While upright spike defense systems never jam, they also do not discriminate. Vast forests of these can make any area a killing field. Menacing spikes or upright spears appear on the basic mechanic's Trap menu, but must be activated remotely to pop out of the ground and impale anyone standing on that tile. The trigger can be located any distance from the trap, typically close for a pressure plate or far away for a lever.įor a system that repeatedly activates automatically and regularly regardless of enemies, see Repeater. They will require at least three mechanisms, one for the trigger and two to create the link. These traps require a trigger such as a pressure plate or lever. For more information, see captured creatures. Caged animals and enemies will be safely brought to any animal stockpiles you have, but may escape later if you are not careful. Use cage traps as your outermost traps to catch the occasional wandering animal, angry wounded elephant or unicorn, or even zombies. A cage trap never fails, although creatures with the tag cannot be captured unless knocked unconscious or webbed first. Maybe even too powerful - currently, even a wooden or glass cage can hold indefinitely any creature short of a titan, even trolls and megabeasts. Your dwarves will attempt to unjam traps unless otherwise forbidden. Hammers seem to jam less than swords or axes, and spears seem to jam the most. They will load each until each type of weapon has ten rounds of ammo. Mechanics will load them with any ammo that is not forbidden. Using crossbows or other projectile weapons in weapon traps avoids the problem of jamming, but they must be kept loaded with ammo. It may be wiser to have several weapon traps with fewer weapons, rather than a smaller number of ten-weapon traps. None of the weapons on a jammed trap will function. View the trap with the items in room t mode, and if there's a corpse inside the trap, it's jammed. This is the only simple trap that works repeatedly without reloading. Weapon trap The gold standard of lethal traps. Surrounding intersections and stairways is a good way of handling threats that make it inside the fortress, including berserk dwarves. Building lots of them is an easy way to earn experience for your mechanic, and add to the depth of your fort's defenses at the same time. Stone fall trap This is the easiest trap to build, so you can easily build them in large numbers. For tips on using these basic traps effectively, see the Trap Strategies section. They can be a quick, easy and brutally effective 'first defense' for a fledgling fortress, but they can also be combined into key parts of more complex set ups. They require one mechanism but do not require levers or triggers. These are the simple traps that are placed by a mechanic.

To fully understand how these component objects work individually (before combining them into diabolical and complex combinations), see those main articles.(* specifically, the stone-fall trap, weapon trap, and cage trap.) By manipulating what does what and when, and what follows from that, impressive results can be achieved. That signal is not always as simple as 'do it now', but it's specifically either to 'open' or to 'close'. When the trigger is activated, it sends a signal to the linked device. Complex traps and automation rely on linking doors, hatches, floodgates, bridges and mechanic's traps to levers or pressure plates, along with machinery to provide the power to run some of the more diabolical designs. Simple one-tile traps* are just that - they exist only on their own tile, trigger themselves when a target walks onto that one tile, and affect only that one tile.

Dwarf fortress stone fall trap