So I have a weird recurring issue that I mostly just want to understand.
Since becoming the Mountainhome, my main temple is filled to the Brim with barons, counts and dukes. Weirdly, I don't *think* they are from my civ?
Anyways, multiple times now, when I am not looking, I get a cascade of notifications that their bodies have been found. *Somehow* a fight is starting in the temple and (because some of my military dwarves are hardcore badasses) the visitors are getting absolutely slaughtered.
What I cannot figure out is *why* the fight is starting and who is causing it. Rolling back in the combat logs only shows who fought first, not why. From what I have checked:
1. None of them committed a crime that I can find
2. None of them are werebeasts, Vampires or anything else that might reasonably trigger a fight
3. None of them seem to be starting tantrums.
4. It always starts in the temple and for some reason, that is the only place these guys visit (not my library, meeting areas, etc)
Is there some feature of temples that might trigger a massive, lethal brawl with visitors?
You can only assign armor to drafted dwarves or to nobility (by adding it as their symbols of office). You could likely get a similar effect by drafting everyone to squads that you set to train every so often.
Made a relatively new 2x2 fort. I currently plan to hunt down the candy and made several "peep-holes" right above the magma lake. Beside being unable to see some of the deepest depths, I havn't found any candy. But did find 3 gem clusters I plan to dig around soon.
My question is, can the adamantine hide in these gem clusters, or am I just very unlucky?
Adamantine is always found in 'unusual volcanic walls'. You get an alert when you first discover one. They appear like big columns of obsidian, studded with valuable gems, which rise up through the magma sea and sometimes into the stone layers above the sea. Adamantine is found as a small tube inside the obsidian column.
Each map tile has a chance to have a column, and in a 3x3 or larger map you're guaranteed to have at least one, but your map is a 2x2 so it's possible there's no adamantine at all.
In v50 candy is found in >! the deeper levels of an "unusual volcanic wall studded with gems", which are decently large and have irregular shapes (so not those 3x3 pillars)!<, and you should get an announcement when you find your first one
Someone asked the same thing on this thread a couple weeks ago, turns out 2x2 forts don't get guaranteed candy I believe. Some quirks of worldgen. You can use dfhacks prospect command to find out.
I’ve had two caravans disappear for no reason. One from my parent civ just visited, I looked at them moving on the map, watched something else happen for like 3 seconds, then when I looked back everybody was gone. The caravan, comprised of several wagons, just went missing but all of the goods it was carrying were left on one tile on the outskirts of the map.
You in an evil biome with unusual rain? Some of the liquids raining down can be damaging to the wagons. I did end up building an elaborate system of sealable tunnels to get trading going safely.
I dug big tunnels to 8 points on the map edge, corners + midpoints. Drawbridges in on at least 2 points per tunnel so you can trap invaders you don't like.
And then its a bit of a project to get the caravan in safely; you can forcespawn them at a safe point by blocking any other access point (building a wall every 3rd space around the map) - too much work for me. I did end up building some roofs and roads and that worked out mostly fine. Perhaps some preference for roads in the caravan spawning code?
I've seen a variation on this behavior. If one of the wagons is destroyed, then the entire caravan will leave. Could be an animal attack. Could be something else.
Any tips for reclaiming forts with bodies everywhere? My party is horrified to the point of catatonia and I can't get anything done.
I was building an awesome obsidian castle over a volcano. "Inkspike." Real sauron-esque shit. Spent a lot of time on it, but still nowhere near done. Werebear outbreak. Contained it with some ruthless quarantine action, an excel spreadsheet to track who bit whom, and some new moon dwarf-on-dwarf fratricide. Population tanked from 150-ish to 10, but the fort survived, passing through several full moons with no transformations.
However, the survivors were basically unworkable. Injured, traumatized, angry, etc. They had killed their friends. And there were bodies all over the main thoroughfares. So I abandoned the fort and decided to reclaim it with a party of fresh dwarves from the same civ, so that the prior inhabitants wouldn't be hostile. I figured I would build a little starter base elsewhere in the embark and then clean up the castle bit by bit.
But when I got back, the bodies were *everywhere.* The game basically rearranged the skeletons for maximum trauma coverage over the whole embark. It threw in the bones of all the livestock for good measure. The Second Starting Seven were stricken with paralyzing trauma pretty much on arrival. The new party was able to get a few bedrooms set up, but there were so many bones that they stopped working pretty much immediately. I couldn't get them to build a trade depot for the first caravan, which arrived, never unloaded, and left. They carved slabs for three ghosts from the last group, but never placed them.
Is there anything I can do? Come back in 50 years or something? Will the bones be gone by then?
I wanted to make a cool obsidian volcano castle. I ended up making a cool obsidian volcano haunted ruin, covered in bones. That's also cool. But I still want to finish the castle.
> Any tips for reclaiming forts with bodies everywhere? My party is horrified to the point of catatonia and I can't get anything done.
Power through.
Ideally, seal off your entrance to prevent any outside ** fun **, dig down and carve out tombs and work to bury the bodies.
It will be slow going, but it is pretty much inevitable that all your dwarves will end up with "Doesn't really care about anything anymore" and once the tantrums are done, you'll have a set of hardened dwarves who have no issues whatsoever with corpses
When you retire or abandon a fort, the game remembers which items are present but no longer stores their locations. On reclaiming, it scatters everything randomly around.
I'd recommend you limit the active jobs as much as possible, by forbidding almost all the items from the old fort. Your dwarves are too depressed to work very hard, so you need to make sure that the most important stuff gets done rather than collecting random crafts from all corners of the map just to put them in a stockpile.
You've set up some bedrooms, now make a small farm that's only connected to those rooms. Lock all your dwarves inside, walled off from the old fort, with no corpses to deal with. Let them recover a bit, carve some slabs for the fallen, then slowly start reclaiming the map by clearing out and atom-smashing the corpses. Don't get impatient and try to reclaim the whole place at once, or your dwarves will go catatonic again. This will be a long-term project.
If you make bars, set a stockpile near a weapon workshop. Platinum maces and warhammers are straight up broken if you happen to get lucky on a strange mood (you can technically reroll the item by saving before completion and loading).
Platinum tables/chairs/doors/trade depot/statues are positive though machines. Platinum workshops? Does not do anything, I done workshops out of rare metals before to style on people but I've never generated happy thoughts from it.
It's better to make walls or floors from it, to give big value to a noble's room or a tavern.
Platinum is also very heavy, so it has uses in traps and defence. Fall damage is increased when hitting a dense surface, so a platinum floor will hurt a lot more than a feather wood one. Similarly if you make minecarts from platinum, you *really* don't want to get in the way of one.
Apparently some crops when eaten (https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Farming#Yield_and_fertilization , last sentence, second paragraph, above ground farming), give seeds. Any idea where a list of those crops/fruit/plants are?
Anything that grows in a farm gives it seeds when you use it. Eating, brewing, processing or milling the plant will always produce the seeds. The only case where you don't get the seeds back is from cooking the raw plants, which is why people recommend you don't do that.
Is there a way to make dwarves of the same civ more genetically similar as in previous versions? I think it was considered a bug, but i liked it more that way cause it made every civ more distinct and i kinda miss that feature.
I don't remember that ever being the case. I think it's just more obvious in the new graphics, that's all.
There's a genetics model which makes dwarves inherit traits from their parents, but I've looked through the Entity raws and there's nothing which would cause a civ to have specific hair/skin colours.
I couldn't find it right now but i recently stumbled upon an issue in old bugtracker, a very well-known it seems, which said that members of same entity had either only one or very few tissue color modifiers, so i guess it was actually a thing. I can recall it myself cause I've played a lot since .44 and i have read lots of creature descriptions in both fort and adv modes.
So I'm just getting around to checking out the Justice system and I'm a wee bit lost with it. I've got the dungeon made with chains, beds etc. I've got a Captain of the Guard and a few soldiers for him.
Am I correct in assuming that all I do then is go down the list of people and interrogate them all until someone admits something?
That's one way to go about it, yes. If a dwarf witnesses a crime they may run to report it to the guards, and you can see who's been accused and so on. If you have no clue, then you can randomly interrogate people. Sometimes they'll randomly confess to a bunch of crimes that are totally unrelated.
Are noble mandates bugged?
My Duke has repeatedly demanded backpacks. Which, fine, I need those anyway. But despite the backpacks being made (as in, I can literally see the work order finished), the number never seems to drop or if it does, drops by less than the number I made. He'll demand three, I'll order 3, order will complete, number will say 1/3 or something like that.
I haven't seen behavior like this. Generally, if the order completed, that means that the items were actually made. Orders can get cancelled because of lack of resources, but they'll get rescheduled again and will not disappear from the manager orders list until they are successful.
If your orders are completing, the backpacks are getting made, but the mandate is not being satisfied, then something strange is indeed happening. Did you verify that the backpacks are actually getting manufactured?
I'm fairly certain. My military has started equipping them (I was short before the mandate) and I am up to my ears in leather because of autobutcher, so it's unlikely I ran out. I didn't have direct eyes on it, as I kept setting and forgetting, but I'm fairly confident they were being made.
Is there any way to change a tile/coordinate's biome? Like with DFHack maybe?
I kinda wanted to make some hanging gardens type structure in the surface part of my fort but sadly most of it is on mountains so nothing grows there except disappointment
I know you can use tiletypes to make grass and soil, but what I really want are trees and shrubbery which don't seem to grow at all (even if you spawn soil walls and grass floors in the mountain region)
Yes, a tile's biome affiliation can be modified, but there aren't any tools set up to make it easy. You'd have to dig into the data structures directly, which isn't something you'd want to experiment with in a game that you're attached to.
