Armor for Miners

[McOrigin]

Is there any way to provide the miners with a helm and a breastplate for basic protection?
As far as I remember, miners (and wodcutters) use a hidden uniform for their tools. And so far I can confirm that my miners will use a uniform while training, but switch back to civilian clothing with a pick for mining even though they shoud keep wearing the uniform off duty...

[Helios]

Originally posted by McOrigin:

Is there any way to provide the miners with a helm and a breastplate for basic protection?
As far as I remember, miners (and wodcutters) use a hidden uniform for their tools. And so far I can confirm that my miners will use a uniform while training, but switch back to civilian clothing with a pick for mining even though they shoud keep wearing the uniform off duty...

just create a uniform without a weapon and put them on ready in a squad.

[McOrigin]

Can do that and they will equip it and train. But as soon as they are off duty / no orders and ready to go mining, they will store the steel uniform in bins and pick up their pick.

Can't have them mine dangerous terrain with uniform equipped.

[AlP]

There's no way to do it, and assigning miners/woodcutters/hunters to the military is a fast way to cause various bugs.

[Cytanger]

Originally posted by AlP:

There's no way to do it, and assigning miners/woodcutters/hunters to the military is a fast way to cause various bugs.

AlP is right. It's not the end of the world though. If you need safer miners for some reason you could train up your miners in a squad then switch them over to mining. Training them with a pick for fighting or even just general dodge training will greatly improve their ability to survive.

[Bobucles]

The trick is not to train up more capable miners,
but to have a dedicated force of more expendable miners.

[McOrigin]

Hehe. Well, there are parts of the underground that are very dangerous to mine.. I need a higher survivability instead of more a larger expendable force :D

Well, actually, I could give my legendary miners with families and a lot of friends a rest. while some newly arrived heretics might get a pick. Good idea, thanks!

[Diarmuhnd]

Originally posted by McOrigin:

Is there any way to provide the miners with a helm and a breastplate for basic protection?

Yes. Put them in a Squad. Pick the default Metal armor loadout. Do not change any of the default equipment.

Click the option in the Schedule tabs that forces them to wear weapons and armor all the time while off duty. I also do this for the other schedule tabs, all my army dwarves have armor equipped all the time.

Then let them have some time off to go collect gear and then send them back to work.

Originally posted by AlP:

There's no way to do it, and assigning miners/woodcutters/hunters to the military is a fast way to cause various bugs.

What bugs does putting miners in a squad cause?

I've been doing this for my last 3 fortresses, 200+ hrs and I've only seen 1 problem. They may not go get a 'real' weapon when called to Ready orders quickly... or ever. lol

Are there more? Have I just been lucky?

Originally posted by McOrigin:

Can do that and they will equip it and train. But as soon as they are off duty / no orders and ready to go mining, they will store the steel uniform in bins and pick up their pick.

Sounds like you didn't select the wear weapons armor all the time option. Your dwarves will wear all the armor and use the pick to mine. Mine do.

[Cytanger]

Originally posted by Diarmuhnd:

Originally posted by AlP:

There's no way to do it, and assigning miners/woodcutters/hunters to the military is a fast way to cause various bugs.

What bugs does putting miners in a squad cause?

I've been doing this for my last 3 fortresses, 200+ hrs and I've only seen 1 problem. They may not go get a 'real' weapon when called to Ready orders quickly... or ever. lol

Are there more? Have I just been lucky?

You're right and that is the major issue. It may have been more of a hindrance in the past than the current version. The other side of the coin is that when a dwarf has a confused inventory state it might impact their work (non-combat) as well.

The fear is that if a dwarf becomes attached to a military weapon and they need a tool for a civilian job, they wouldn't switch to the civilian tool to do the job. Therein lies the problem with the "always" equip option in the schedule menu. You would risk a dwarf either becoming attached to a weapon and not doing their job, or having their pick get classified as a weapon and not being used for work. If you can get a dwarf to drop a weapon that they are attached to I believe that they get a negative thought if they can't pick it up again. Fundamentally, they want a "work pick" and a "war pick" but can only carry one at once.

So out of an abundance of caution, it makes sense to remove miners/pick-fighters and lumberjacks/axe-dwarves from a squad before trying to have them do civilian work.

[McOrigin]

Originally posted by Diarmuhnd:

Yes. Put them in a Squad. Pick the default Metal armor loadout. Do not change any of the default equipment.

