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[crossmr]

They're supposed to be striking out in the world, ready for hardship.

a couple of random people die and the fort implodes? How did their civilization ever survive this long?

I had a minotaur take out a couple people early on. When the killing stopped we'd gone from 66 to 4 dwarves. I rebuilt over a few seasons. A forgotten beast blew up a floodgate (was not aware they could do that) and killed 4 random dwarves. Out of 203. Before the military got there. They quickly killed it, and the dwarves went to bury the dead, but before they could get there, half the fort has descended into tantrums and so far another 7 have been killed.

I'm sure this will be another great cleansing, but immediately prior to this the entire fortress was ecstatic. This just seems like far too much of an overreaction in this situation.

[ComatosePhoenix]

1: large populations seem more sensitive,  I had a 3 of my original 7 die in the first year and no body got so much as a bad thought from burying corpses.

2: losing a friend is very traumatic, normal people only have 2 or 3 close friends whose deaths will send them over the edge. dwarfs being a simulation have no "friendship cap" so if they spend a lot of time idling and partying in the same meeting room Every dwarf will be stupidly close to every other dwarf. this can be alleviated with multiple dining halls spread throughout the fort.

3: By that same note putting ALL your dwarves in the same basket tends to backfire when Urist McAgry goes nuts and murders everyone in the basket.

4: I would say overall you had really bad luck with the tantrums, When I have a dwarf tantrum he usually scares off the others before doing any real damage and then spends the rest of the time kicking things in the furniture stockpile.

[silverskull39]

It would be pretty cool to see dwarves form cliques of close friends whose deaths will traumatise them, and then have large swaths of casual acquaintances.

[crossmr]

A normal person has 2-3 close friends, but in our fort I'd guess lots of people have many close friends. It seems like it might go like this:


Urist McButcher: Hey did you hear McTanner was killed by a forgotten beast 8 seconds ago?
Urist McStonecrafter: Who was that.. the guy who worked up on level C?
McButcher: Yeah I think he...
Urist McStonecrafter: Did you just blink at me?!!!
McButcher: I...I blinked, I didn't blink AT you.. it's just something normal that
McStonecrafter: FOR ARMOK!!! I'LL EAT YOUR CHILDREN!!!

Next thing you know Stonecrafter is on top of a dining room table in a leather thong swinging around a dead jaguar leg like a club babbling to himself with a pile of half a dozen dead dwarves surrounding him.


and then it doesn't get any better from that point.

If you know so many people then if someone dies the others should console you and if not that many people know each other 4 random deaths shouldn't set the fortress on fire like this.
I just don't see a scenario where it instantly descends into brutal room to room butchery like this. Even my war lions and war dogs had formed a large pack and were moving as a group fighting people.

[cikulisu]

the real problem i had was children.

something was wrong in particular with a large family i had. at one point, one child punched in the skull of his brother. this precipitated a cain & abel scenario that destroyed the entire fortress of about 120 people, because the children kept tantruming and punching in each other's skulls. it was truly a horrifying thing to behold.

in fact, at one point i think the child actually did punch in his brother's skull and then start a 5 line soliloquy about death.

it was like something out of shakespeare.

edit: on topic, i agree though like the posters above me said, it very well could be because you had a jengatower of superclose best friends forever types from long intermingling. they are right in that the first time anything past minor tragedy happens that shit will topple, and the worst part about it is that even a tiny bit of cyclical revenge killing will keep the cycle going until almost no one is left.

[klefenz]

Dwarf Fortress: Friendship is Deadly.

Now I think about it, my most successful fortress ever had several small dining rooms, and lots of people died in that fort, however no tantrums. From now on multiple small dining rooms will become standard.

[ComatosePhoenix]

"If you know so many people then if someone dies the others should console you"

They kinda do that now, they feel happier from talking to a friend, its just that loosing 4 friends at once is a lot, and instead of looking for a shoulder to cry on, dwarfs look for a face to punch.

Tantruming is actually quite good for the dwarf as long as he doesn't manage to kill anyone. If he makes it to a stock pile he'll vent his frustrations tossing things around and come to his senses feeling much better. heck, he might even get some combat skill out of it.

A semi-decent captain of the gaurd and jail cell made out of masterwork chains and things will help reintegration with society too, after all aside from vampire's and werebeast's which should be treated specially anyway, any criminal dwarf is just misunderstood unfortunate at the wrong place at the wrong time, and they just need some peace and quite away from it all.

I am getting to into this topic 

[Jorn Stones]

The issue is:

losing a friend: -50 happines.

Having 0 friends: no happiness loss

Having 100 friends and losing 5 of them: -250 happiness, miserable>tantrum spiral.

I already suggested to have it changed so that the happiness loss is something like: 400/number of remaining friends. That way, having more friends would be preferable to having none or very little, as the impact for 5 dead dwarves would be like 10 or more times as little, but of course nobody responded to that thread at all.

[Agent_Irons]

They're psychotic little bastards. This is why you get martial trances and artifact moods.

They're just really unstable.

[Hectonkhyres]

They're psychotic little bastards. This is why you get martial trances and artifact moods.

They're just really unstable.

Then they should get something extra when things are really going their way. Urist becomes a grandfather -> Urist gets happiness for the wonderful event -> Urist is filled with motivation in his daily life in a way determined by personality. Having something to live for (being such a HORRIBLY RARE THING for dorfs) should have some sort of effect.

[BenLubar]

400/number of remaining friends.

If their only friend dies, they get infinite sadness and the game explodes. Seems fitting.

[NomeQueEuLembro]

400/number of remaining friends.

If their only friend dies, they get infinite sadness and the game explodes. Seems fitting.

400/(remaining numbers of friends + 1)
So if a dwarf loses his only friend in something like an bear attack he's gonna get an instant -400 happiness, the same as losing 8 friends in the actual mechanism. So either you make them socialize to avoid tantrums, or you make them work to build walls against sieges, unless you had enough dwarves to make both, making things harder in early games and easier later.

Anyway, that's why I love artifact furnitures.
Urist McTantrum: I LOST MY ONLY CHILD TO THAT BEA... Oh, look, what an awesome chair!