Feeding prisoners...

[Og-the-Trog]

So, I'm thinking about making my dungeon a series of cells in the floor of the "Justice Squad" barracks.
3x3, with a bed a well and an overlapped tile from each of the shrines for praying, preferably capped with a lever-actuated floor grate that lets down onto a ramp into the cell.

Question is, what's the best way to feed em? Since they'd be trapped in there via the lever-grate until their sentence is up, I'm thinking I'd have to designate a food drop.
Can that be centralized, or do they have to have individual drops for each cell?
Can prisoners go up/down a floor or two if the ramp/stair is within reach?
And, can they reach into adjacent squares or are they strictly limited to what's in the 3x3 prison cell?

Side question, do I have to keep the cells open 24/7 for the game to recognize them as being available, or can I seal all but one or two and re-open them as needed?

[Gen_kazzum]

have them use a chain or rope to hold the dwarves in your cells, then drop the food in from the hatches above. Total isolation.

[Gen_kazzum]

Originally posted by Gen_kazzum:

have them use a chain or rope to hold the dwarves in your cells, then drop the food in from the hatches above. Total isolation.

Okay let me explain some more.

As far as I am aware you don't want to use actual cells if you want to do this, you'll want to put a chain or rope in the middle of the chamber, this way they can access every part of the cell.

you could use two stock piles one for food and one for liquids, put them on two leaver operated gates and use that to drop in food etc. you could also dig a underground channel and just pipe water into every cell in the corner. then the dwarves would drink water while in prison. Tantrum Spiral if you know you know.

I am not sure if dwarf fortress will recognize the cells properly unless they are accessible by all the dwarves in the steam version. These things are kind of finicky when going from game to game, engine to engine, rewrite to rewrite.

But I would imagine your solution working.

[Og-the-Trog]

Exactly, but could I, say, arrange 4 cells in a square, mine out the shared corner, and drop the food down into one shared pile?
Or is that out of reach?

Heh yeah I'm planning on putting a well in each which all sip from the same prison cistern.
Ye don't work, ye don't get booze in this fort!

[Other]

If you are using chains to hold the prisoners, you don't need the walls (except for any RP reasons).

I normally set up my jail by using chains constructed in an open room; the 8 tiles around the chain will contain a bed, table, chair, well, and two tiles worth of food stockpile (set to prepared meals only) and two tiles of drink stockpile. Both stockpiles are set to take from my main kitchen piles. I'll put two adjacent chains only two tiles apart, rather than three, so that the two "cells" overlap on three tiles, which are the well and one tile of each of the stockpiles, so a pair of cells has only one well, a 3-tile drink stockpile, and a 3-tile food stockpile. If you want to build even fewer wells, you could overlap 4 cells in a 5x5 area, so the center tile with the well is shared by all four, the chains are each 1 tile diagonally from the well, and put the bed, table & chair in the corners. The overlap in the center row & center column would be the food stockpiles & drink stockpiles.

I find that the resulting jail also works well as a safety bunker in case some sort of problem makes it all the way into my fort, since the area has beds, food, drink, and wells for hospital water; for that additional use, I'll put some levers in the room to raise bridges outside the doors, and a dump zone with some forbidden essential supplies (a couple picks plus cloth & thread for wound care).

[Og-the-Trog]

Have you ever had the need to employ that emergency shelter?

If so....did you have to lock the noblemen & other problem dwarves outside?

[Gen_kazzum]

you couldn't fully isolate them, the shared corner would change it to more like 2x2 cells and with a shared corner if you used walls

[Gen_kazzum]

or it would be a alot of shared space between cells where prisoners could interact and possibly kill each other.