a 3-wide drawbridge for everyday usage, and UNDER it there is a serpentine of heavily trapped tunnels which leads behind the main drawbridge - but only if another bridge is lowered.

Which works fine, because I can lower the small one and raise the large one, then raise also the small one after the enemies are deep inside the serpentine and have been (hopefully) already smashed to bits by my traps.
If all else fails, I have several layers of cage traps after everything else.

Time for a few more questions now:

-how do I bury dead animals? They show up in the "u" menu, cluttering it.
-can I diagnose and heal wounded animals?
-four of my injured soldiers have infections (bloody golbins with silver whips). Will they survive?
-can I make a trap with a whip? It sounds really silly...
-I am finally making (copper...) plate armor for my dwarves. Do I need to individually forge both greaves/gauntlets/boots/ecc., or "build greaves" means that 2 will be made from the same lingot?

More complex question: can I define multiple burrows on alert? The idea is that a small room will have all the levers, and that one (better two) dwarf mechanics will be assigned to that room during sieges, attacks, ecc.
The room has food and a lockable floor hatch. If I manually assign the burrow coinciding with it during an alert, I guess it will overlap with the normale "emergency" burrow for everyone else. How will it work?