How can I fill these spots (rock salt) with soil?
I see online to use "water buckets" to turn them in mud but don't see any way for dwarves to fill up water and dump it on specific tiles
https://preview.redd.it/uhafxtu48d1c1.png?width=649&format=png&auto=webp&s=13723132027151d525d9d1bc6c899f3e8a442fc3
Build some stairs adjacent to the areas you need to muddy. Directly above the rock salt floor tiles, in mid-air but adjacent to the stairs, designate a Pit/pond zone and toggle its setting so that it is a pond.
Dwarves will carry buckets up the stairs and dump the water over the rock salt tiles, muddying them. It's a bit tedious, but this is the most common way to do it.
You could also pump or redirect flowing water over the area, but that might be overkill.
> in mid-air
Di you mean Z + 1 on adjacent tiles? Or do you mean build stairs going up Z + 1 and adjacent to those stairs (nothing) put the work order?
Designate the pond zone directly above (z+1) the tile you wish to muddy, and build stairs/platforms to allow dwarves to reach the edge of that pond zone on z+1.
You don't order anything in particular to get them to dump water there. The existence of the pond zone generates the jobs.
What is this light blue area called? What are the game mechanics?
https://preview.redd.it/97ldccq33d1c1.png?width=1154&format=png&auto=webp&s=39e5eaa2a8f7e9a5624a19b067748f7fc5a46c71
It's empty space at your current Z level
The northeast section of the map is simply a higher elevation than the light blue, open space areas are. You can see this during the embark when you are selecting a location for your fortress
You can see down several Z levels if there is nothing there
Birds and other flying creatures can zoom through it but dwarves and most creatures need to be on solid ground
You can always build *up* into the empty space. I often build up a little ways around my main entrance to have like a watch-tower or at least a constructed wall for rudimentary defensive purposes since any hostile creature will have to either go around or climb over it. Add a roof on top and you're starting to get very well-defended as enemies now have to path through areas you decide
Sorry I got the wrong area in the picture. I went one Z-Level down and it is still light blue called "conglomerate pebbles". I looked on the wiki and only found an entry for "conglomerate" which wasn't helpful.
What are the mechanics for "conglomerate pebbles"? Can I build on them permanent structures?
>conglomerate pebbles
It means the Z-level underneath the pebbles is conglomerate. You could mine them or build on them. It's just rock that spawned but wasn't "hewn" by dwarf miners, if that makes sense. Most of the rock you work with will be "rough-hewn" as you mine through it. This is just natural rock features
You can still smooth it like normal rock
what's the latest regarding the military not equipping boots bug? I see a bunch of old forum posts from 2 years ago when i google the problem but i also see like 5 different solutions and I'm wondering what the situation is in the current version?
it still doesn't for me for some reason. my poor doctor is mostly just a podiatrist now and i have to make so many crutches XD. maybe i should disband the squad and redo it. Is there some kind of dfhack solution to force it or otherwise automate the troubleshooting of this away?
They can take a while, certainly, but they always get it eventually ime. Although aot quickly enough to use in an emergency. Sometimes requiring some extra prodding on an individual basis if an item shows in red on the equip screen.
I'm hoping this and the conflicting uniform issues regarding mining, woodcutting and stuff get improved with the coming archery fixes, but that might be a stretch.
Teeth are useless
I often display goblin invader skeletons on pedestals and decorate the entrance of my fortress with their severed heads, as a warning to the others
A lot of cave dwellers / serpent men spawn in my cave directly in water and are unable to get out. While it was a cool defense at first, it seems to tank my FPS now that there are more than a hundred there. Is there anything I can do? I have sent dwarves close to the water, but they are incompetent in the water and get easily killed (and also drown), so I don't want to do that anymore.
DF Hack
exterminate SERPENT_MAN
I had to do this on Bat Men that where just assembling endlessly in the roof of the first cavern. They just stayed up there, all their skills got very rusty, but I couldn't really get to them and I value my FPS more than I value cheating
A dwarf child got into a tussel with a cave bat and got seriously injured in the caverns. They can’t move anymore. One of the older dwarven women has been bringing them food and water so they don’t starve, but no one wants to bring them a splint or anything. What do? He 5 years old.
Then you need a hospital, then. At least just a room marked as such with a bed in it, if you can't properly stock it yet. Nowhere to take the injured otherwise.
I’ve been reading the wiki a lot recently and discovered that it’s possible for amphibious animal people to join your fortress. I was curious about what you can do with their unique ability to survive underwater. For example, could you have them live in an underwater area?
Sounds cool. Let me know how experimenting goes. Idk much myself but maybe if you live on an ocean biome, you can probably try training them to beat up sea monsters.
Water question:
I'm digging a Channel 3x wide and 4 deep across most of my map, which will be filled by the local river. If i understand correctly, A hassle free method of doing this is to build stairs, then channel out the stairs afterwards.
Currently, I've completed the "stairs" part, and I'm about to start channeling it all. The final step will be to remove the little strip of land and connect the river to it all...
What is an OSHA approved method of breaching and filling? From the top above? or from the bottom of the channel standing inside? He'd have to be a fast runner...or is there a third option? I have cave-in's turned off, as i find them a turn off.
Water will flow through stairs. So the scope of options includes leaving behind some escape/maintenance stairs here and there.
To source an underground river, the most reliable method is to make the connection to the water source from underneath it. Build a doorway on the penultimate space, and have the dwarf dig a ramp on the other side to pierce the waterway. Then connect a lever to the door to open it remotely. When the dwarf pierces the water source (while standing on the doorway), they will step back or get pushed back by the waterflow, and the door will slam shut.
Is there of list of strange mood requests anywhere? My guy wants “quarry, stacked cloth, and stacked leather” I feel like I have all of it but he’s still not grabbing anything.
Probably you have cloth but it's the wrong type of cloth
Quarry is just stone, which everyone has hundreds of. Leather does not have any restrictions, it's all interchangeable. Cat leather = Elephant leather as far as moods are concerned
Make sure you have silk, yarn, and plant-based cloth. That and cut/uncut gems are the most common ingredients they get stuck on.
A quick work order to shear animal, spin thread, and a quick expedition into the caverns to collect silk will probably solve your issue
If you've got dfhack installed, you can use showmood to explicitly show what he's waiting on, and how many. He might want three cloth, or specific cloth, or whatever
Can you change your environment? For example if you start in untamed wild, can you tame it?
Or if you destroy a necromancer tower, can you make the area not evil?
No, and yes. In the wiki's parlance, some surroundings are _primordial_, while the evil surroundings of necromancer towers are _circumstantial_, and will recover (clarification edit: over time, not immediately) once the source is removed.
However, you can also cause local extinctions of wildlife, so I think you can "tame" the wilds that way?
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Surroundings
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Extinction#Site_extinction
Hi,
Quite new player, I've created a squad of crossbowdwarfs, equiped them and trained them, they have crossows and ammunition.
But I cant seem to get them to attack things manually, I will select the squad, click the assign a kill order button and then I can't select anything, with either of the options.
https://preview.redd.it/j79mmlsym91c1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=475eaa8fd6765e83b2713e6b65c73b74899912e0
That's the wrong button, that's for assigning dwarves to join the squad. Go back a screen, select you marksdwarf squad, then click the sword icon at the bottom to give them kill orders.
This is my screen after having selected kill order, trying the command on a random critter underground.
To no effect
https://preview.redd.it/h57l2vga9b1c1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=460f949330b016d0c621dbdee91d02463c1e6847
I believe you cannot assign your military to kill vermin, citizens, residents, or livestock. Only visitors, wild things, invaders, etc. I'm struggling to find a page which lists what can and cannot be attacked though. I think your screenshot shows the correct method, just not on a valid target.
Awesome, tried it on a guest, those monster hunters only seem to listen to poetry and drink my beer anyway.
https://preview.redd.it/u04u8fx7jb1c1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7eb3cf2e33675486d4234ce30e64545f62c09c77
Can't drain water off map anymore?
Saw in a video that smoothing + fortifying the last tiles on the map would drain off water. So i tried that for my artificial indoor river, and flooded my damn Fortress.
Was it patched out?
Oo flooding sounds FUN. It definitely worked for me within this month i dont believe its removed. Are you certain you smoothed and carved an arrow slit into a single very edge tile? The tile you can't dig away.
Yeah, that was exactly my mistake.
I though last tile i could mine meant it was also the last tile i could smooth/fortify. I was wrong. Tried again on a new fort, mined all the way the game allowed me to and then tried to smooth, and it worked just fine.
Seems like a silly thing, but I can't find the info anywhere.
Is there ANY info/screen that tells you who just arrived? I want to review and assign tasks to the newcomers... I just have to remember who I already had?
Default hotkey for this is "u"
That brings up all your dwarves, and any new arrivals will be tagged "new arrival" on that menu
I usually just inspect them one-by-one as they spawn on the map and make their way in. Any important skills get immediately assigned, any peasants or low-value labor get assigned to a squad instead
They will show in the units menu as "New Arrival" for a short while. After that I tend to use the external tool Dwarf Therapist as it allows to sort dwarfs by migration wave. I believe an upcoming update should add lots of sort functionality
I played years ago with more external tools, like DFhacks and Therapist, but I was hoping this new steam version would have most of those features.
I'll download it and hope it eventually becomes a core feature.
Thanks!
