Hey, all. I see a lot of discussion on this sub about how Marksdwarves are broken beyond repair and they don't grab their ammo and so forth. I have found a method of training Marksdwarves that has worked in every Fortress I've ever used it in. I wanted to offer this information in the hopes that I can improve everyone's experience training Marksdwarves.

Here is one of my newest recruits, practicing his skills.

The first thing I want to cover is the uniform. I never set up Marksdwarves first and how I set up my melee Dwarves directly relates to this. When I start my military, I change the default "Metal" uniform to "Armor replaces clothes" and then I save it as a new uniform and assign it to my dwarves. My ranged uniform is this uniform, but I changed melee weapon to crossbows.

Here it is.

Everyone has everything, except my commander who is taking a break.

After that comes the training area. I think this is probably the largest culprit as far as not getting Dwarves to train. The trick is to layer an Archery Range and a Barracks on top of each other and assign the squad to both areas.

Archery Range, make sure it's pointed the right way. In my example, its pointed South towards the targets.

Regular Barracks, layered exactly over the Archery Range

This is an unobstructed view of my training area. Sorry about the clutter, I'm moving stuff downstairs.

Make sure to dig a trench in front of your archery targets. The used ammo will fall into the holes and you can get it back.

Now that you're set up, in usual DF fashion, there's a setting we should change in the menu to get everything working correctly.

In this here tab, you want to change the top option to say \"Forbid used ammunition during sieges\". This will let your Dwarves pick up the ammo after they use it and keep practicing. Otherwise, you'll have to manually unforbid the ammo on occasion.

This is the way I set up my Marksdwarves every time and they always work for me just fine. Hopefully I've explained my process well enough that other people can get theirs working too.

Edit : Some people have said they get Marksdwarves to train without a Barracks. Whenever I remove mine, they all change to having no orders and start reading and stuff. I stand by needing a Barracks.