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[matskuman5]

So, I have a fortress with 231 dwarves.

I double-checked I have my pop-cap set at 200, but I just got another migrant wave. Plus a lot of babies are born there, regardless of the the pop-cap.

Why does this happen?

[Garath]

well, the pop_cap can be passed by migration in some cases, one being for example that the liaison (or caravan, forgot how it was) didn't have a chance to report back to the mountainhomes

children being born are regulated by a completely different setting, the child_cap

the wiki is your friend:

If the fortress population exceeds the population cap when the dwarven liaison is visiting he will note that you don't want any more dwarves. On his safe return to the dwarven homeland he then will see that no migrants are sent that year. So you can stop immigration by setting the POPULATION_CAP option in d_init.txt to a number lower than your current population, the change will only take effect after the dwarven caravan visits so you may get up to three waves of migrants before the change takes effect.Verify

The first two immigrant waves are hardcoded so you will always receive them, and if you have less than 4 dwarves POPULATION_CAP is ignoredVerify. The number of migrants depends on the created wealth of your fortress and so is affected by your dwarves activities. Note that if your fortress should ever become a mountainhome, you will receive an additional migration wave with the promotion, regardless of your population cap. The number of migrants is not affected by how far below the population cap your fortress was. One dwarf short, or twenty - it's all the same.

It is worth noting that you need a certain minimum population size before any of your dwarves will experience strange moods. Additionally, POPULATION_CAP still allows babies to be born. You will need to alter BABY_CAP in order to change it.

To reiterate, the population cap is not a hard limit on the number of dwarves in your fortress; It is a soft cap on immigration that only is checked when a liaison successfully reports back to your home civ. If a player is as little as 1 dwarf under their population cap when the liaison leaves, they will be eligible for a full year of normal immigration. As such, it is recommended that players set their population cap at 20-30 dwarves below the number of dwarves they actually want in their fort.

There is an open bug where it seems that for some people POPULATION_CAP doesn't work at all.VerifyBug:2922

[Quietust]

When a migrant wave "event" occurs, it compares your population cap to the population observed by the last Dwarven caravan to visit (and leave) your fortress. If you didn't get a Dwarven caravan this year (e.g. due to a siege), it will continue to use the values from the previous successful caravan visit.

There is a DFHack script to forcibly update these values - "fix/population-cap" will immediately report your current population to the Mountainhomes and should prevent subsequent migrant waves from exceeding it.

[enizer]

i had this problem for a long time until i read the FULL wiki page on it, but as a rule of thumb you always get one extra migrant wave after hitting the pop cap

for example: in forts where i want to have around 50 dwarves, i need to put the pop cap at 30