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[Necro910]

We need an advice dog series for this 

Native Gold

Give them black plague

Unarmed Elven Traders


Shoot them with dead relatives

Establish a colony

Eat kittens

[melphel]

Now for a few questions:   

How can I make my dwarves go/stay in the fortress during a siege?

Is there a way to recover from a tantrum spiral?

I looked at my bolts on the Stocks screen and found that some types of bolt were being forbidden seemingly automatically.  Why is this?

Thanks in advance.

To get them to go inside:
Create a burrow ( Burro[w] > [a]dd new burrow : define burrow).  You don't actually have to assign anyone to it, just select the safe inside areas of your fort where enemies hopefully won't be able to reach.  When trouble shows up, turn on a civilian alert for that burrow ( [m]ilitary > [a]lerts : Set a civilian alert if one isn't on already.  To do this pick any alert, Inactive will do fine, and press enter; there should now be a green 'CIV' next to it.  Now move over to the burrows column for that alert and highlight your burrow.  Press enter to activate that burrow, there should be a green 'A' next to it; do this again if you want to turn it off).  Every non-active-military dwarf will move into that area while the alert is on.  They will also be able to move around and access any items within the burrow, but not items outside.  They will drop whatever they are doing if they are working outside the burrow or going to collect an item outside.

To get them to stay inside:
Put doors on the entrance to your fort, lock them when enemies show up ( [q] > [l] + [ o] ).  In fact, it might be a good idea to keep these doors locked all the time if you don't have outside work to be done.  Locks can be picked by thieves/snatchers, broken by building destroyers, and if they are open at the time, overtaken by invaders (they can't be locked until the door is reclaimed by your own dwarfs moving through it).  Doors can trap your guys outside if you aren't careful, and dwarfs won't path to go inside if there is a locked door in the way.  Hatches are worthy of mention, they act exactly like doors with the exception that they block pathing vertically through z-levels, rather than horizontally across one.  Locked hatches cannot be destroyed/picked from below.  Enemies need to be next to the hatch (on the same z-level) to pick/destroy it, they won't path to it if they can only reach it from below.  Make a "U-bend" in your entrance corridor (a short drop down and them back up created by channeling ramps.  Like the pipe traps under your sink...) and place hatches over the inner side.

Alternatively, use bridges.  Bridges count as constructions (as opposed to buildings) and are indestructible.  Retracting bridges disappear when activated, and can be placed over pits to not only block an entrance, but to drop enemies on the bridge into said pit (You will have to dig the pit before building the bridge).  Drawbridges can do the same thing, but also create an indestructible wall along the side they raise to when activated.  Dropping drawbridges on something on the floor below will destroy it (known as atomsmashing), and is a cheap way to deal with invaders, just be careful not to catch your own dwarves under the bridge.  Also, raising a bridge with something on it will send it flying in a random direction somewhere on that z-level.  Note that sufficiently large creatures (ogres, titans, forgotten beasts, etc.) will prevent a bridge from being activated if they are standing on or under it.  Bridges need a lever, and mechanisms to connect them, in order to be activated.  There is also a short delay between a lever pull and the resulting bridge action (plus the time it takes for a dwarf to get to the lever), whereas doors and hatches are locked/unlocked instantaneously by you.

As for tantrum spirals,
the best way to deal with them is to prevent them from happening.  Keep your dwarves happy with plenty of good food and booze, pretty furniture, and rooms.  A dining room of high quality is the bare essential.  Make that dining room huge as well .  I've found that when dwarves cram into small meeting halls, they talk to each other and get all buddy-buddy with each other quickly.  That's good for making them happy with friends, but if/when something happens to their friends, expect massive unhappy thoughts.  Large areas help to keep them from grouping together and talking, and since the room takes up more space, you need less fancy furniture and engravings to get it to royal quality (though engraving the whole thing is probably a good idea anyway).

When a spiral happens, there isn't much you can do about it really.  Have doors between rooms and partition off areas with tantrumers by locking them, but that won't help much if they are in a hallway or the dining hall.  If you can wait it out long enough for everyone still alive to calm down, you can recover.  Also, migrants come into a fort with neutral happiness, and no close relations to fellow migrants (with the exception of occasional parent-child and marriage), so if you get a wave in the middle of a spiral, try to keep them separated and away from everyone else.  Then the migrants can rebuild what is left.

Lastly, about forbidding:
By default, spent ammo is forbidden.  All the bolts your guys fired, and missed, and did not break upon hitting walls/floors, get forbidden.  You can reclaim this ammo manually ( loo[k] > (un)[f]orbid ) or by mass reclaiming ( [d]esignations > [ b] items > [c]laim ) or just from the stocks menu.  You can change it so that the ammo doesn't get auto-forbidden ( [ o]rders > [F]orbid > [p] ).  From that same Forbid menu, you can auto-forbid equipment dropped by dead enemies and soldiers.  You can auto-forbid corpses with [ o]rders > [r]efuse. This might be a good idea as it will prevent your dwarves from running out to pick stuff up in the middle of a battle.  You can always unforbid items when the area is safe, and then you get to pick and choose what you want to have picked up (the downside is this will probably take a long time and a lot of scrolling through long lists of body parts and equipment).  Supposedly having all those items just lying around can kill your framerate, but I don't like sending dwarfs into potentially dangerous areas just to pick up trash, so I tend to leave it strewn about the landscape...plus I don't need 40 bins of dirty gobbo armor clogging up my stockpiles.