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[semelfett]

So I'm playing on my second fortress and i have survived to my third year, but now i got two problems. I can't find any ore for iron, there is native gold everywhere but that wont really help my military. so is the ore below gold or just bad luck? Second is there anyway to get my dwarfs inside when under attack? right now i have 80 dwarfs trying to loot my dead dwarfs while goblins kill them.

[Talvieno]

Iron is smelted from hematite, and magnetite, and I think limonite too, but I'm not sure. These usually show up in sedimentary layers. If your map has sedimentary layers, you're in luck - there's a chance you'll find iron. And it's very possible for the iron to be there - just dig deeper. If you don't find any... I'd say it's bad luck.

To get your dwarves inside, use a burrows. Place it with "w" and use the enter key to define where you want your dwarves to go. After that, go to the military screen ("m"), go to alerts ("a"), and create a new alert. Set this alert to include the burrow you just created. When this alert is selected (you select it with "enter"), all your dwarves, excepting military ones, will rush off to the burrow and stay there... unless they're running from someone.

[semelfett]

thanks for the answer going to try and get my dwarfs back inside it it's not to late already(military dwars with wooden training swords die so horribly fast.)

[semelfett]

It was way to late now all my dwarfs are having !fun! trowing tantrums.

[Iton Ibrukrithzam]

It was way to late now all my dwarfs are having !fun! trowing tantrums.

Sweet, you lose!

Seriously, though, as a more experienced player, forts that end due to total defeat are far more valuable as learning experiences than those that end via boredom or FPS death.  Every fort I've lost due to brutal death is a lesson I take with me for the future.

[Tirion]

The lesson here is that you shouldn't use a melee military if you don't have metals. The best you can do without any metal is bone crossbows with bone bolts, wooden shields, and leather/bone/shell armor... And it's probably not enough without walls and traps. Cage traps are really useful to capture goblins, who you can disarm later- and their equipment is 100% dwarf compatible. Or if you're more into killing and have sand and fuel or magma, replace cage trap spam with weapon trap spam stuffed full of green glass trap components.

[Iton Ibrukrithzam]

The lesson here is that you shouldn't use a melee military if you don't have metals. The best you can do without any metal is bone crossbows with bone bolts, wooden shields, and leather/bone/shell armor... And it's probably not enough without walls and traps. Cage traps are really useful to capture goblins, who you can disarm later- and their equipment is 100% dwarf compatible. Or if you're more into killing and have sand and fuel or magma, replace cage trap spam with weapon trap spam stuffed full of green glass trap components.

Ah, but the big question is, "Should our desert savage, no metal dorfs use captured gobbo metal?"

If yes, arming them is just a matter of patience. 

If no, then reliance on alternate methods of killing become more needed.  Such as the GDS squad.

[semelfett]

I'm gonna arm my dwarfs with silver crosbows as i have lots of silver and lead. But first i have to deal with a berserk merchant guard that have killed 20 dwarfs this far. Can i make a zone larger? my hospital is way to small.

[Tirion]

I'm gonna arm my dwarfs with silver crosbows as i have lots of silver and lead. But first i have to deal with a berserk merchant guard that have killed 20 dwarfs this far. Can i make a zone larger? my hospital is way to small.

IIRC you can't make silver ranged weapons in unmodded DF, and the only time a crossbow's material counts is in melee when it's used as a very bad hammer despite being made of the best hammer material, and without armor your dwarfs will be dismembered by the goblins anyway. Silver however can be made into trap components such as large serated disks and menacing spikes... look up trap design on the wiki, it makes low-metal embarks survivable.

You can just delete and re-designate the hospital zone, but since when can caravan *guards* go berserk? I thought only merchants and their animals can.

[semelfett]

Yeah i noticed that i couldn't use silver for crossbows, so im making bolts of it instead. About that berserk guard all i know is that I didn't have a macedwarf and there was one going berserk in my dining hall right after a caravan arrived.

[greycat]

Silver bolts are excellent, as are silver hammers.  For shooting, the material of a crossbow doesn't matter -- only its quality level matters.  So you could arm dwarves with masterpiece bone crossbows firing silver bolts, backed up by silver-hammer-dwarves.  The issue will be the lack of decent armor on the hammerdwarves; leather armor just isn't the best.

I would recommend requesting armor as well as all other meltable iron/steel sources (anvils, toys, everything) from your civilization.  And maybe bronze as well.  This will let you build up a few decent pieces of armor over time.

[semelfett]

Going to set up some workshops for crossbows then. Another question before I unleash way to much !fun!. If i dig a tunnel to a river will it fill up my fortress or stop after a while?

[Garath]

fill it up to the level of the river, unless you stop it. So first build your floodgates or bridges (raised bridge will stop flow) before you breach the last tile to let the water in, and link them to levers

also, if you dont want your people to run out but dont want to restrict to burrowm you can use (d), (b), (f) and select the tiles where not to pick up, or clean trap. Wy do this? if you have an extensive mining planned, you'll have to enlarge the burrow every few seconds, because you can only make visible area part of a burrow. A 2 wide corridor, 30 tiles long, needs to be reassigned 29 times or so, every 2 stones dug out

[Tirion]

fill it up to the level of the river, unless you stop it. So first build your floodgates or bridges (raised bridge will stop flow) before you breach the last tile to let the water in, and link them to levers

also, if you dont want your people to run out but dont want to restrict to burrowm you can use (d), (b), (f) and select the tiles where not to pick up, or clean trap. Wy do this? if you have an extensive mining planned, you'll have to enlarge the burrow every few seconds, because you can only make visible area part of a burrow. A 2 wide corridor, 30 tiles long, needs to be reassigned 29 times or so, every 2 stones dug out

False. You can designate unmined areas as part of a burrow.

[Garath]

really? tell me how! not with a 3x3 or 5x5 brush

i hope you dont count walls, they are visible. I'm talking about the black spaces. Please tell me how

well, aperantly its supposed to work automatically. i dont see burrow designations on the area, and the mining had no progress....
lets keep it at everyone being busy somewhere else and i'll be back on this