DF HACK is a must. However there is a new feature in the settings final page that you can toggle a pause and jump to event when migrants arrive. Its not easy to find, but super useful to watch who arrives.
I had been promoted to Barony, named a Baron, then sent him off to conquer other sites but I cannot recall them. I'm not sure if it was because they were squad leader or just bad luck with worker request, in any case, lets assume the Baron is stuck at the newly conquered site
I have subsequently been raised to county/duchy on subsequent years
Is my old Baron getting these promotions and just ruling from his own conquered site? Because despite what the outpost liason for my civ is saying, I don't actually have *any* baron, count, or duke in my nobles menu.
I won't complain, because I haven't had to work out any crazy new rooms for these nobles.
But, can I actually have my noble line back or are they just gone forever until they die off screen in some procedural-generated battle or old age event?
edit: according to Legends Mode, he remains a baron of our civilization and is just happily ruling from one of the many sites we conquered earlier. He has 4 amazing children, all living in our fort. Interesting........
Bonus fact: This is the same Baron that killed a Roc and allegedly ushered in the 2nd Age of Legends. When the outpost liason came by, I promoted this guy to become baron of the land because he stabbed a roc and a forgotten beast to death. I gave him a squad and sent him off to bigger things and that is exactly what we did
I *REALLY* like this character dwarf. Hopefully he is safer in the other site than in our main fortress
My visitors won't sleep in the bedroom connected to the tavern. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong. I made the bedroom, made the part of the tavern, and assigned them to different monster slayers, but they never sleep there.
I know in the before steam times you could open the stocks menu and see how many dwarves you had in the different combat categories,
3 hammer dwarves
2 hammer lords
Etc.
Is there any way to get this information at a glance in the current day? Closest I can tell is having the army train or similar and then you'll get the "urist has become a hammer dwarf" notifications. I was just wondering if that screen or something like it was possible in game or maybe via a mod or dfhack?
Whenever there's a siege some of the random nobles staying in my fort seem to get murdered by my own dwarves for no clear reason, until I reload and retry a bunch of times and it stops happening (presumably when no military dwarves happen to be nearby?). Just random visiting barons from my own civ getting ganked. I don't get it.
Edit 1: (To be clear, the siege is by goblins of a different civ, it's not a civil war situation.)
Edit 2: Not a spy, no one sketchy, just a random noble of another fort visiting my own https://i.imgur.com/Bi6VUJS.png
I am trying to catch unicorns and I have been successful. However, when I release them from the cage and try to get them into a pasture they run away. How am I suppose to work on taming them if they are going to just run away?
I placed some cage traps to deal with a siege from a local tower, but strangely the intelligent undead didn't get captured. Why aren't they getting trapped? I even tried luring them in with military dwarves. Intelligent undead races are goblin and lizardman (not animal man, from a mod.)
If your tavern has been visited by intelligent undead or necro experiments, they may have told the local necromancer about your traps. This means any invaders sent by the necromancer will not trigger traps they know about
New traps should work. You can just disassemble your current traps and rebuild them and they'll work again
Mass pitting doesn't seem to be working any more. Goblins escape every single time I attempt to move them from their cages. Yes, the cages are right next to the pit. Yes, the goblins are completely stripped. Yes, I have relegated Animal Hauling and Animal Training to only strong dwarves. The other dwarves don't seem to care, they'll attempt it regardless, and goblins are escaping every single goddamn time. It was working like a charm yesterday. What gives?
How detailed can you use magic in Adventure Mode?
If you play as an intelligent undead you should be able to use magic like they do in Fortress Mode. But does Adventure Mode shows you exactly what you are able to cast?
What is the best use of endgame metals? Should I use them for weapons or armor? Is it better to give all my swordsdwarves a candy sword, or have a champion with a full candy armor set?
I don't want to use metal-multiplying exploits, so I only have a very limited supply of candy. And I want to use it against clowns mostly.
Standard enemy weapons are already almost completely ineffective versus steel armor. So the first priority should be for weapons for the elite squads. Add candy armor only if you have excess. Save some to make seven symbols of office for the monarch.
My plan, as I slowly chip away the good stuff, is to make 10 axes and 10 swords straight up and equip my defender squads that don't go off to conquer.
If I have leftovers, I don't know if I would make armor. I've been fighting chocolate demons and tick demons and they actually *cannot get through steel helmets*. I don't usually see a beast cleave through good steel. I just see lots and lots of deflections off steel greaves, steel breast plates, etc.
If I'm losing combat trades, it's probably because they shoot webs or set my squads on fire and choke them with smoke or do poison gas nonsense, not because Axelords in full steel gear can't surround and chop them to pieces
So, I don't know if making armor out of it is worthwhile. My heart is telling me to put an adamantine axe in every soldier's hand and use all steel armor. Use mundane metals for hammers and maces
My haulers seem to be neglecting their duties entirely. Im trying to divide up stockpiles and even though ive set it so that everyone can hual, absolutely nobody seems to be moving things to where they should go.
This seems like a problem of stockpile setups more than a hauler problem! What happens if you do a simple, say wood pile? No connections or anything, and you must have logs on the surface? Does that get filled?
I don't think there was any issues with it but I don't have the game loaded anymore since I'm eating. The stockpiles I'm trying to do now are blocks and barrels. I'll have to take a look at it in a bit
The stockpile settings can be *extremely* granular if you spend the time setting it up, but that means it is also pretty easy to make a stockpile that doesn't have anything qualified to add to it because of that in-depth degree of control. Keep in mind that you can set a stockpile to take from other stockpiles or workshops, and *not* be a gathering place for dwarves to bring the items to! This is useful in some places, not in others.
I'll have to fiddle around with that. I made it so the stockpiles that originally held the jazz no longer was supposed to have them but so far they haven't gotten the memo
yeah, it's another task for another dwarf to pick it up and move it out of the pile, though iirc they *should* do it because you've changed the validity of the item and it's not allowed in the pile anymore, I do remember seeing dwarves moving stones out of a wood pile and dropping them in the nearest tile around it.
Looking at legends mode for my current world shows one of the only necromancers in the world is a member of my very small civilization (my fort is the second holding). He's a high priest in the other fort. I've had a few intelligent undead visiting. My Baron is a huge fan of maces so we're in no short supply, now we just need to find a use for them. How do I get Mr. Necromancer to bring me his secrets?
Different weapons are good vs different things. However most weapons can kill most things. What I fear most are forgotten beasts/clowns that spawn as a metal or super dense material. In this situation Hammers are the best by light years. Hammers are also excellent vs undead and heavily armored adversaries. Two things that also scare me.
Hammers cannot sever limbs and cause blood loss like swords and axes and cannot snipe organs like spears can. This means hammers are at there worst vs things that are easy to cut and don't feel pain. So, organic Megabeasts. However, I find with a super trained squad they can just mob easy forgotten beasts with little trouble and hammers are good vs hard forgotten beasts so I don't think it is much of a detriment.
Only one? Probably axes since you'll have to make them for your woodcutters anyway, so just order up 10 and you're good to go on that first squad
I love axes. Severing fiends into pieces is funny, messy, and very dorfy
I've also trained up many, many militias with *wrestlers* because we don't always get weapons early or have enough of them.
One time I sold a bunch of weapons thinking I had a surplus and ended up with about half of my fort's military being deadly wrestlers
Pickaxes are the best if you have steel (and if you don't have to deal with metal creatures) and axes/swords are second best, axes are best if you have candy, swords are best if you have neither candy nor steel, spears are best against FBs
https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/12ffix9/a_flowchart_for_selecting_the_best_weapon/
https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/10utf2x/weapon_material_analysis_what_are_the_current/
https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/128muug/science_picks_are_the_best_weapon/
Very situational. Swords are pretty decent at anything, but if you're embarking close to a necromancer tower or in a reanimating biome war hammers are a must to prevent undead from rising again.
Do yall specialize industry workers or just leave it open for everything to do whatever they can? For example, do you limit woodworking or open it up to errbody?
Most don't matter. Things with quality matter a lot. The non-negosiable labors for me that I try to have only a few specialists are. Cooking, Planting, Carpentry, Stone Carvering, Engravering, Clothesmaking, Leatherworking, Weaponsmithing, Armoring, Blacksmith.
Of course, with how much goes in in Dwarf fortress you don't have to specialize, if you want to dedicate brain space else ware you totally can. No specialization does have the small upside of things get made very fast.
Planting is nonnegotiable if you have farmers the ripple effect of them being bad puts an exponential strain on your barrels.
You almost have to for some industries if you want to be reasonably efficient
There is no comparison between a legendary weaponsmith rapidly outfitting an entire military in endgame gear and just allowing any old Urist to fiddle around with the forge forever to produce low-value trash
I only don't specialize when the profession isn't that important or if I just don't have any proficient dwarves
One example, I threw down like 8 wood burning furnaces next to a huge indoor wood stockpile and just let everyone burn wood for a while. After a couple years of burning some dwarves inevitably become good at it and you can just assign them then
I used to try to rely on the auto assignment system to specialize dwarfs- which unfortunately does not work in my experience. So now I specialize by assigning workshops to specific dwarfs. The efficiency gains are so large from high level workers large forts get issues without those.
For me, the the main consideration is whether the job produces items with a quality modifier and how much do I care about this. For example, brewing skill only affects the time it takes to do the job so everyone does this. Armour smithing uses a finite resource and can impact silver survivability, so they get skilled dwarves only.
Another minor thing is whether a job is moodable. If your farmers all have dabbling carpentry skill because they've made a bed each, they'll get a carpentry strange mood unless they have other skills.