Click the option in the Schedule tabs that forces them to wear weapons and armor all the time while off duty. I also do this for the other schedule tabs, all my army dwarves have armor equipped all the time.

Then let them have some time off to go collect gear and then send them back to work.

I've been doing this for my last 3 fortresses, 200+ hrs and I've only seen 1 problem. They may not go get a 'real' weapon when called to Ready orders quickly... or ever. lol

Are there more? Have I just been lucky?

Originally posted by McOrigin:

Can do that and they will equip it and train. But as soon as they are off duty / no orders and ready to go mining, they will store the steel uniform in bins and pick up their pick.

Sounds like you didn't select the wear weapons armor all the time option. Your dwarves will wear all the armor and use the pick to mine. Mine do.

I have double checked my uniform and schedule settings, as they work very well for my professionel military dwarves to always wear their gear. If they are attacked while on a civilian job, they will instantly pull out their weapon and fight.

My "miner squad" will not always carry their armor, always switching back to the invisible "civilian uniform with pick" when off duty / no order.

I wonder how you made that work..

[Gun_Shy]

Originally posted by McOrigin:

Originally posted by Diarmuhnd:

Yes. Put them in a Squad. Pick the default Metal armor loadout. Do not change any of the default equipment.

Click the option in the Schedule tabs that forces them to wear weapons and armor all the time while off duty. I also do this for the other schedule tabs, all my army dwarves have armor equipped all the time.

Then let them have some time off to go collect gear and then send them back to work.

I've been doing this for my last 3 fortresses, 200+ hrs and I've only seen 1 problem. They may not go get a 'real' weapon when called to Ready orders quickly... or ever. lol

Are there more? Have I just been lucky?



Sounds like you didn't select the wear weapons armor all the time option. Your dwarves will wear all the armor and use the pick to mine. Mine do.

I have double checked my uniform and schedule settings, as they work very well for my professionel military dwarves to always wear their gear. If they are attacked while on a civilian job, they will instantly pull out their weapon and fight.

My "miner squad" will not always carry their armor, always switching back to the invisible "civilian uniform with pick" when off duty / no order.

I wonder how you made that work..

Gonna go out on a limb and say it didn't work but they probably weren't fully paying attention and missed the actual problems. It looks normal for a dwarf to be "Hauling Item To Stockpile", until you realize they're hauling their pickaxe to the stockpile, dropping it, picking it back up, going to drink in the tavern, hauling their pick back to the stockpile again...

The main problem being that these dwarves will spend the vast majority of their time swapping equipment, dropping things, acting weird, rather than doing the jobs you tell them. The jobs will still get done eventually (usually), but efficiency suffers large, and unless you're astute, you might not catch the fact that a dwarf is caught in a hauling loop.

Because if you have your military uniforms/alerts/schedules configured *correctly*, but are trying to apply them to Miners/Woodcutters/Hunters with those labors enabled, it will absolutely be a problem.

[McOrigin]

The main problem for my miners squad was not switsching from civilian life to training in uniform: I had my only "pickaxe weapon stockpile" near my miners guild and all their room around that guild.
This kept their paths very short when storing away civilian clothing and putting on their uniform.

Later I omitted everything but a pick from the military unform and changed it to "over clothing". That skipped the whole "store the civilian clothing in my own cabinet" cycle and the just ran to switch pick for pick. Strange enough, they cannot use their civilian pick as thei military pick, but that's just how it is and always was.

But I managed to have my 10 miners in one dedicated squad traing properly. Problems occured again when it set them to half training (4/10): While the assigned miners were training properly, the civilians went to "individual combar drill" when no mining job was issued.
And as soon as they had to mine, they went to the "swap pick cycle", to mine a bit and returned to the "swap pick cycle" for individual combar drill, just to swich back again when another tile was free to be mined. That's a huge PITA.

The solution was to have the whole squad on full training (10/10). While no civilan mining was done during that period, they were training fighting and -most imporantly- dodgeing as well as thei body attributes just fine.

BUT when they were not supposed to train, either because I had some larger mining to be done, or I needed them to fulfill some civilian needs, I had to manually unassign their dedicated barracks, because otherwise every so often several of them would go to "individual combat drill", trapping them in the "swap pick for pick" cycle.

tl;dr: You can train your miners for better survivability in a dedicated squad, but should limit the uniform to a pick and need to micromanage the barracks.

You can, of course, train civilian miners and turn them into full time military dwarves if you remove the mining job from them. A pickaxe is a formidable and very dwarve weapon!