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[De]

Was the "grief" thought taken out on purpose? I find it kind of upsetting that my dwarves continuously freak out over goblin teeth stuck in a nearby tree (working on it) but don't care at all when their children are beaten to bloody pulps by trolls mysteriously escaping from cages. They don't care about their pets any more either. I know this could be seen as convenient but it kind of makes me hate my dwarves when they're more upset by goblin bones then they are by losing their own family. The weaver whose kid died is one of the happiest dwarves in my fortress....

[Shonai_Dweller]

Mothers still go mental when their babies are savaged by giant rats and fall into underground pools. So that's something I guess.

[Sirbug]

Military training seems to harden dwarves to this point. However, my fort drowning from corpse-induced distress and it's hard to say if they are actually distressed over relatives dying.

[Ultimuh]

Did they recently dine in a well decorated dining room admire a mastercraft engraving recently?

[ShinQuickMan]

Based on anecdotal evidence on my part, dwarves do show angst for such things, they just don't express it immediately all the time.

For example, there was this one time where some random kid under a mood got mauled by a werebeast. He was a migrant, showing up in the fortress with his parents and a number of his siblings. Assumably, his family should have bawled then and there, but, seeing their profiles, they showed no sign of grief for a while.Then,  more than a season after that incident, the entire family collectively stopped working out of depression for some reason. A look at each of their thoughts showed they finally acknowledged their loss.

Hypothetically speaking, I think this has something to do with how news travels within the fortress, such that, if a relative/friend recieves no news of their compatriot's death, they'll go on as if nothing has happened. Or maybe they just have an absurdly long denial duration?

[De]

Well I first noticed that they didn't care about pets dying in the first fort I started playing when 40.24 came out (I always just go ahead and start new forts when there's a new release). It was on glacier so after an initial troubled period (we spawned on top of a polar bear and lost 5 of the starting 7) there weren't any deaths for a long time, being beyond the reach of other civilizations, only the pets living on to old age and dying of natural causes (and one time when I accidentally butchered some, a real accident, no idea how it happened). I thought maybe the owners didn't care because they were being buried properly. Then a hydra (in fact the hyrdra that the age of the world was named for) came and demolished half my militia including the captain of the guard and the resident champion, Captain Tink. The dorfs were all heavily upset by the corpses lying around (the hydra as much as their compatriots) but nobody cared except for the "so and so was horrified by the death of Captain Tink" which went on for years and years until I figured out that Tink's hand had landed up on top of the fortifications directly over the entrance. I thought maybe I'd lost anyone being upset by the death of parents and friends in the spam of horrification. Then I played this fort where my goal is to create a bunch of bloodlines to chart through the coming years (started in year five) and the first thing I did was build an atom smasher so we don't have a bunch of upsetting bodies lying around there's less spam and I've also noticed people don't care when their pets die, ever. Then one of my miners, a founding member who had a ton of friends (because of the breeding program where I group various dwarves together into a tiny burrow to see if they'll fall in love) became encased in ice about a year ago and no one cares, they don't even care that we can't retrieve her body. Now, like I said, the happiest dwarves in the fortress seem to be the ones who lost children during the troll oops (they really love the food).

I know people hate the feelings off loss over pets but I always thought it added character and I miss it now that it's gone.