Apparently you can actually... order your dwarves inside and they'd stay inside now, eh?
HA HA HA HAH AH@! HAAAA!HAAAAAAAA!!!!!!~~~~~~~~~~
OMG, I can't stop laughing!!!!!!
A AH AH HAH HAH!!!!!!!!!
As if anything in Dwarf Fortress could be so easy as to simply tell a dorf to "stay inside".
Oh no. In current versions Dwarf Fortress you have have to define a burrow. Define military squads. Assign dorfs to squads. Set alerts. Set rally points. Set burrows for the alerts. Turn on the Alert. Pray that you got it right. Ooops, you missed a step somewhere. One of the invading goblins steppe on a trap and got diced into tiny pieces. Now all your dorfs are running out to clean the trap and pick up the xx giant earthworm loincloth xx (i.e. useless crap) and getting slaughtered by the other 27 goblin marksmen. There goes 19 dorfs. Oh, what's that ? A tantrum spiral? Weee! Fun!
(Oh, and you have to do all that without any documentation of what any of these features actually does, singly or in combination. Or how to set them up. Or that they even exist.)
Wel, time to start a new fortress.
The absolutely ridiculously complex military system in the current versions is so frustrating, I almost quit and deleted the entire game in exasperation. If Anaris hadn't been willing to essentially walk me through it step by step, I probably would have just quit and deleted everything. As it is, I think I have managed to learn how to tell my dorfs to stay inside. But I still don't understand the military system at all. The only way I manage to stay alive in DF is to Trap The World.