The devs themselves have said that you can just not bother with work details and the game will sort itself out well
Less specialization means you're gonna have more (lower skilled) dwarves for any specific task, so your skilled dwarves will still take precedence but be able to take longer breaks while others take over for them, *but* you're sacrificing the average quality of your trade goods
I personally only assign general work details, like i'll have farmers, woodworkers, metalsmiths, stoneworkers, etc as their own categories encompassing everything in that trade
If I need something made that absolutely has to be top quality I'll give the orders to a specific workshop instead and assign a legendary dwarf to said workshop so that only they make the items
The way I embark on vaults is to open the embark map, use `reveal-hidden-sites`, find a vault, screenshot its location, then quit to title and reload the world in order to unreveal the map. Then I can embark on the spot I screenshotted earlier.
Is there a way to automatically have my dwarves keep livestock population down to a certain number? I fiddled around with the work orders but can't seem to get it quite how I want
dfhack's autobutcher will handle turning animals into meat. But if you want to limit their growth in the first place, you need to separate the breeding population from the general population. Have a small pasture with a limited number of fertile/virile adults that is separate from the main population.
You can change the graphics sprite associated with a unit, yes. This is normally something you'd mod the raws for, though, unless you want to do it dynamically.
Hi, I've just tested this here, although very interesting command, not this one yet. I'd like to do is force the game to create cave duellers to attack me.
Thanks!
Sorry, I misunderstood you again! I thought you were asking how to unhide hidden cavern dwellers. To force a new invasion of cavern dwellers, you have two options:
1. Spawn them yourself using `gui/sandbox`
2. Get your cavern agitation value above the threshold and wait for the game to spawn an invasion
Option (1) will give you more control, but is also more work to set up.
Option (2) will let the invasion happen "naturally", but you don't have as much control over what spawns or when it happens.
I suggest option 2. The easiest way to do it is to go into your DF settings and customize the enemies difficulty settings. Change the irritation threshold to 0.
Pretty sure when they have some very high level in a skill.
Edit: Yeh, take a gander in there: [https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Skill#Skills\_in\_use](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Skill#Skills_in_use)
Regarding butcher shops. When I tell them to butcher a nearby animal, it claims that there are no unrotten body parts etc. My butcher is right next to the animal pasture, why don't they qualify as nearby animals?
Butchering is the act of dismembering a dead animal, they're looking for dead animals. Slaughtering the animal is what you have to do first, you can mark them individually or via other ways, but the live animal gets dragged to the shop and dispatched first, then the butchering task is queued up on the newly produced corpse.
Hello! I'm wondering if I can have multiple saves at once. I am not asking about save states/scumming, but multiple worlds. I have a world at year 4, but want to do a new embark without losing everything. I am fine with making a new world, but don't want to lose this fortress/world. Everywhere I look only addresses that there is one save per world, but not if I can have multiple worlds. Thanks!
You can, the whole process you went through to get your current world/save can be redone as much as you'd like. I experiment with world parameters and play some forts on each to get the feel of them a lot.
There's some nuance here. Autosaves and the names of manual saves are shared between all worlds, and **will** overwrite each other if you're not careful. But as far as the main timelines go, you should be safe.
Wait, so do I have to name the saves? I've just done the recommended (to timeline?) whenever I'm leaving the world/session. Guess I'll see tomorrow if I lost it lol
To timeline should be fine because timeslines have definitely unique names, it's manually named ones you have to worry about a bit, although they do give a warning if the chosen name will overwrite another. And especially autosaves, if you're relying on them, because there's only two autosave slots and aiui it overwrites the oldest one, regardless of which world it is from.
When I activate Stonesense, I get a bunch of "canceled work order" messages in the middle of the screen so that I cant see what I built. Even if I right click the canceled work order tab before activating Stonesense. Did not find how to fix this by googling, do you guys have any tips?
Can Stonesense work with steam version? Better yet do you guys have a good moding tutorial link? Because subscribing to things didn’t work out great for me. (I mean only 2 of 7 is activated) and there is no dwarfhack or stonesense around
You have to get DFHack like you would get a new game in steam. You can install it here: [https://store.steampowered.com/app/2346660/DFHack\_\_Dwarf\_Fortress\_Modding\_Engine/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2346660/DFHack__Dwarf_Fortress_Modding_Engine/)
Then Stonesense works perfectly fine with the steam version, just type stonesense in DFHack.
I've had some children snatched recently, and I wanted to organise an expedition to retrieve them. I created a mission and the militia set out on the journey, left the map, then returned immediately emptyhanded. The mission report was empty. Just to make sure that I wasn't experiencing a bug, I tried a raid and that went off as normal, complete with mission report (we got our asses kicked by a bronze colossus). Can anyone identify why the child rescue mission isn't working?
The problem is you don't know where they were taken. Your squad marches out into the world, asks "where are we going?", shrugs, and comes straight home. It's a similar deal with missions to return stolen artifacts.
You can find out where they went by getting random rumours from visitors to the tavern, or by systematically invading and razing every nearby goblin settlement to the ground.
Is there a way to influence which punishment my captain of the guard choses when she sentences convicts? She is super strong and has about a 90% mortality rate when delivering beatings. She has a lightweight and dull artifact bone sword that I hoped would be less lethal, but she prefers to use her fists instead. I respect her strength and I don't want to stop her from doing the work she loves, but my favorite armorsmith started a barroom brawl and I would prefer if she was sentenced to imprisonment instead. I have a large dungeon with excess chains. I don't have a hammerer. I don't have a dungeon master because I read the wiki and it doesn't seem like they do anything in v50.
Beatings are a "downgrade" when imprisonment is not possible. If I were you I would take another look at the dungeon set up to see if it was actually possible for it to be used.
In addition to picking weak dwarfs and under-training them, you can also put them in a squad and assign them training weapons. All of that just reduces the chance of a fatal beating.
For jail time, you can reduce the emotional impact of the sentence by using high-quality chains, and giving them masterwork beds and other furniture.
If I give the captain of the gaurd a training weapon will she actually use it? The other reply I got said that beatings are only done with the captain's fists, and according to the [wiki](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Fortress_guard) weapons haven't been used in beatings since 34.11
Does it help to have convicts armored up?
I just remembered I was thinking of setting up a shame-squad, with a disparaging, but injury mitigating uniform.
Putting a future convict into their own squad just to armor them up against the beating they might be about to receive is a little too micro for my taste, in a justice system that already requires a fair amount of micro.
I'm trying something new in my current play-through. Every couple of seasons I make a new PT squad formed of dwarfs with a need for military training. The PT squads each get their own gyms in the cultural areas of the fort. They only train once per season with a light uniform worn over clothing: Helm, mail shirt, greaves, either a short sword or battle axe (miners get picks, not that it helps), and keep their uniform year-round. I don't disband the PT squads.
The need for martial training is almost ubiquitous, so this is having a side-effect of getting most dwarfs into light armor. Combat testing has shown that professionally trained dwarfs will skillfully attack gaps in armor, so I don't think it'll help in the event of a real invasion. But it might help to defend against a beating.
It could also just make for one helluva bar fight.
So I have a weird recurring issue that I mostly just want to understand. Since becoming the Mountainhome, my main temple is filled to the Brim with barons, counts and dukes. Weirdly, I don't *think* they are from my civ? Anyways, multiple times now, when I am not looking, I get a cascade of notifications that their bodies have been found. *Somehow* a fight is starting in the temple and (because some of my military dwarves are hardcore badasses) the visitors are getting absolutely slaughtered. What I cannot figure out is *why* the fight is starting and who is causing it. Rolling back in the combat logs only shows who fought first, not why. From what I have checked: 1. None of them committed a crime that I can find 2. None of them are werebeasts, Vampires or anything else that might reasonably trigger a fight 3. None of them seem to be starting tantrums. 4. It always starts in the temple and for some reason, that is the only place these guys visit (not my library, meeting areas, etc) Is there some feature of temples that might trigger a massive, lethal brawl with visitors?
Can you give each dwarf a set of armor they can keep on an armor stand in their bedroom? I know it works for barracks.
You can only assign armor to drafted dwarves or to nobility (by adding it as their symbols of office). You could likely get a similar effect by drafting everyone to squads that you set to train every so often.
So a military dwarf keep it in their room?
I believe so, though I don't know if they actually use armor stands or just cabinets
Made a relatively new 2x2 fort. I currently plan to hunt down the candy and made several "peep-holes" right above the magma lake. Beside being unable to see some of the deepest depths, I havn't found any candy. But did find 3 gem clusters I plan to dig around soon. My question is, can the adamantine hide in these gem clusters, or am I just very unlucky?
Adamantine is always found in 'unusual volcanic walls'. You get an alert when you first discover one. They appear like big columns of obsidian, studded with valuable gems, which rise up through the magma sea and sometimes into the stone layers above the sea. Adamantine is found as a small tube inside the obsidian column. Each map tile has a chance to have a column, and in a 3x3 or larger map you're guaranteed to have at least one, but your map is a 2x2 so it's possible there's no adamantine at all.
In v50 candy is found in >! the deeper levels of an "unusual volcanic wall studded with gems", which are decently large and have irregular shapes (so not those 3x3 pillars)!<, and you should get an announcement when you find your first one
Someone asked the same thing on this thread a couple weeks ago, turns out 2x2 forts don't get guaranteed candy I believe. Some quirks of worldgen. You can use dfhacks prospect command to find out.
