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[King Mir]

I have a dwarf in my fortress that got injured in a goblin ambush. He's got motor nerve damage, sensory nerve damage, and lost the ability to grasp. Before the injury he was a militarily grunt, so he doesn't have useful civilian skills. My problem is I can't get him to do anything. If I assign him a bunch of skill he announcement spams about being unable to get equipment, and doesn't start doing anything. Even without assigning anything, he will often spam about being unable to move his own stuff. The only thing I've been able to get him to do is bookkeeping, but that doesn't keep him occupied. All my other dwarves are working but he just lounges around in the dining hall.

What jobs should he be able to do? How can I make him useful?

[i2amroy]

If he has lost his ability to grasp in both hands then the only useful thing that he will do at this point is maybe die (alternatively you could draft him into the military with "no uniform" and use him as a reservoir for enemy bolts ). Seriously though, at this point he's pretty much a permanent cripple who will never be able to do anything again.

[GoldenShadow]

I can imagine a dwarven hospital with crippled dwarfs being artificially alive on life support. Its not sad, its keeping their familys from having to deal with death.

[King Mir]

Well he does do the bookkeeping. I'd make him manager too, but my current manager has some skills. I was thinking of making him Captain of the guard, but that would probably just upset him, because he won't immediately get his rooms.

[Garath]

a cripple, completely useless agent of the law. wonderful

[RTiger]

He would make a great hammerer

[i2amroy]

He would make a great hammerer

I don't know about that, have you ever seen a dwarven biter going into action? It's scary when some armless/legless dwarf rolls his way over to a goblin and bites their head off.

[Diamond]

Assigning armless dwarf to guard duty might or might not be a good idea, as biting may be dangerous. I once assigned war-veteran dwarf that was missing leg, one arm and had some problems with the other hand too, and was slowly walking with a crutch to be a guard captain. I regretted that decision after 3 deaths of haulers and one craftsdwarf from having their skull broken by said crutch.

[Aspgren]

Urist McUseless: Stop right there, criminal scum! Nobody defies mandates on MY watch!
Urist McInnocent: Bite me!

*CENSORED DUE TO EXTREMELY GRATUITOUS VIOLENCE*

[assimilateur]

Could you test if he'll do hauling? I remember that in adventurer mode, when I lost both hands, I could still haul things and put them in my backpack, presumably with my teeth.

What I recommend (though I assume this will require generating a new world) is removing the [HAS_NERVES] tag from all creatures*. Losing use of a limb due to nerve damage seems to happen too easily, and since making nerves more resilient or giving them the ability to heal doesn't work (I've tried), I decided to get rid of it. It's not like they can't still lose limbs or bleed out or whatever. And I did so with all creatures so as not to give myself too much of an advantage against invaders.

*This is actually quite easy to do if you've ever used a text editor like notepad++. You can open any number of files (in this case, the creature_*.txt files in the raw folder) and replace a tag with another string of characters (I put HAS_NERVES without brackets to remind myself it was there). While you're at it, you can replace [PET_EXOTIC] with [PET], since the dungeon master is broken and won't come.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Train him as a biter. Capture small, furry animals and pit the dripple against them until he can handle unarmed, unarmored goblins while armored. Eventually, he'll be a legendary biter and will be ready to bite some gobbos to death. Bonus points if he wears nothing but the armor he is forced to wear, eats only raw meat, and lets all his non-military skills rust to nothingness.

[Fredd]

Sheriff job would be good

[i2amroy]

Which would be bad for the reasons above as sheriff/captain of the guard are the same person. Yes he would be useful, but yes he would then proceed to bite dwarves to death instead of punching them.

[King Mir]

He won't haul. He's got no biting skill, though he is an adequate striker and skilled fighter.


I made him captain of the guard. I don't know if I should let him use the barracks after I build a jail. Probably will; he's not likely to need to bite anyone in my fort.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I still think a feral biting dwarf to set on the goblin hordes is a good idea.