After Action Reporter

I’ve written a book – Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress, available at O’Reilly and Amazon! It covers the current version and takes you from knowing nothing to being a confident Dwarf Fortress player!

So you’re busy enjoying the latest build of Dwarf Fortress, marvelling at the complex health system and the confusing military system when a thought strikes you, “I’ve just built all this great stuff for my Hospital, but how will I get my medical dwarfs some doctoring experience?”. Indeed, this is quite a conundrum! If you don’t train your medical staff perhaps they will screw up when some really important doctoring needs to be done.

But don’t fear, dear reader, we have a solution! Controlled dwarf torturing: it’s not really torture, it’s just dropping them a few levels on to rocks and then using them to practice medical techniques on. They love it really – it’s all for the good of the fortress, after all!…

First thing you need to do is set up a hospital with all the goodies; beds, containers traction benches, a nearby well, quarters for your medical staff and so on. Then, you need a shaft into which your “volunteers” will be shoved. I dug one three deep and on the top floor built a retracting bridge. You can see how I built mine in the picture below:

From there, find a couple of useless, friendless losers volunteers, conscript them into the military and station them on the bridge above the shaft:

Don’t they look comfortable?

Woops! Did someone pull the lever in the hospital? I guess so! Oh dear, the bridge has retracted and now it is time to plummet three floors!

Wee! This would be fun if there wasn’t solid rock at the bottom of this shaft!

Splat! Oh dear, one of the dwarfs didn’t survive the three-floor drop. Perhaps two floors would be better? Oh well, one of them is still around for the medical dwarfs to practice on!

Oh dear, it appears our crack suicide-squad member has two broken legs! Gosh, I sure hope our medical team can patch him up!

Well, he’s been dragged to the hospital, excellent!

And a few hours later his wounds have been diagnosed. Gosh, two broken legs and extreme pain? That sounds unpleasant!

And shortly after that a treatment plan is suggested! Excellent, now your dwarven medical staff can get to work and you can rest, happy in the knowledge that important training is being undertaken. Of course, you might want to keep this training up once your volunteer recovers. After all, what doesn’t kill them only makes them stronger!