How do you recover a stolen artifact that's hidden on a dead body?

[Wolfguarde]

Thanks to some quick thinking, I managed to locate an artifact's carrier once it was stolen and swapped from the initial thief; I sicced my military onto them, and they're lying dead in my main thoroughfare. The gem, despite still being on the body (according to the "follow" cam) isn't showing up in the guy's inventory. Is there some protocol here for recovering it?

[love]

Check stocks? It might've been moved already.
Barring that, it's possible it got swapped once more or someone else picked it up.

[McOrigin]

Artifact theft and the whole plot featire is .. bugged as hell.
I try to prevent theft by storing all artifacts in a dedicated stockpile behind a locked door.
And I do restrict all zones for citizen only to avoid foreigners. I know, I miss some nice features because of that, but I want to keep my artifacts...

Looking forward to some new !SCIENCE! regarding that topic.. maybe something has been fixed in the steam version and you can recover stolen artifacts in the end.

[Wolfguarde]

I'm camera-locked on the gem; this is my second time running through the heist, and the guy who bore it off the map before I reloaded is still dead-centre where the gem is. When I followed him the first time, the gem had a "hidden" tag in his inventory; I assume this is what's responsible for it not showing up on the body, now, but I also don't want to baby it until one of my dudes finally gets around to moving the gem to the eight-years-old artifact stockpile that the whole fortress has conveniently ignored through the thefts of the previous four artifacts from my map.

I might just reload and wall the bloody thing off, honestly...

[McOrigin]

Maybe it's the usual 'hidden' tag that you can apply to e.g. mined rock too? You could try to toogle that visibility by designating the whole stack. Maybe it's forbidden too, and thus not picked up.

[Wolfguarde]

I will try that when I unwall it if the heist happens again, I'm going to leave it sequestered until my dwarves are done with the hauling backlog. I'm tired of people just... walking out of my fortress unchallenged with my valuables >.>

[Erei]

The quickest way : if it's not afurniture (that work to, but the quickest is simply to "build" the furniture), make a pedestal, build it, click it and put the artifact on it. They'll haul it pretty much immediately that way and you'll know where it is.

Otherwise, unlock it, and make sure you have a stockpile for it.

[Wolfguarde]

I knew I was missing something when I went looking for displays. Thank you!

[Zettai]

Originally posted by McOrigin:

Artifact theft and the whole plot featire is .. bugged as hell.
I try to prevent theft by storing all artifacts in a dedicated stockpile behind a locked door.
And I do restrict all zones for citizen only to avoid foreigners. I know, I miss some nice features because of that, but I want to keep my artifacts...

Looking forward to some new !SCIENCE! regarding that topic.. maybe something has been fixed in the steam version and you can recover stolen artifacts in the end.

I don't think this is a bug. Yesterday I noticed one of my dwarves pick up an artifact from a pedestal in a guildhall and then walked off to the edge of the map with it and gave it to a human bard who had previously visited my fort. Now I can track the artifact and it goes to the edge of the map and says the human has it, but I am not sure how to get it back. Needless to say I sent the stealing dwarf into magma lol

[Erei]

It's not a bug, I explained how to do deal with it many times, and I'm a bit tired of repeating (it's lengthy) sorry^^
But in short, criminal claim artifacts from afar. They send "agents" to your fort, under fake identity (as regular visitors). They corrupt a random dwarf. They come back, ask the dwarf to steal, the dwarf give them the item, then the agent leave.
Dwarves are never immune to corruption and will always succumb in time. Yes, even your bloody king can become a thief, even though that doesn't make any sense whatsoever (the dude can call the entire army to murder the agent, and he can always take the item, he is the king).

Killing your dwarves is pointless. The agent will literally come back and corrupt another. If you don't kill your dwarves and let the agent free, then he'll ask that dwarf over and over to steal the item.
Which mean, the best way is to destroy those agents. Killing them is fine, they are part of criminal faction and the "major" civ they belong to won't be mad at you.