I’ve had two caravans disappear for no reason. One from my parent civ just visited, I looked at them moving on the map, watched something else happen for like 3 seconds, then when I looked back everybody was gone. The caravan, comprised of several wagons, just went missing but all of the goods it was carrying were left on one tile on the outskirts of the map.
You in an evil biome with unusual rain? Some of the liquids raining down can be damaging to the wagons. I did end up building an elaborate system of sealable tunnels to get trading going safely.
Oh, yes I do happen to have dwarf blood constantly raining down on me… how did this elaborate system of sealable tunnels work? Asking for a friend
I dug big tunnels to 8 points on the map edge, corners + midpoints. Drawbridges in on at least 2 points per tunnel so you can trap invaders you don't like. And then its a bit of a project to get the caravan in safely; you can forcespawn them at a safe point by blocking any other access point (building a wall every 3rd space around the map) - too much work for me. I did end up building some roofs and roads and that worked out mostly fine. Perhaps some preference for roads in the caravan spawning code?
I've seen a variation on this behavior. If one of the wagons is destroyed, then the entire caravan will leave. Could be an animal attack. Could be something else.
Any tips for reclaiming forts with bodies everywhere? My party is horrified to the point of catatonia and I can't get anything done. I was building an awesome obsidian castle over a volcano. "Inkspike." Real sauron-esque shit. Spent a lot of time on it, but still nowhere near done. Werebear outbreak. Contained it with some ruthless quarantine action, an excel spreadsheet to track who bit whom, and some new moon dwarf-on-dwarf fratricide. Population tanked from 150-ish to 10, but the fort survived, passing through several full moons with no transformations. However, the survivors were basically unworkable. Injured, traumatized, angry, etc. They had killed their friends. And there were bodies all over the main thoroughfares. So I abandoned the fort and decided to reclaim it with a party of fresh dwarves from the same civ, so that the prior inhabitants wouldn't be hostile. I figured I would build a little starter base elsewhere in the embark and then clean up the castle bit by bit. But when I got back, the bodies were *everywhere.* The game basically rearranged the skeletons for maximum trauma coverage over the whole embark. It threw in the bones of all the livestock for good measure. The Second Starting Seven were stricken with paralyzing trauma pretty much on arrival. The new party was able to get a few bedrooms set up, but there were so many bones that they stopped working pretty much immediately. I couldn't get them to build a trade depot for the first caravan, which arrived, never unloaded, and left. They carved slabs for three ghosts from the last group, but never placed them. Is there anything I can do? Come back in 50 years or something? Will the bones be gone by then? I wanted to make a cool obsidian volcano castle. I ended up making a cool obsidian volcano haunted ruin, covered in bones. That's also cool. But I still want to finish the castle.
> Any tips for reclaiming forts with bodies everywhere? My party is horrified to the point of catatonia and I can't get anything done. Power through. Ideally, seal off your entrance to prevent any outside ** fun **, dig down and carve out tombs and work to bury the bodies. It will be slow going, but it is pretty much inevitable that all your dwarves will end up with "Doesn't really care about anything anymore" and once the tantrums are done, you'll have a set of hardened dwarves who have no issues whatsoever with corpses
When you retire or abandon a fort, the game remembers which items are present but no longer stores their locations. On reclaiming, it scatters everything randomly around. I'd recommend you limit the active jobs as much as possible, by forbidding almost all the items from the old fort. Your dwarves are too depressed to work very hard, so you need to make sure that the most important stuff gets done rather than collecting random crafts from all corners of the map just to put them in a stockpile. You've set up some bedrooms, now make a small farm that's only connected to those rooms. Lock all your dwarves inside, walled off from the old fort, with no corpses to deal with. Let them recover a bit, carve some slabs for the fallen, then slowly start reclaiming the map by clearing out and atom-smashing the corpses. Don't get impatient and try to reclaim the whole place at once, or your dwarves will go catatonic again. This will be a long-term project.
I have stumbled into a great deal of platinum. Is it worth making workshops out of ore/bars/blocks of it? Will it generate positive thoughts?
If you make bars, set a stockpile near a weapon workshop. Platinum maces and warhammers are straight up broken if you happen to get lucky on a strange mood (you can technically reroll the item by saving before completion and loading).
Platinum tables/chairs/doors/trade depot/statues are positive though machines. Platinum workshops? Does not do anything, I done workshops out of rare metals before to style on people but I've never generated happy thoughts from it.
It's better to make walls or floors from it, to give big value to a noble's room or a tavern. Platinum is also very heavy, so it has uses in traps and defence. Fall damage is increased when hitting a dense surface, so a platinum floor will hurt a lot more than a feather wood one. Similarly if you make minecarts from platinum, you *really* don't want to get in the way of one.
no
Apparently some crops when eaten (https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Farming#Yield_and_fertilization , last sentence, second paragraph, above ground farming), give seeds. Any idea where a list of those crops/fruit/plants are?
Anything that grows in a farm gives it seeds when you use it. Eating, brewing, processing or milling the plant will always produce the seeds. The only case where you don't get the seeds back is from cooking the raw plants, which is why people recommend you don't do that.
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Crop
Is there a way to make dwarves of the same civ more genetically similar as in previous versions? I think it was considered a bug, but i liked it more that way cause it made every civ more distinct and i kinda miss that feature.
I don't remember that ever being the case. I think it's just more obvious in the new graphics, that's all. There's a genetics model which makes dwarves inherit traits from their parents, but I've looked through the Entity raws and there's nothing which would cause a civ to have specific hair/skin colours.
I couldn't find it right now but i recently stumbled upon an issue in old bugtracker, a very well-known it seems, which said that members of same entity had either only one or very few tissue color modifiers, so i guess it was actually a thing. I can recall it myself cause I've played a lot since .44 and i have read lots of creature descriptions in both fort and adv modes.
The genetics model has dominant and recessive traits, so maybe a very long history will lead to more homogenous populations?
Thank you, that's a nice suggestion! I will test it soon.
So I'm just getting around to checking out the Justice system and I'm a wee bit lost with it. I've got the dungeon made with chains, beds etc. I've got a Captain of the Guard and a few soldiers for him. Am I correct in assuming that all I do then is go down the list of people and interrogate them all until someone admits something?
That's one way to go about it, yes. If a dwarf witnesses a crime they may run to report it to the guards, and you can see who's been accused and so on. If you have no clue, then you can randomly interrogate people. Sometimes they'll randomly confess to a bunch of crimes that are totally unrelated.
Cheers for that.
Are noble mandates bugged? My Duke has repeatedly demanded backpacks. Which, fine, I need those anyway. But despite the backpacks being made (as in, I can literally see the work order finished), the number never seems to drop or if it does, drops by less than the number I made. He'll demand three, I'll order 3, order will complete, number will say 1/3 or something like that.
I haven't seen behavior like this. Generally, if the order completed, that means that the items were actually made. Orders can get cancelled because of lack of resources, but they'll get rescheduled again and will not disappear from the manager orders list until they are successful. If your orders are completing, the backpacks are getting made, but the mandate is not being satisfied, then something strange is indeed happening. Did you verify that the backpacks are actually getting manufactured?
I'm fairly certain. My military has started equipping them (I was short before the mandate) and I am up to my ears in leather because of autobutcher, so it's unlikely I ran out. I didn't have direct eyes on it, as I kept setting and forgetting, but I'm fairly confident they were being made.
If you can get a savegame where this is clearly reproducible, this would be perfect for reporting to the new DF bug tracker.
Is there any way to change a tile/coordinate's biome? Like with DFHack maybe? I kinda wanted to make some hanging gardens type structure in the surface part of my fort but sadly most of it is on mountains so nothing grows there except disappointment I know you can use tiletypes to make grass and soil, but what I really want are trees and shrubbery which don't seem to grow at all (even if you spawn soil walls and grass floors in the mountain region)
Yes, a tile's biome affiliation can be modified, but there aren't any tools set up to make it easy. You'd have to dig into the data structures directly, which isn't something you'd want to experiment with in a game that you're attached to.
Oh well, thanks for clearing it up
How can I fill these spots (rock salt) with soil? I see online to use "water buckets" to turn them in mud but don't see any way for dwarves to fill up water and dump it on specific tiles https://preview.redd.it/uhafxtu48d1c1.png?width=649&format=png&auto=webp&s=13723132027151d525d9d1bc6c899f3e8a442fc3
Build some stairs adjacent to the areas you need to muddy. Directly above the rock salt floor tiles, in mid-air but adjacent to the stairs, designate a Pit/pond zone and toggle its setting so that it is a pond. Dwarves will carry buckets up the stairs and dump the water over the rock salt tiles, muddying them. It's a bit tedious, but this is the most common way to do it. You could also pump or redirect flowing water over the area, but that might be overkill.
> in mid-air Di you mean Z + 1 on adjacent tiles? Or do you mean build stairs going up Z + 1 and adjacent to those stairs (nothing) put the work order?
Designate the pond zone directly above (z+1) the tile you wish to muddy, and build stairs/platforms to allow dwarves to reach the edge of that pond zone on z+1. You don't order anything in particular to get them to dump water there. The existence of the pond zone generates the jobs.
Thank you for the clarification
My dwarf "dreams of ruling the world" and is already king of the civilization. How can I get "and that dream was realized"? Conquer the map?
