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[MOK]

I had some ... fun...  the other night.  My fortress was really coming together with a meticulously planned water system that was nearing completion, and things were pretty darn well-arranged.  But alas, I discovered the 'loyalty cascade,' and the fortress ceased to function.  I couldn't stabilize with a handful of war survivors, as these maniac horses I'd been raising were killing even them.  I abandoned, having decided I was having enough... fun....

...So I reclaimed today, because that fort was sweet, and I don't feel like taking another 24 hours to design and dig it out again, etc.  That's too much... fun.... for me.

The reclaim did not go well.  I had things going as stably as I could, trying to clean up methodically.  Pretty much, I just monitored the cleanup for... 5, 6 hours?  Till the inside of the fort wasn't a mess, trying to prioritize ghost-busting. 

Alas, I couldn't get all the ghosts, and eventually a pair who latched onto my two axe-dwarves-in-training, and drove them berserk, along with two others.  This reclaim has failed, as I'm nearly non-functional again, and I can't get migrants to come due to local 'friendly' goblins killing mountainhome caravans.  I'd been  trying to grow my axedwarves & war dogs to take them out, but it just took too long.

So now I'm considering another reclaim.  How can I make the reclaim process .... less fun?  Spending hours waiting for crap to get stockpiled, criss-crossing the map  to mark & gather bodies takes too long.  It's a waste of  time.

Anyone have suggestions on how to handle starting over?  The build-time on a new fort is just too much, and the item-hunting on reclaim is just as tedious, it seems.

[Girlinhat]

For one, loosing isn't supposed to be pleasant.  So with that in mind... not much really.  Unless you want to get cheaty.  Runesmith lets you insta-kill creatures, and DFHack has an autodump feature.  Just make layer-wide designations to dump things, and autodump them outside, sort through it from there.

[Jacob/Lee]

For one thing, in my experience with forts that massive, sorting through all the crap left behind immediately is not a good idea. First you need to stabilize the fort, get your farms working again, banish the ghosts, kill the goblins etc. etc. After that, when you get more migrants start sorting through all the stuff, preferably finding the more useful stuff first.

[Wannazzaki]

DFLair in DFHack prevents item scatter.

[Girlinhat]

Actually I couldn't find the lair tool in my version...

[Ieb]

Get an engraver and mason working on slabs.
Identify the more dangerous ghosts first and throw a slab for 'em somewhere. You just need to get 'em to sod off from the mortal plane for you to pick up the pieces again, you can move their slabs to a proper area later on or even give them a real burial if their corpses still exist.

You can do all this in a little dug pit too, so you don't necessarily have to enter the actual fort and risk angering the dead residents.

[Wannazzaki]

Actually I couldn't find the lair tool in my version...

You need to DFhack version that you extract into a seperate folder, not the quakeconsole styled one. If you HAVE and still can't find it, well.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=28H6EJPA

Here

[Keldane]

There's also a utility that would allow you to embark with extra dwarves. I'm not sure if it's been updated for the most recent version, but it does come with instructions on how to use a hex editor to modify the game's executable yourself to set the number of dwarves you start with. They even appear on the Embark screen, so you can give them skills and such if you want to - though in my opinion, your best bet may be to only give skills to the basic starting seven, and then disable their hauling labors on arrival. Let the extra dwarves exist as haulers and zerg rushers while your core seven begin crafting coffins and slabs and begin addressing any other business that requires non-hauling skills. Just remember that most of the equipment you'll need will already be on site, so you can probably afford to spend some extra embark points on food and drink so that your slave labor doesn't die before you give them permission to do so.

[Jacob/Lee]

If you do Keldane's method, you might want to bring a single pick + axe. For all you know, your whole pickaxe/battleaxe set might be behind a couple dozen murderous ghosts a few "friendly" goblins.

[MOK]

As for the nature of losing, I understand that.  But I believe there's a difference between !!FUN!! and ...fun...

As for the rest:  Hmm, looks good.  I'll try some of this.  Pity that I didn't know about slabs.

Next time I'll just have to suppress my OCD-ness about a tidy map.... Though frankly I think I'll just cheat it.  Not something I'd normally do, but I'd rather spend my time dying to sieges and floods than letting the fort run calmly for hours, everyone booked up collecting blocks and mittens.

[Ubiq]

Whatever the setup I'd recommend turning off hauling on your starting seven. Let the migrant waves take care of it and the fastest way to do that is to centralize collection points for the goods.

Now, prior to embarking:

What stage were your forges in upon abandoning?

If you have magma forges handy and plenty of metals, embark with a few Metalsmiths.
If not, have carpenters and as much wood as you can carry.

Set to work making bins, slabs, and coffins. Set a chair as an office for one of your dwarves and set them to work updating the stockpile records so that you can rapidly reclaim things via the stock screen as the need arises.

When you have plenty of bins ready, start creating stockpiles in the areas where trash is most dense.  When migrants show up, turn off hauling on the useful ones and let the rest go about their business.

After they arrive, they'll start hauling bins out to those areas and collecting things. When all the bins in a stockpile are filled, delete it and create a replacement stockpile elsewhere. The dwarves will now haul the empty bins to the new stockpile.

Save furniture for last as it cannot be placed in bins and turn off barrels and bins in those stockpiles to make sure that dwarves will continue hauling them to empty stockpiles instead.

[Girlinhat]

My advice on the mess cleanup?  Let the monkies do it!  Wait for macaque to come steal all your xpig tail fibre sockx from the strewn field.