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[Krath]

Currently, I have about 40 dorfs in my fortress. Everything so far has been going perfectly. I have a decent sized, armed, and trained military, so that's not an issue. I have food and booze coming out of my ears, craft production is going great, etc. But I just have way more manpower than I need right now.

Out of the 40 or so dorfs in my fort, only about 20 of them are actually doing something. Like I said, supply production is only going up, I have people assigned to most of the meaningful jobs, and I have a more than adequate military currently, so they're being relegated to hauling duty. At any given time I'll have about 20 idlers doing absolutely nothing. There's not much to haul, so they're basically just taking up space. These are immigrants with useless jobs like Wood Burner and Soap Maker.

Should I just let them lounge around all day and use up my beer supplies? Should I draft them and get a ridiculously strong military? Should I use them to donate blood to the blood god? I have no idea.

[b1gb0y2013]

You could sign them up for military and restraint them at your front gate for some goblin blood-filled fun...

[Bishop36]

An idea for dealing with "extras" that I am fond of right now is this: Tunnel down to the lowest cavern area and start a small survival fort with anyone you don't want. Make sure to seal them off from the surface and make them completely self-reliant. There are many uses for this other than entertainment, such as a detached military base for dealing with whatever needs dealt with.

[DarthCloakedDwarf]

Megaconstruction.

[DasGuntLord01]

There's hundreds of things you can do with your unwanted dorfs.  I just like to go down the list of professions, and make sure each of them has a workshop and a job to keep them occupied.

Megaprojects and Dwarven Sacrifices are good too.  Corall all of your unwanteds into their very own bedrooms, and rig up a selection of nasty traps to kill any dwarf of your choice at will...

[Interus]

You could quit being so gosh-darned efficient and make more hauling jobs.  You could man the fortress guard.  You could set up an alternate military unit and have them alternate with 3 months of active duty and 3 months of rest.  You could begin work on a surface fortress.  Assign all your guys to be masons, and start pumping out and placing stone blocks and buildings.

[Ubiq]

I always just put extra dwarves to work cranking out stone blocks. Since the number of mineral veins and clusters is way up in this version, it's hard to get entire districts of the same color rock so those blocks are used to make rooms look more uniform. A microcline cluster ruining the edge of that marble apartment complex? Walls mined out and replaced with marble block walls. Same for the floors. In one fort, I even made a six tile wide obsidian highway with alunite lane dividers that stretched from one side of the map to the other with offramps and everything.

Useless, idle dwarves are just tools waiting to be used.