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[JTTCOTE1]

Are you annoyed by having almost 50% children, thanks to those darn migrant waves?
Are your food stocks in jeopardy because they're being eaten by hordes of useless twats?
Then this is the solution for you!
(Sorry if this is well known, but I saw a thread where someone didn't so I'm just making this. Yes, it's not as dwarfy as magma, but it's meant for starting forts)
The best way of dealing with children is, obviously, murder. How to go about this without discovery is a different challenge. But I have found a solution!
Dig out a 1*3 room, preferably near your dining hall, that is perpendicular to the hallway you're digging it from. Construct a door at the entrance, then a 2 long drawbridge that raises towards the far end of the room. Link these both to the same lever. But suspend the bridge, and dig out a tile adjacent to where it is when raised. Construct a wall in that square, and let the bridge be built and linked.

Designate the wall for removal. Check the jobs list to see if a child accepted it, if not, cancel it. (The closer it is to your dining room, the more likely it'll be a child as opposed to a hauler who just finished his job). When the child enters the room, pull the lever. The door will close, and 100 ticks later the bridge will atom-smash him where no eyes can see. Pull the lever again and the door opens and bridge raises, and the trap is reset for the next child.

I've been using this in many forts and it usually brings the number of children down to around 10 before it is more effort than it's worth getting them into the room instead of your mayor (Oh yeah, it works for him too.)

What do you think?

[Murphy]

I find [BABY_CHILD_CAP:30:30] to produce more realistic percentage of children in my settlements.

[ThtblovesDF]

I find that I'm saving a lot of metal on shields by issuing childMkI shields.

[Di]

Come on, there are many less tedious ways to get rid of children. Like putting mothers into danger room or burrowing them outside.

[aoxoa]

I miss Runesmith Designate them for butchering. Quite funny when I first used it on a baron or noble (I forget it was ages ago). I forget, but he was annoying me and I thought hrm wonder how this will go.

Well it went good.

[Scruffy]

If you don't mind cheating the children make great miners such. They are expendable, resilient (survive really long drops caused by accidental channeling etc that adults won't) and they will have less time socializing when they are either mining or being hauled to the hospital.

[Tirion]

If you want to kill them, why not make their deaths useful? Make sure all adults are ecstatic, it's not that hard with a legendary dining room/statue garden, own engraved 3x3 bedrooms, a working cloth industry and a good cook. Build a room underground, within line of sight from frequently used traffic areas. All floor tiles within should be covered by retracting menacing spikes, linked to a lever outside. As many as possible wall tiles should be windows. Pasture useless pets and burrow useless children inside. Lock the door. Pull the lever repeatedly. If the survivors outside don't drop below Unhappy, keep the door locked until the dead rot away into skeletons. It will present 2 Tragedy thoughts per lost pet/friend/child: lost a X recently, and was forced to endure the decay of a X recently. Accidentally, has witnessed death can happen, it's a tragedy too. Windows block miasma so that doesn't enter the equation, it's a useless non-tragedy bad thought. According to this: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:List_of_Dwarven_Thoughts
if done carefully and gradually, this can be done with no insanity or tantrum spiral. And it results in dwarves who don't really care about anything anymore- that's what enough Tragedy thoughts do.

[Sidhien]

Dunno if this works in the current version, but I used to just use burrows + meeting hall to segregate the children. To maintain maximum parental happiness, any solution will probably have to ensure that:

1) There are no witnesses
2) No one finds the body
2.5) (Optional) There is no body

Note: I'm pretty sure that if the children get reanimated and try to rip their parents' throats out, it counts as finding the body. So keep that in mind.

[Kipi]

I think you can still engrave a slab for "missing" children after one week since disappear. No ghost, no bad thoughts! 

[nanomage]

I never actually used it, but here is a potentially less thought-disturbing way of getting rid of little brats.
1. Construct a huge wall or great paved square of floor somewhere in the wilderness.
2. Wait for dwarven caravan to leave.
3. Make sure all your dwarves are busy hauling several thousand stones from one dump to another.
4. Order your huge wall or square destroyed.
5. When your children are busy removing the wall, seal the gate and wait for goblins to come and mop up.
... (if the goblins are snatchers, no bad thoughts will result from their, erm, interference. If their intentions are more cruel, you are back to engraving slabs.)

[GoombaGeek]

An easy but inefficient method is to harness the power of dwarven stupidity:

Code: [Select]

.....
+++☺.
.....The single floor tile is designated for removal. There is a 50% chance they will drop themselves into whatever non-OSHA-compliant devices are constructed below. And if everyone else is doing real work, you don't even need to make sure that your useful dwarves don't get dropped! Plus it keeps your masons/carpenters/soap-bar-placers busy.