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[bobboy555]

I'm trying to build an above-ground town but I just can't keep up with the constant influx of legendary cheese makers even though I set my population cap to 50. They all started tantruming because they didn't have their own beds. I also tend to have too much food taking up my barrels so I can't make any drink. Any way I can fix the game ignoring the pop cap I set? (I'm using the masterwork settings menu by the way.)

[krenshala]

As others have mentioned before, it looks like the liaison tells your civ if you were at or below the pop-cap, and if you are migrants will show up (assuming conditions at your fortress don't prompt the message "The fortress attracted no migrants this season.").  This makes the pop-cap more of a guideline than a hard and fast rule.

In my experience, setting it to 20 will give you a population of ~25 to 30 dwarves, 30 will give you ~45 - 50 dwarves, and 50 will give you ~65 to 75 dwarves.

[i2amroy]

If you are only a little averse to the popcap settings then you just need to make sure that a liason successfully visits your fortress and then leaves alive after the popcap has been exceeded. The migrants should stop fairly quickly. If you really want the pop cap to not be exceeded then I believe DFHack has a command that force updates your civilization's track of your population, which will stop all future migrant waves (assuming no dwarves die) if you run it after the wave that passes your pop cap.

For your brewing there is a fairly easy way to greatly reduce the amount of canceled brewing tasks. Simply open up the stock(p)ile menu and then look for the "reserved barrels" setting. Increase the number of reserved barrels up to 5-10. This reserves a certain number of barrels from basic storage to only be used in workshop tasks, (such as brewing) and usually ensures that as long as you have at least one empty barrel you will be able to brew.

An easy way to cancel out pretty much all bad thoughts is to set up a simple mist generator in a common area of your fortress (say above the dining room entrance). Being pleased by mist is a fairly powerful thought, and if a dwarf is being comforted by it every time they walk into the dining room they will quickly rack up enough positive thoughts to outweigh almost any bad thought. In fact mist is such a powerful good thought bringer, that it was pretty much the only mechanism that could be used to cancel out the bad thoughts from being naked on babies before Toady removed them.

[Telgin]

I believe it's actually the dwarven caravan leaving that reports back your population, not the liaison.

DFHack does have a command to make the population cap take immediate effect though.  I think this is the command:

Code: [Select]

fix/population-cap

[bobboy555]

Thanks for the help guys, I'll make sure to use these in my new fort.
EDIT: Just checked, the DFHack command "fix/population-cap" alerts your civ to your population like the caravan would.

[lollypox]

The more entertaining workaround is to force migrants to cross a retractable bridge to get into your fortress. The tricky part is salvaging the ones that are worth keeping, if you kill them all then you'll likely get another wave, so you have to let just enough to hit your cap survive.

And kill whole families, leave no orphans.

[Larix]

For dwarf happiness above-ground, your options are a bit limited. The best option always is the legendary dining room. Those produce such strong good thoughts it's a bit silly. Putting valuable stuff somewhere your dwarfs can notice and admire it is also pretty effective - from statues to furnaces. Dwarfs get a bad thought from 'sleeping without a proper room', but that one's quite mild; lack of a proper room can safely be ignored if your place is otherwise nice. I've seen it suggested to just draw really tiny rooms around each bed and let your dwarfs claim them - if you have enough beds for everybody, this can produce extra happiness without actually building rooms.

I've never built a mist generator, but strongly suspect they're not gonna work too well above ground if your biome freezes for any part of the year: some building objects get destroyed when the water they're in turns to ice (grates most notoriously), and in some cases ice-vs.-building interactions can leave blocks of never-melting ice.