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[Nas92]

I have embarked on a volcano and whenever migrants arrive they start right on top of the volcano next to the lava. This wouldn't be much of a problem but they take ages to get down to the entrance of my fortress. I rejoiced a little because that would mean even sieges and elven caravans would spawn there. But then I realised: in all of my previous fortresses I got like one immigrant wave a year and that was when I was lucky. So I want a healthy supply of migrants because if they trigger an ambush whilst trying to reach me they won't have a chance to escape the ambushers. So, any tips to ensure migrants every or, at least, nearly every season?

[FleshForge]

Talk to your liaison and/or trade (not necessarily both) and you'll get the regular crop of random numbers of migrants.  From experience in 31.16 I doubt you can truly influence the randomness too much; I've traded 30k worth of stuff I crafted and got 10 migrants, and traded like 6 mechanisms for a couple barrels of beer and got 20+.

[jei]

Donate all your extra valuables to the dwarven caravan as offerings, this is always a good habit so there's less clutter to eat yor FPS.
You'll get tons of migrants if you're generous. Also buy lots of stuff from them. Expensive stuff. Big trade and offerings bring in lots
of migrants in my experience. As for making valuable stuff, depends on your people and their talents what will make most money,
not forgetting to sow leather and silk images on stuff and studding with gold and gems.

Also, dig a tunnel for your migrants and merchants to use if securing them otherwise is a problem.
A trap laden tunnel with a magma moat beside it is very useful but never let your dwarves fight an enemy there
or let your military go in unless you can lower a bridge over the magma moat to protect them.

[FleshForge]

Sometimes migrants just have shit for luck - in my current fort I had a huge wave of 22 migrants spawn almost exactly the same time and place as a couple of large goblin ambush teams, who literally killed them just as each one entered the map one by one.  Unrelated trivia: a few times a goblin was actually standing on the tile the migrants would enter the map at, and that apparently prevents them from getting onto the map.  The saddest part was they left a little dwarven kid for last, but they didn't forget about him    I tried to take my noob squad out to get them inside and even formed the incoming migrants into a squad of their own but it did no good, they just got massacred.

I built them a huge hero's tomb the next year and went back and recovered all their bodies 

[proxn_punkd]

Supposedly a more valuable fortress attracts more migrants, so see about smoothing/engraving your meeting area as well as allowing the merchants to fleece you for all you're worth.

[Psieye]

Migrants never come in winter and, after the first year, very rarely in summer and autumn. Your best bet at saving your migrants is to trap the entire spawning point.

[NecroRebel]

You might try blocking off that part of the map edge. Build floors over any up ramps on the map edge (you can't remove them with mining designations, but constructed floors will get rid of them), then build drawbridges, link them to a lever, and raise said bridges to make a pseudo-wall right on the map edge; this will prevent anything from spawning where a raised drawbridge sits.

The other option is to have a tunnel that opens to near where the migrants spawn. Trap it thoroughly so few enemies can get in there, set burrows so that your prior residents aren't allowed into it, set a meeting area inside, and make an airlock around the meeting area. Some migrants, at least, will go to the meeting area inside the tunnel, so they'll have less distance to run in the open, and once all the migrants are inside or dead you can switch the airlock, put the new migrants into your main fort burrow, and have them go to work. Due to the airlock, few enemies will even try to go in there unless you've got migrants, so little looting will occur inside either.



Finally, to get more migrants, make lots of created wealth and have little imported wealth. Sew images or sell any goblin clothing that shows up, melt foreign-created metal equipment, decorate any foreign bins or barrels you get, and make high-value stuff like steel and silver serrated discs, aluminum and platinum furniture, and the like. Created wealth attracts migrants, while imported wealth seems to repel them, so turning imported wealth into created wealth is a good plan.