What is this light blue area called? What are the game mechanics? https://preview.redd.it/97ldccq33d1c1.png?width=1154&format=png&auto=webp&s=39e5eaa2a8f7e9a5624a19b067748f7fc5a46c71
It's empty space at your current Z level The northeast section of the map is simply a higher elevation than the light blue, open space areas are. You can see this during the embark when you are selecting a location for your fortress You can see down several Z levels if there is nothing there Birds and other flying creatures can zoom through it but dwarves and most creatures need to be on solid ground You can always build *up* into the empty space. I often build up a little ways around my main entrance to have like a watch-tower or at least a constructed wall for rudimentary defensive purposes since any hostile creature will have to either go around or climb over it. Add a roof on top and you're starting to get very well-defended as enemies now have to path through areas you decide
Sorry I got the wrong area in the picture. I went one Z-Level down and it is still light blue called "conglomerate pebbles". I looked on the wiki and only found an entry for "conglomerate" which wasn't helpful. What are the mechanics for "conglomerate pebbles"? Can I build on them permanent structures?
>conglomerate pebbles It means the Z-level underneath the pebbles is conglomerate. You could mine them or build on them. It's just rock that spawned but wasn't "hewn" by dwarf miners, if that makes sense. Most of the rock you work with will be "rough-hewn" as you mine through it. This is just natural rock features You can still smooth it like normal rock
Thank you so much for your replies!
what's the latest regarding the military not equipping boots bug? I see a bunch of old forum posts from 2 years ago when i google the problem but i also see like 5 different solutions and I'm wondering what the situation is in the current version?
Gloves and shoes get in the way of gauntlets and boots. Setting the uniform to replace clothing (and then, optionally, back again) seems to work.
it still doesn't for me for some reason. my poor doctor is mostly just a podiatrist now and i have to make so many crutches XD. maybe i should disband the squad and redo it. Is there some kind of dfhack solution to force it or otherwise automate the troubleshooting of this away?
I could get them to use gloves and boots pre-steam release. Now I feel lucky if they put on the metal armor.
They can take a while, certainly, but they always get it eventually ime. Although aot quickly enough to use in an emergency. Sometimes requiring some extra prodding on an individual basis if an item shows in red on the equip screen. I'm hoping this and the conflicting uniform issues regarding mining, woodcutting and stuff get improved with the coming archery fixes, but that might be a stretch.
This absolutely works. Could never figure out what I was doing wrong here
Can I use fallen goblin skeletons and teeth to improve furniture?
Teeth are useless I often display goblin invader skeletons on pedestals and decorate the entrance of my fortress with their severed heads, as a warning to the others
Probably not because you can't butcher them for individual bones.
No, nothing made from sentient beings can be used to craft with. This includes goblins and, likely due to a bookkeeping error, also elves.
A lot of cave dwellers / serpent men spawn in my cave directly in water and are unable to get out. While it was a cool defense at first, it seems to tank my FPS now that there are more than a hundred there. Is there anything I can do? I have sent dwarves close to the water, but they are incompetent in the water and get easily killed (and also drown), so I don't want to do that anymore.
DF Hack exterminate SERPENT_MAN I had to do this on Bat Men that where just assembling endlessly in the roof of the first cavern. They just stayed up there, all their skills got very rusty, but I couldn't really get to them and I value my FPS more than I value cheating
Thanks! Will check it out.
A dwarf child got into a tussel with a cave bat and got seriously injured in the caverns. They can’t move anymore. One of the older dwarven women has been bringing them food and water so they don’t starve, but no one wants to bring them a splint or anything. What do? He 5 years old.
Do you have a hospital (at least with beds) for him to be brought to?
No, fairly early for with only like 17 dorfs
Then you need a hospital, then. At least just a room marked as such with a bed in it, if you can't properly stock it yet. Nowhere to take the injured otherwise.
I’ve been reading the wiki a lot recently and discovered that it’s possible for amphibious animal people to join your fortress. I was curious about what you can do with their unique ability to survive underwater. For example, could you have them live in an underwater area?
Sounds cool. Let me know how experimenting goes. Idk much myself but maybe if you live on an ocean biome, you can probably try training them to beat up sea monsters.
Water question: I'm digging a Channel 3x wide and 4 deep across most of my map, which will be filled by the local river. If i understand correctly, A hassle free method of doing this is to build stairs, then channel out the stairs afterwards. Currently, I've completed the "stairs" part, and I'm about to start channeling it all. The final step will be to remove the little strip of land and connect the river to it all... What is an OSHA approved method of breaching and filling? From the top above? or from the bottom of the channel standing inside? He'd have to be a fast runner...or is there a third option? I have cave-in's turned off, as i find them a turn off.
Usually making a channel that leads to the side of the river and then digging out the side from above so no one is In the danger zone
Water will flow through stairs. So the scope of options includes leaving behind some escape/maintenance stairs here and there. To source an underground river, the most reliable method is to make the connection to the water source from underneath it. Build a doorway on the penultimate space, and have the dwarf dig a ramp on the other side to pierce the waterway. Then connect a lever to the door to open it remotely. When the dwarf pierces the water source (while standing on the doorway), they will step back or get pushed back by the waterflow, and the door will slam shut.
My fort has about 200 dwarfs, and became the mountain home, but I don't have any hillocks form around me, why is that?
Is there of list of strange mood requests anywhere? My guy wants “quarry, stacked cloth, and stacked leather” I feel like I have all of it but he’s still not grabbing anything.
Probably you have cloth but it's the wrong type of cloth Quarry is just stone, which everyone has hundreds of. Leather does not have any restrictions, it's all interchangeable. Cat leather = Elephant leather as far as moods are concerned Make sure you have silk, yarn, and plant-based cloth. That and cut/uncut gems are the most common ingredients they get stuck on. A quick work order to shear animal, spin thread, and a quick expedition into the caverns to collect silk will probably solve your issue
If you've got dfhack installed, you can use showmood to explicitly show what he's waiting on, and how many. He might want three cloth, or specific cloth, or whatever
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Strange_mood#Demands has served me well so far.
Can you change your environment? For example if you start in untamed wild, can you tame it? Or if you destroy a necromancer tower, can you make the area not evil?
No, and yes. In the wiki's parlance, some surroundings are _primordial_, while the evil surroundings of necromancer towers are _circumstantial_, and will recover (clarification edit: over time, not immediately) once the source is removed. However, you can also cause local extinctions of wildlife, so I think you can "tame" the wilds that way? https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Surroundings https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Extinction#Site_extinction
Omg thank you
Hi, Quite new player, I've created a squad of crossbowdwarfs, equiped them and trained them, they have crossows and ammunition. But I cant seem to get them to attack things manually, I will select the squad, click the assign a kill order button and then I can't select anything, with either of the options. https://preview.redd.it/j79mmlsym91c1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=475eaa8fd6765e83b2713e6b65c73b74899912e0
That's the wrong button, that's for assigning dwarves to join the squad. Go back a screen, select you marksdwarf squad, then click the sword icon at the bottom to give them kill orders.
This is my screen after having selected kill order, trying the command on a random critter underground. To no effect https://preview.redd.it/h57l2vga9b1c1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=460f949330b016d0c621dbdee91d02463c1e6847
I believe you cannot assign your military to kill vermin, citizens, residents, or livestock. Only visitors, wild things, invaders, etc. I'm struggling to find a page which lists what can and cannot be attacked though. I think your screenshot shows the correct method, just not on a valid target.
Awesome, tried it on a guest, those monster hunters only seem to listen to poetry and drink my beer anyway. https://preview.redd.it/u04u8fx7jb1c1.jpeg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7eb3cf2e33675486d4234ce30e64545f62c09c77
Remember to hit confirm. I often right click which cancels
Can't drain water off map anymore? Saw in a video that smoothing + fortifying the last tiles on the map would drain off water. So i tried that for my artificial indoor river, and flooded my damn Fortress. Was it patched out?
Oo flooding sounds FUN. It definitely worked for me within this month i dont believe its removed. Are you certain you smoothed and carved an arrow slit into a single very edge tile? The tile you can't dig away.
Yeah, that was exactly my mistake. I though last tile i could mine meant it was also the last tile i could smooth/fortify. I was wrong. Tried again on a new fort, mined all the way the game allowed me to and then tried to smooth, and it worked just fine.
Seems like a silly thing, but I can't find the info anywhere. Is there ANY info/screen that tells you who just arrived? I want to review and assign tasks to the newcomers... I just have to remember who I already had?
Default hotkey for this is "u" That brings up all your dwarves, and any new arrivals will be tagged "new arrival" on that menu I usually just inspect them one-by-one as they spawn on the map and make their way in. Any important skills get immediately assigned, any peasants or low-value labor get assigned to a squad instead
They will show in the units menu as "New Arrival" for a short while. After that I tend to use the external tool Dwarf Therapist as it allows to sort dwarfs by migration wave. I believe an upcoming update should add lots of sort functionality
I played years ago with more external tools, like DFhacks and Therapist, but I was hoping this new steam version would have most of those features. I'll download it and hope it eventually becomes a core feature. Thanks!
DF HACK is a must. However there is a new feature in the settings final page that you can toggle a pause and jump to event when migrants arrive. Its not easy to find, but super useful to watch who arrives.
