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[smeeprocket]

I've noticed about six or seven babies wandering around sans mother in my fort and the areas surrounding it. One time I think a dwarf picked the baby up but not so for the other ones. I eventually have to go back to other tasks and cease watching them, however. Sometimes I'll get the missing for a week prompt, but not as often as I see the babies.

Obviously, the babies are alone because their mothers died in combat, but can they technically survive like that? I haven't noticed them wanting food or water, except maybe once. They wander completely randomly, and I've assigned them beds thinking they would go there, but they don't from what I can tell.

To be honest, I'm looking for an effective way to annihilate the orphaned children in my fort without sending the adult dwarves further down the depression spiral, but there's something really cool about a dwarf so tough she survives infancy all on her own, perhaps being raised by blind fisher cave people at one point, or giant eagles, depending on her direction of travel.

I would name her the champion of my fort in twelves years and she would single-handedly crush the goblin armies.

[Badger Storm]

I /think/ dwarves will give orphans food and water as they would to prisoners and the wounded, but don't quote me on it.  Of course, being dwarves, your infant mortality rate might be pretty high anyway.

I'd like to see cow, goat, llama etc. milk available to feed orphaned babies.  No, it can't compare to mom, but it has to be better than plump helmet crap and plain water.

[smeeprocket]

Well, food and water seems almost silly considering they don't care enough to pick them up, and just let them wander aimlessly. I've seen them wandering through the underground caves, overland and generally very far away from the fort.

There doesn't seem to be any real way to gather them up either.

[Badger Storm]

Perhaps a meeting place would help?  Just about everything in your civ gravitates there naturally.  When I next have dwarflets afoot, I'll have to test that out.

[smeeprocket]

I have a meeting hall. Several overlapping ones actually to draw all my dwarves to the happiest spot in the fortress. The babies don't seem drawn to it.

[PatrikLundell]

Too late for this in your case, but the general advice is to keep fertile females out of the military (which is annoying, since it seems females are way more likely to have some military skills, for some reason). Not only because females can orphan their infants, but also because of the babymash effect of going into battle (or a danger room) carrying an infant.
Also note that babies grow up to children at an age of 1, and then they start to behave like dorfs (drawn to meeting halls, drinking, partying, going to the hospital for treatment of the arms broken at an age of 1 month,...).

Mothers can lose/put down their infants and then seek them out and pick them up again. If the mother is carried to the hospital, her infants keep crawling about aimlessly until she recovers sufficiently to go and pick them up.

[smeeprocket]

These infants have no mothers. This fortress has seen so so so much death. There are a lot of orphans wandering around. I wish I could conscript them.

I'm not going to tell these fine women they can't fight for the fort tho, if only I could build a daycare to better empower them. ^_____^

Also, the last few fights everyone had to join in. I've had the worst luck most fun with this fortress ever.

[pisskop]

The kids will be given water as any dwarf.  Prisoners, overworked (i.e. stone haulers, chest-draggers, and injured-but-still-concious), and the like will often get bad thoughts from the need before the job is even cued, let alone a dwarf is free long enough to do such a low-priority job.  If you have full-time (or enable the part-time) doctors, they will eventually get around to it.  Frankly, I would use appointed nobility (managers, brokers, etc) for the task, especially if water is few and far.

If they survive long enough to walk they'll be sucking all your food n' booze down in no time.

[§k]

They are likely to survive if they are kidnapped before they starved.

[Aslandus]

They are likely to survive if they are kidnapped before they starved.

The goblins are supposed to be kidnappers, but they take much better care of the kids than we do...

Anyway, as far as I know there's not much you can do for orphaned babies but ease up on job orders so you dwarves have more time to feed them (they wander around as if they are stark raving mad until they reach child age, so make of that what you will)... also if you want to keep them alive don't wash them into your water supply like I did that one time...

Basically, if your population is so low that you're desperate to keep infants alive, you should probably seal up your fort for a while, long enough for them to grow into children and hopefully get a migrant wave or two so you have some workers... Nobody will pick up the baby but its mother, though hopefully the future will have a cradle or something where mothers can put their babies when they go out on military orders to keep them from wandering around like drunk cats...

[Thisfox]

I had a three month old baby arrive in a migrant wave once, without parents or siblings. He took an immense amount of time to crawl from the edge of the map to the fort, then took to wandering around the entrance, which was only a few sets of stairs from the dining room, where he spent the rest of his time.

After checking his relationships, I left him be, and I could have sworn that he ate and drank in the dining room just like any child. Perhaps the other dwarves fed him, perhaps he helped himself, I have no idea.

Only a month or so before he turned one and became a child, he was outside when a werebeast arrived. I did my best to send everyone downstairs, and the baby wandered through the forest of traps around the entrance, doing as he pleased. The werebeast attacked... then there was blood everywhere, and the baby went downstairs. I thought for a moment he had killed the werebeast, but actually when I checked the reports, he had just lured it into the trappy area by being young and fat and juicy, and just when it attacked, it had turned into a human and been stonefall trapped and died. Bang.

Best kid ever. Someone threw a party on his first birthday and I gave him his own room and bedroom, something I rarely if ever do to dwarf children. He deserved it.