Nice, a bug that can be turned into in a witty DF cliché!

The stray (tame) horse cancels drown: unconscious.

i've read a lot of things that talk up cage traps to no end. i've tried them and i gotta say, i'm unimpressed. i mean sure, they capture things while they're still alive, but that seems more negative to me than anything else because for one, while the traps are removing a threat, they're ADDING something my dwarves have to store away forever, and i have to allocate space to store it, my mechanics need to go out of their way to get a replacement cage, and then if i want to interact with the caged creature i need to go through this complicated process of planting it with (b)uild, q->a on the cage, release/take their things (in the case of goblins), and then store it away again and/or try to sell the damn creature, which can fail stupendously apparently. i'm just glad i have like 40+ war dogs walking around my fort to jump on and maul anything that escapes.

the only thing i really care about is producing a lot of dead bodies, dead bodies are safe and easy to handle, and are profitable to some extent. cages are not conducive to dead bodies, thus i don't like cages. can anyone change my mind?

Also, i have a question about weapon traps. say for example the spiked ball:

http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Spiked_ball

at "number of hits", does that mean it'll strike a creature three times before it manages to get away, or that it'll attack three times and then break?

You could try decorating your bed's with silk or cloth...

Well, I gave it a shot but as expected they've got no way to accomplish anything without heavy modding.

(Note: I'm still on .40c, so apologies if this has already been sorted out.)
In a previous fortress I had a Fortress Guard made up largely of axedwarves, with the Sheriff being the lone swordsdwarf. I got away with few injuries and soon had about half a dozen Champions, but the Sheriff never sparred so much as once after I got everyone armed, even though I had him join the Guard full-time. Is it because of his job, or because dwarves will only spar against similarly-armed guards?

Does the history of the world continue, while a Fortress is in Progress in this world ?

I have checked legends after abnadoning a 15 year old fort, and there was not a single historical event recorded after year 200 (where worldgen stopped) outside of my fort.
So this kind of got me thinking, if something is going on outside my fort.

Same here.

You will get one or two waves of migrants after you hit the limit (until the migrant numbes get re-calculated, which i think happens once per year, when the dwarven caravan bring news of your wealth back home).
It will stop eventually.

I think that the population limit is the point at which migrant waves stop.  So with a limit of 20, you should get enough waves to push you over 20, and then they should stop.

i have tried to limit my dwarf population for three fortresses now, i dont seem to have any luck with this... is this a known issue? (i tried searching the forum but nothing relevant came up)

this is what i have in the INIT.txt file:

You can set the maximum population of your fortress here.  Keep in mind that your population must be at least 80 to get a king and 100 to obtain the current game features.

[POPULATION_CAP:20]

This allows you to control the number of babies+children in your fortress.  The first number is an absolute cap on the number of babies+children.  The second is a percentage of the current number of adults in your fortress (the default is the essentially meaningless 1000% here).  The lower number is used as the cap.  The cap only prevents further pregancies, so migrant children, multiple births and existing pregnancies from old saves can still push you over the cap.  Setting either number to zero will disallow pregnancies in the fortress.

[BABY_CHILD_CAP:0:0]


this should limit my population to 20 dwarves right? but so far i keep getting immigrants past 20. is there a way to fix this?