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[Garath]

A few babies is fine. It's not fine when your first two hardcoded immigrant waves bring you 2 dwarfs total (1 in each) and 7 babies/children. Especially when you're trying to embark on a particularly challenging location and food/booze production isn't really in full swing yet.

it may not be fine, but it's a good challenge

[guitarxe]

Sure, if you want that challenge. I embark in certain areas with certain self-made restrictions to have my own kind of challenges. But when you get

Spoiler: THIS (click to show/hide)

it gets ridiculous...
43 adults, 33 children. That puts me at 3 dwarfs shy of a siege, and I only have armour enough to perhaps equip 5 dwarfs.

[dexxy]

How come the dwarfs have "Everything" after their names?

[guitarxe]

I changed their professions in Dwarf Therapist. I called it "Everything" because it has every labour (save for a few) turned on.

[guitarxe]

2: atomsmashing them so they don't leave identifyable remains won't create a bad thought as long as noone sees it ("she might still be alive, walking around in the wilderness, surviving, after 10 years, right mother? Just because she disappeared doesn't mean we have to give up hope.")

I just tried that and man did that not work. Smashed a lot of the children and whole fort is an instant tantrum...

[dexxy]

2: atomsmashing them so they don't leave identifyable remains won't create a bad thought as long as noone sees it ("she might still be alive, walking around in the wilderness, surviving, after 10 years, right mother? Just because she disappeared doesn't mean we have to give up hope.")

I just tried that and man did that not work. Smashed a lot of the children and whole fort is an instant tantrum...

You can't believe everything you read on the forums. I read that you shouldn't let soldiers carry food, so that they will go eat in the dining room. So I tried that out, almost starved a militia commander to death.

[Panando]

I think atomsmashing children is distasteful. It's better to brick them into tiny individual rooms and let them starve to death. Their deaths remain undiscovered, but it leaves evidence of dwarven culture for future generations. The methods all centre around the idea of de-constructing stuff to lure children. Simple example, dig out a bunch of 1x3 rooms, have a door into each room, and a constructed wall in the end of the room. Have an "adults burrow" with all the adults assigned to it, and excluding the death chambers. Order the walls to be de-constructed, when a kiddy goes into a room, lock the door.

[Garath]

Might have to read the original thread on atomsmashing children and others, might need to be done 1 by 1 and out of sight of others. My last accidental smash in 34.07 had 3 people reported as dead and 1 baby missing, so maybe only 1 per smash will be 'missing' and the rest will cause the penalty.

The trick is to make sure noone is a witness to the death or finds the body, and preferably leave no remains

[Finn]

2: atomsmashing them so they don't leave identifyable remains won't create a bad thought as long as noone sees it ("she might still be alive, walking around in the wilderness, surviving, after 10 years, right mother? Just because she disappeared doesn't mean we have to give up hope.")

I just tried that and man did that not work. Smashed a lot of the children and whole fort is an instant tantrum...

I'm glad someone noted that.  I have a fort where I regularly atom smash new migrants.  I have it rigged so that the bridge is above ground and everyone else is under civilian alert below ground half a map away.  If I've let the migrants hang aroung long enough to socialize, the instant the lever is pulled, instant unhappyness half a map away.

[guitarxe]

Hm... I'm guessing I wasn't careful enough to make sure it wasn't noticed by anyone. I simply dug a room with a door on the same zlevel as my living spaces, assigned children to a burrow under the bridge in that room and pulled the lever as soon as as a few brats walked under it.

I was thinking that if it's behind a door nobody would see? Guess I was wrong. I'll try walling off the room this time instead and see if that works.

[Garath]

a possibility was that the children "saw" eachother die

[Sutremaine]

You can't believe everything you read on the forums. I read that you shouldn't let soldiers carry food, so that they will go eat in the dining room. So I tried that out, almost starved a militia commander to death.

That works for military dwarves who spend a lot of time inactive, as only inactive dwarves will attempt to eat in the dining room. But even if you were disabling food rations to stop wrestling-related rotting the outcome would have been the same, as any dwarf in a position to starve can't go and eat in the dining room anyway.

[guitarxe]

So I tried out crushing the children a few more times in different ways and here are the results:

Attempt #1 - Put child under bridge in room, then wall off the room and pull the lever. No unhappiness in any dwarfs in the fort. Child gets marked as "missing".
I thought that perhaps walling off, and not simply putting a door, would do the trick, and above confirmed my suspicions.

Attempt #2 - Put 3 children under bridge in room, wall off, pull lever. This time there were announcements that the child got crushed under a bridge (notice that for the first time, this did not happen). This announcement came for only 2 of the 3 children, however, and only 2 of the children got marked as deceased, while the 3rd got marked as missing.
So, looks like someone's theory here that perhaps the children "saw" each other die and telepathically communicated it to the rest of the fort holds true.

So, in end result, to have a clean kill you need to make sure that only 1 child is crushed at a time, as having multiple victims will make it so they can see each other at the moment of death, and somehow spread the news to the rest of the fort, even thought they are walled in.