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[Larix]

Abandon your fort.

In fact, abandon a fort with a great many children, after many of them have had successful moods. Make sure the kids' lodgings were close to the farms and 'all dwarfs harvest' was enabled.

After abandoning, embark in a new location from the same civilisation. Wait for migrants. Chances are very good that you'll receive children from your old fort in the first year already. Now the bug is that the game enables the labours for which a migrant has skill, _including children_. Those children are now able to plant seeds and work in craftsdwarf workshops. You can even set workshop profiles to only allow a legendary woodcrafter child in a workshop, and they'll happily crank out masterwork wood crafts for you.

Obviously, you can't change their labour settings and the kids will only take jobs on their own terms, and you'll need adults for hauling, but children won't take breaks, won't pasture animals and won't go and haul stones for a month instead of making crafts. But still - free child labour!

I haven't built a fort on this concept, but last i got child migrants who started planting my fields, i did pick out the legendary woodworker, set the 'P'rofile of the crafts workshop to them, and indeed, the child worked in the shop and produced quality items at a fierce clip.

[slothen]

waiting for children to have moods and then abandoning.. seems like a lot of work for minimal gain.  If you want children to work, there's an option in dwarf therapist that lets you enable any labor on any child whenever.  I once had a squad of legendary +5 child siege operators.  But they still sucked.

[Larix]

Pff, it's a lot less work and much more gain than dwarven... day cares or atomsmashing. And it's not so much something to actually set out for, but rather something you can exploit after abandoning/re-embarking if you've been elfy enough to let your children live. A fort where in the first five to ten years, all the farming and craft production is handled by children would certainly be possible. Not useful or efficient, but a worthy Stupid Dwarf Trick.

Of course you can also just hack dwarfs to have no childhood phase, but where's the fun in that?

[Loam]

I had a bug once where citizens from my old, abandoned fort showed up in migrant waves in my new fort as friendlies. Since they weren't citizens, they couldn't do any work; they just hung out in the fort, or outside.