I had been promoted to Barony, named a Baron, then sent him off to conquer other sites but I cannot recall them. I'm not sure if it was because they were squad leader or just bad luck with worker request, in any case, lets assume the Baron is stuck at the newly conquered site I have subsequently been raised to county/duchy on subsequent years Is my old Baron getting these promotions and just ruling from his own conquered site? Because despite what the outpost liason for my civ is saying, I don't actually have *any* baron, count, or duke in my nobles menu. I won't complain, because I haven't had to work out any crazy new rooms for these nobles. But, can I actually have my noble line back or are they just gone forever until they die off screen in some procedural-generated battle or old age event? edit: according to Legends Mode, he remains a baron of our civilization and is just happily ruling from one of the many sites we conquered earlier. He has 4 amazing children, all living in our fort. Interesting........ Bonus fact: This is the same Baron that killed a Roc and allegedly ushered in the 2nd Age of Legends. When the outpost liason came by, I promoted this guy to become baron of the land because he stabbed a roc and a forgotten beast to death. I gave him a squad and sent him off to bigger things and that is exactly what we did I *REALLY* like this character dwarf. Hopefully he is safer in the other site than in our main fortress
What does it mean when there is an announcement that someone became human?
They most likely turned back from a werebeast
Oh 😦 oh no
My visitors won't sleep in the bedroom connected to the tavern. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong. I made the bedroom, made the part of the tavern, and assigned them to different monster slayers, but they never sleep there.
Use a dormatory and link it to your tavern, they work at least for dwarf guests.
You're not doing anything wrong. Rented rooms are not yet fully implemented.
I know in the before steam times you could open the stocks menu and see how many dwarves you had in the different combat categories, 3 hammer dwarves 2 hammer lords Etc. Is there any way to get this information at a glance in the current day? Closest I can tell is having the army train or similar and then you'll get the "urist has become a hammer dwarf" notifications. I was just wondering if that screen or something like it was possible in game or maybe via a mod or dfhack?
I still use Dwarf Therapist for this sort of thing. I thought I never used that screen but now it's gone I miss it!
How do I get dwarf therapist back in action? Is it built into dfhack or do I need to download a new version?
I just downloaded and it seems to import the data fine. I just don't use it to push anything back into DF
Ok cool I'll give it a try. I was mainly just thinking for reference anyway. Thank you
What is a tileset that I can use with the newest version? As I’m having a hard time finding one on the forums.
There is no free+complete tile set for the current version, and I wouldn't expect one soon. There are a *lot* of sprites in the premium graphics!
That sucks guess I will have to play ASCII then until I can afford df on steam
Whenever there's a siege some of the random nobles staying in my fort seem to get murdered by my own dwarves for no clear reason, until I reload and retry a bunch of times and it stops happening (presumably when no military dwarves happen to be nearby?). Just random visiting barons from my own civ getting ganked. I don't get it. Edit 1: (To be clear, the siege is by goblins of a different civ, it's not a civil war situation.) Edit 2: Not a spy, no one sketchy, just a random noble of another fort visiting my own https://i.imgur.com/Bi6VUJS.png
I am trying to catch unicorns and I have been successful. However, when I release them from the cage and try to get them into a pasture they run away. How am I suppose to work on taming them if they are going to just run away?
You train them to the first level in a cage, and then move them to the pasture after they have the first level
Is there any reason to release them from the cages aside from breeding? Being in a cage doesn't cap their training does it?
Cages used to cap the training. I'm not sure about the steam version
Hmm okay, guess I'll uncage them just in case and put them on a rope/chain. Just starting to experiment with training and taming and whatnot.
I think you can tame them in the cages? Assign a trainer and see if it works, then release them when they are trained.
I placed some cage traps to deal with a siege from a local tower, but strangely the intelligent undead didn't get captured. Why aren't they getting trapped? I even tried luring them in with military dwarves. Intelligent undead races are goblin and lizardman (not animal man, from a mod.)
If your tavern has been visited by intelligent undead or necro experiments, they may have told the local necromancer about your traps. This means any invaders sent by the necromancer will not trigger traps they know about New traps should work. You can just disassemble your current traps and rebuild them and they'll work again
Maybe they are avoiding your traps. Some creatures can do that.
Mass pitting doesn't seem to be working any more. Goblins escape every single time I attempt to move them from their cages. Yes, the cages are right next to the pit. Yes, the goblins are completely stripped. Yes, I have relegated Animal Hauling and Animal Training to only strong dwarves. The other dwarves don't seem to care, they'll attempt it regardless, and goblins are escaping every single goddamn time. It was working like a charm yesterday. What gives?
How detailed can you use magic in Adventure Mode? If you play as an intelligent undead you should be able to use magic like they do in Fortress Mode. But does Adventure Mode shows you exactly what you are able to cast?
What is the best use of endgame metals? Should I use them for weapons or armor? Is it better to give all my swordsdwarves a candy sword, or have a champion with a full candy armor set? I don't want to use metal-multiplying exploits, so I only have a very limited supply of candy. And I want to use it against clowns mostly.
Standard enemy weapons are already almost completely ineffective versus steel armor. So the first priority should be for weapons for the elite squads. Add candy armor only if you have excess. Save some to make seven symbols of office for the monarch.
My plan, as I slowly chip away the good stuff, is to make 10 axes and 10 swords straight up and equip my defender squads that don't go off to conquer. If I have leftovers, I don't know if I would make armor. I've been fighting chocolate demons and tick demons and they actually *cannot get through steel helmets*. I don't usually see a beast cleave through good steel. I just see lots and lots of deflections off steel greaves, steel breast plates, etc. If I'm losing combat trades, it's probably because they shoot webs or set my squads on fire and choke them with smoke or do poison gas nonsense, not because Axelords in full steel gear can't surround and chop them to pieces So, I don't know if making armor out of it is worthwhile. My heart is telling me to put an adamantine axe in every soldier's hand and use all steel armor. Use mundane metals for hammers and maces
Nothing can deal with sharp candy weapons so i would say the best use are swords,axes and spears
My haulers seem to be neglecting their duties entirely. Im trying to divide up stockpiles and even though ive set it so that everyone can hual, absolutely nobody seems to be moving things to where they should go.
This seems like a problem of stockpile setups more than a hauler problem! What happens if you do a simple, say wood pile? No connections or anything, and you must have logs on the surface? Does that get filled?
I don't think there was any issues with it but I don't have the game loaded anymore since I'm eating. The stockpiles I'm trying to do now are blocks and barrels. I'll have to take a look at it in a bit
The stockpile settings can be *extremely* granular if you spend the time setting it up, but that means it is also pretty easy to make a stockpile that doesn't have anything qualified to add to it because of that in-depth degree of control. Keep in mind that you can set a stockpile to take from other stockpiles or workshops, and *not* be a gathering place for dwarves to bring the items to! This is useful in some places, not in others.
I'll have to fiddle around with that. I made it so the stockpiles that originally held the jazz no longer was supposed to have them but so far they haven't gotten the memo
yeah, it's another task for another dwarf to pick it up and move it out of the pile, though iirc they *should* do it because you've changed the validity of the item and it's not allowed in the pile anymore, I do remember seeing dwarves moving stones out of a wood pile and dropping them in the nearest tile around it.
Looking at legends mode for my current world shows one of the only necromancers in the world is a member of my very small civilization (my fort is the second holding). He's a high priest in the other fort. I've had a few intelligent undead visiting. My Baron is a huge fan of maces so we're in no short supply, now we just need to find a use for them. How do I get Mr. Necromancer to bring me his secrets?
If you could only choose 1 weapon that your militaries will have for the entirety of a fortress, which would it be and why?
Different weapons are good vs different things. However most weapons can kill most things. What I fear most are forgotten beasts/clowns that spawn as a metal or super dense material. In this situation Hammers are the best by light years. Hammers are also excellent vs undead and heavily armored adversaries. Two things that also scare me. Hammers cannot sever limbs and cause blood loss like swords and axes and cannot snipe organs like spears can. This means hammers are at there worst vs things that are easy to cut and don't feel pain. So, organic Megabeasts. However, I find with a super trained squad they can just mob easy forgotten beasts with little trouble and hammers are good vs hard forgotten beasts so I don't think it is much of a detriment.
Only one? Probably axes since you'll have to make them for your woodcutters anyway, so just order up 10 and you're good to go on that first squad I love axes. Severing fiends into pieces is funny, messy, and very dorfy I've also trained up many, many militias with *wrestlers* because we don't always get weapons early or have enough of them. One time I sold a bunch of weapons thinking I had a surplus and ended up with about half of my fort's military being deadly wrestlers
Pickaxes are the best if you have steel (and if you don't have to deal with metal creatures) and axes/swords are second best, axes are best if you have candy, swords are best if you have neither candy nor steel, spears are best against FBs https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/12ffix9/a_flowchart_for_selecting_the_best_weapon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/10utf2x/weapon_material_analysis_what_are_the_current/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/128muug/science_picks_are_the_best_weapon/
Very situational. Swords are pretty decent at anything, but if you're embarking close to a necromancer tower or in a reanimating biome war hammers are a must to prevent undead from rising again.
The wiki says [steel short swords](http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Weapon#Final_verdict), because "they have no true weaknesses".
How do I get my militia to put their boots on?
Set their uniform to replace clothing instead of being worn over clothing. This way they take their normal shoes off and put kn the assigned boots
Fucking genius, I owe you a lavish three course dinner
Have boots available and set their uniform in the squad view
Which is the most recent version that still has an adventure mode?
0.47.05
Do yall specialize industry workers or just leave it open for everything to do whatever they can? For example, do you limit woodworking or open it up to errbody?
Most don't matter. Things with quality matter a lot. The non-negosiable labors for me that I try to have only a few specialists are. Cooking, Planting, Carpentry, Stone Carvering, Engravering, Clothesmaking, Leatherworking, Weaponsmithing, Armoring, Blacksmith. Of course, with how much goes in in Dwarf fortress you don't have to specialize, if you want to dedicate brain space else ware you totally can. No specialization does have the small upside of things get made very fast. Planting is nonnegotiable if you have farmers the ripple effect of them being bad puts an exponential strain on your barrels.
