You could try locking him in a 1x1 room with nothing but his bed in there.  Then he'd have to sleep on it.  Or at least on the tile.

Additionally, replacing "his bed" with "a weapon trap" is another suitable course of action.

And even if you don't mess with the hotkeys, I believe F1 is set to your wagon's location by default.  So if you get lost, you can always hit F1 and hopefully be able to find your fort from there.

Nah, not dwarfy enough.  You have to do it in such a manner that the dwarf doing the dumping is a noble who is dumped in the process

Early on in one fort, I built a staircase down from the surface (ultimately winding up in my farming/cooking/brewing/eating area) to facilitate the move from from surface living down to the "proper" underground area.  I then went off and forgot that it was there.

Well, after a while a goblin ambush was spotted by a fox or something.  I eagerly waiting for them to enter my trap-filled Moat-Spanning Causeway o' Doom, which was outside the Gatehouse o' Doom, which was outside the Entry Corridor o' Doom, which was outside the Butchery Arena o' Doom.  I was filled with sadistic glee as the vile creatures approached what was, in every possible sense of the word, overkill.  Finally, they reached the Causeway o' Doom...and then turned aside.

Straight towards the stairway that, having forgotten about, I had neglected to seal off.

Before the ambush, my fort's population had been 43.  By the time the last goblin died, my population was down to just 12, with five of my original seven counted among the dead.  My Legendary original Miner, who had killed fully half the goblins himself, died shortly thereafter as dozens of dead friends and witnessed deaths drove him insane.



Another incident that almost, but not quite, resulted in a mass slaughter was in a later fort, and was the result of my first-ever waterworks projects.  I built up/down stairs instead of up stairs in a spot that I was going to flood as part of the underground piping.  Later, I was happily digging out exploratory mining tunnels, with nearly a hundred dwarves in those tunnels hauling ore and gems when I went off and dug right under that up/down stairway.

It gets better though.  As it turns out, if there's a stone on a tile, it doesn't show the water.  So I didn't know that things were flooding, and flooding fast, until I saw water seep into an empty tile.  I managed to act fast enough to keep the deaths to six dwarves and one cat, but I irrevocably lost a Magnetite deposit, a full-blown vein of Platinum, five clusters' worth of ungathered raw gems, and the tunnels spanning more than half of that z-level.

Are you sure your civilization still has a king/queen?  They have a nasty habit of dying of old age and never being replaced.

Cage traps are an excellent way to train Marksdwarves by making a firing range:

1) Make an area surrounded by walls and/or moats with the only access being a retracting bridge
2) Put the cages on one side of the bridge and link them to a lever.
3) Go to the stocks screen and dump any ranged weapons the goblins are holding
4) Raise the bridge
5) Put your Marksdwarves on the side opposite the cages.
6) Pull the lever to open the cages.
7) Watch the carnage.

You can also make a couple (rather obvious) modifications to this process to train melee dwarves instead.

Also, if you happen to catch any wild critters in the cage traps, you can put the cage in a zoo to give happy thoughts to any dwarves that like them, or tame them and turn them into livestock or something.


As for "number of hits", I may be wrong, but I think it means that it attacks that many times per firing of the trap.  As far as I can tell, a weapon trap basically attacks with every weapon in it, then checks if it jams, if it needs to fire again, etc.  I believe that said multi-hit components smack the enemy multiple times per firing of the trap.  And yes, that DOES make Giant Axe Blades pointless.