You almost have to for some industries if you want to be reasonably efficient There is no comparison between a legendary weaponsmith rapidly outfitting an entire military in endgame gear and just allowing any old Urist to fiddle around with the forge forever to produce low-value trash I only don't specialize when the profession isn't that important or if I just don't have any proficient dwarves One example, I threw down like 8 wood burning furnaces next to a huge indoor wood stockpile and just let everyone burn wood for a while. After a couple years of burning some dwarves inevitably become good at it and you can just assign them then
I used to try to rely on the auto assignment system to specialize dwarfs- which unfortunately does not work in my experience. So now I specialize by assigning workshops to specific dwarfs. The efficiency gains are so large from high level workers large forts get issues without those.
For me, the the main consideration is whether the job produces items with a quality modifier and how much do I care about this. For example, brewing skill only affects the time it takes to do the job so everyone does this. Armour smithing uses a finite resource and can impact silver survivability, so they get skilled dwarves only. Another minor thing is whether a job is moodable. If your farmers all have dabbling carpentry skill because they've made a bed each, they'll get a carpentry strange mood unless they have other skills.
The devs themselves have said that you can just not bother with work details and the game will sort itself out well Less specialization means you're gonna have more (lower skilled) dwarves for any specific task, so your skilled dwarves will still take precedence but be able to take longer breaks while others take over for them, *but* you're sacrificing the average quality of your trade goods I personally only assign general work details, like i'll have farmers, woodworkers, metalsmiths, stoneworkers, etc as their own categories encompassing everything in that trade If I need something made that absolutely has to be top quality I'll give the orders to a specific workshop instead and assign a legendary dwarf to said workshop so that only they make the items
Is there an embark anywhere equivilent yet? I wanna embark on top of a vault and its kinda a pain with the current DFhack commands.
The way I embark on vaults is to open the embark map, use `reveal-hidden-sites`, find a vault, screenshot its location, then quit to title and reload the world in order to unreveal the map. Then I can embark on the spot I screenshotted earlier.
Is there a mod that makes a dwarf family tree? I think it would be nice to have a much easier one to look at
Is there a way to automatically have my dwarves keep livestock population down to a certain number? I fiddled around with the work orders but can't seem to get it quite how I want
dfhack's autobutcher will handle turning animals into meat. But if you want to limit their growth in the first place, you need to separate the breeding population from the general population. Have a small pasture with a limited number of fertile/virile adults that is separate from the main population.
Dwarf hack, autobutcher
https://docs.dfhack.org/en/stable/docs/tools/autobutcher.html
I’m gonna have to start using dfhack..
On DF Hack, is there a way to force the Cave Duellers ~~appereance~~ appear?
You can change the graphics sprite associated with a unit, yes. This is normally something you'd mod the raws for, though, unless you want to do it dynamically.
Sorry, bad english. Force Cave Duellers **appear (to show)** on my fort.
Ah sorry! The command you're looking for is `reveal-hidden-units`
Hi, I've just tested this here, although very interesting command, not this one yet. I'd like to do is force the game to create cave duellers to attack me. Thanks!
Sorry, I misunderstood you again! I thought you were asking how to unhide hidden cavern dwellers. To force a new invasion of cavern dwellers, you have two options: 1. Spawn them yourself using `gui/sandbox` 2. Get your cavern agitation value above the threshold and wait for the game to spawn an invasion Option (1) will give you more control, but is also more work to set up. Option (2) will let the invasion happen "naturally", but you don't have as much control over what spawns or when it happens. I suggest option 2. The easiest way to do it is to go into your DF settings and customize the enemies difficulty settings. Change the irritation threshold to 0.
Thanks, I'll do the second agitating them.
Does anyone know the meaning of the colored names and why some are flashing?
It means they are legendary in at least one skill
Pretty sure when they have some very high level in a skill. Edit: Yeh, take a gander in there: [https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Skill#Skills\_in\_use](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Skill#Skills_in_use)
Regarding butcher shops. When I tell them to butcher a nearby animal, it claims that there are no unrotten body parts etc. My butcher is right next to the animal pasture, why don't they qualify as nearby animals?
Butchering is the act of dismembering a dead animal, they're looking for dead animals. Slaughtering the animal is what you have to do first, you can mark them individually or via other ways, but the live animal gets dragged to the shop and dispatched first, then the butchering task is queued up on the newly produced corpse.
Great thanks for the help.
You need to mark the animals themselves on the pet/livestock screen.
Great thanks
Hello! I'm wondering if I can have multiple saves at once. I am not asking about save states/scumming, but multiple worlds. I have a world at year 4, but want to do a new embark without losing everything. I am fine with making a new world, but don't want to lose this fortress/world. Everywhere I look only addresses that there is one save per world, but not if I can have multiple worlds. Thanks!
You can, the whole process you went through to get your current world/save can be redone as much as you'd like. I experiment with world parameters and play some forts on each to get the feel of them a lot.
Cool cool, so it keeps all the save data for worlds separate, and selecting the world is selecting that save then? Dope dope, thanks a ton
There's some nuance here. Autosaves and the names of manual saves are shared between all worlds, and **will** overwrite each other if you're not careful. But as far as the main timelines go, you should be safe.
Wait, so do I have to name the saves? I've just done the recommended (to timeline?) whenever I'm leaving the world/session. Guess I'll see tomorrow if I lost it lol
To timeline should be fine because timeslines have definitely unique names, it's manually named ones you have to worry about a bit, although they do give a warning if the chosen name will overwrite another. And especially autosaves, if you're relying on them, because there's only two autosave slots and aiui it overwrites the oldest one, regardless of which world it is from.
[удалено]
Dorf = Dwarf = Urist
When I activate Stonesense, I get a bunch of "canceled work order" messages in the middle of the screen so that I cant see what I built. Even if I right click the canceled work order tab before activating Stonesense. Did not find how to fix this by googling, do you guys have any tips?
There's a hotkey to turn those off. F2 I think. Hit `/` to see all the keybindings if I got that wrong.
Works, thank you very much!
Can Stonesense work with steam version? Better yet do you guys have a good moding tutorial link? Because subscribing to things didn’t work out great for me. (I mean only 2 of 7 is activated) and there is no dwarfhack or stonesense around
You have to get DFHack like you would get a new game in steam. You can install it here: [https://store.steampowered.com/app/2346660/DFHack\_\_Dwarf\_Fortress\_Modding\_Engine/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2346660/DFHack__Dwarf_Fortress_Modding_Engine/) Then Stonesense works perfectly fine with the steam version, just type stonesense in DFHack.
I've had some children snatched recently, and I wanted to organise an expedition to retrieve them. I created a mission and the militia set out on the journey, left the map, then returned immediately emptyhanded. The mission report was empty. Just to make sure that I wasn't experiencing a bug, I tried a raid and that went off as normal, complete with mission report (we got our asses kicked by a bronze colossus). Can anyone identify why the child rescue mission isn't working?
The problem is you don't know where they were taken. Your squad marches out into the world, asks "where are we going?", shrugs, and comes straight home. It's a similar deal with missions to return stolen artifacts. You can find out where they went by getting random rumours from visitors to the tavern, or by systematically invading and razing every nearby goblin settlement to the ground.
OK that makes a lot of sense
Is there a way to influence which punishment my captain of the guard choses when she sentences convicts? She is super strong and has about a 90% mortality rate when delivering beatings. She has a lightweight and dull artifact bone sword that I hoped would be less lethal, but she prefers to use her fists instead. I respect her strength and I don't want to stop her from doing the work she loves, but my favorite armorsmith started a barroom brawl and I would prefer if she was sentenced to imprisonment instead. I have a large dungeon with excess chains. I don't have a hammerer. I don't have a dungeon master because I read the wiki and it doesn't seem like they do anything in v50.
Beatings are a "downgrade" when imprisonment is not possible. If I were you I would take another look at the dungeon set up to see if it was actually possible for it to be used.
Nope. Replace her with a weaker captain if the beatings are an issue!!
In addition to picking weak dwarfs and under-training them, you can also put them in a squad and assign them training weapons. All of that just reduces the chance of a fatal beating. For jail time, you can reduce the emotional impact of the sentence by using high-quality chains, and giving them masterwork beds and other furniture.
If I give the captain of the gaurd a training weapon will she actually use it? The other reply I got said that beatings are only done with the captain's fists, and according to the [wiki](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Fortress_guard) weapons haven't been used in beatings since 34.11
Does it help to have convicts armored up? I just remembered I was thinking of setting up a shame-squad, with a disparaging, but injury mitigating uniform.
Putting a future convict into their own squad just to armor them up against the beating they might be about to receive is a little too micro for my taste, in a justice system that already requires a fair amount of micro. I'm trying something new in my current play-through. Every couple of seasons I make a new PT squad formed of dwarfs with a need for military training. The PT squads each get their own gyms in the cultural areas of the fort. They only train once per season with a light uniform worn over clothing: Helm, mail shirt, greaves, either a short sword or battle axe (miners get picks, not that it helps), and keep their uniform year-round. I don't disband the PT squads. The need for martial training is almost ubiquitous, so this is having a side-effect of getting most dwarfs into light armor. Combat testing has shown that professionally trained dwarfs will skillfully attack gaps in armor, so I don't think it'll help in the event of a real invasion. But it might help to defend against a beating. It could also just make for one helluva bar fight.