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[Antikythera]

I'm running a generational fort with no immigrants nor trade. I'm 7 years in and have my first babies.

I also just caught my first giant cave spider (ever) and tried to make a silk farm before realising using a dog as bait doesn't work in the current version.

With only 7 adult dwarves I cant really spare one to use as bait so was wondering how I could use children as bait. Could I put them in a burrow with food and drink in front of the GCS? Would the children stay put or run away? would getting webbed cause them to starve?

[taptap]

A spider can lock really strong dwarves like forever in webs (and webs keep coming). I would go for batch production in an advanced farm with a "waving bridge", milk the GCS for some hundred webs at a time then remove spider and recover the bait. The amount of webs should be more than sufficient given you only have a few dwarves.

[PatrikLundell]

There are basically two ways to set up a GCS silk farm: Hostile GCS vs dwarves (and some animals should work, I think), or a tame GCS vs enemies (goblins work fine, but a wild animal did not (I think I tried a blind cave ogre). Undead work as bait for both version. I suspect you don't get goblin invasions for a couple of decades, but if you're lucky you might engineer the capture of a kobold.

[Antikythera]

Thanks for the advice. Set up a waving bridge with a temporary soldier on patrol for a week or so to generate a supply of thread.
Gained some skills with minecart repeaters as a bonus.
Tried to make it safe for all involved by segregating the bridges with fortifications like so

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seems the soldier entering through the door was not targetable through two fortifications.
I removed some fortifications between the dwarf and the north bridge and even though the dwarf walked the same path and so the same distance from the spider this time he was targeted successfully. OP success.

next time I may try to make the soldier safe from being hurt by bridges using channels instead of fortifications. I don't like the idea of atom smashers being so close to dwarves. I lost one kitten in setting this up. Luckily it wasn't my only female. Also of note was when removing the excess fortifications I left the GCS in position and the bridge waving. It didn't target the civilians at work even in the final configuration but targeted the soldier immediately. 

[Niddhoger]

Remember, monsters can climb now.  When you make those channels, be sure to smooth the walls just to be extra safe. 

[taptap]

Remember, monsters can climb now.  When you make those channels, be sure to smooth the walls just to be extra safe.

Some people work underground with a lot of roof

[PatrikLundell]

Something else: I think you'll have trouble with your generational fortress, because of the problem to generate future generations.
- On embark, you can get any gender combination, I think (I've had 1+6 once).
- A fair number of dorfs are not sexually geared for child production (homo or asexual; bi will work if the partner is of the opposite sex, though).
- In addition to that, I think some are uninteresting in a family, even if the marry.
- Dorfs only marry those within a 10 year age span (+/- 10 years), which is quite narrow for embarkers that can span over 100 years (or more) of ages.
- I think DF employs the Roman ethics on how close a relative you can marry, in which case it has to be further away than cousins. This means two couples can give you 2 locally produced generations before reaching a state where no available partners exist.
- Dorfs also have to like each other, strangely enough (mine are horrendously bad at making friends).
Given the above, you'd need 3 couples to get a fortress going long term (I think they've come up with a figure of 150 or so humans for long term viability), and that would probably be very hard to get without modifying some parameters (such as ability to select who to take on embark from a reasonably large pool, abolishing non hetero sexual alignment, relaxing age restrictions, and probably a few things on top of that).

[Sutremaine]

The only forbidden marriages in DF involve parents or siblings. Everyone else is fair game.

[Antikythera]

you had me worried when you said 1st cousins were not partnerable.

I rerolled a couple times and got 3f 4m all hetero. I worldgen for only 100 years and so they were all within the 55-85 age range. each female had at least one male within 10 years. even then I had one couple remain as lovers so only two breeding pairs. they took 2-3 years to pair up and then married in year 7. not sure I could have sped that up. at one stage in the first couple of years I assigned each age determined pair a two bed bedroom. not sure if that had any effect.

now I have 8 children 4 years later. I limited it to 30:300% with a hard cap of 220. The first fortborn will reach productive adulthood in yr. 20. hopefully they will marry and start diversifying the gene pool by yr. 28. by then they each will have 20 siblings. the fort will not have a geometric growth instead averaging 2.3 child per year because of the 30 child limit.

[PatrikLundell]

I must be doing something wrong, because my fortresses are horrendously bad at generating children, or even couples. I'm 18 years in, with a 50 pop immigration cap, and the 8 children produced are all produced by the same immigrated couple. My starting 7 have friendships with each other (except for a grudge pair), and a small number of years ago one pair upgraded theirs to the lover stage. All the others have large lists of friendly relations only, with the exception of a friend pair (same gender) initiated about one year ago.
The previous fortress was similar, with one immigration couple, but after 5 years or so, I actually got another couple, that even started to produce children.
I might run the buggers too hard by trying to get them to occupied as much as possible (but I don't break up parties unless there is a crisis. A largely moot point since parties seem to require an existing friendship to be declared).

From a game perspective it's good to hear I was wrong about the Roman ethics, and I also prefer to stay clear from the Incas/Faraonic one (i.e. to keep the divine bloodline clean by sticking to siblings).

[Antikythera]

My research when I first tried this and failed led me to create a 1 tile meeting zone. The dwarves interact when they are adjacent so having them spread out is counterproductive.

Also for recent forts I have not made the dining room a meeting hall. I reckon parties are a waste of precious man hours months and read they don't occur if your meeting zone isn't build from a building (table well etc) but is just a zone.

My royal dining room was only created after they coupled and before that my dining room was designed to maximise interaction. If a dwarf is in each chair they can have several possible interactions.

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as for you having 8 children I'm worried there may be some hidden limit. I've got 8 from my two couples in 4 years and the youngest has just turned 1 and they should have popped out another 2 already. I'm wondering if I don't understand the effect of 300% baby_child_cap i assumed 300% x 7 adults should be a cap of 21.

[taptap]

my dining room was designed to maximise interaction. If a dwarf is in each chair they can have several possible interactions.

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While I have a similar dining room (when testing it helped somewhat), with sufficient density (i made barracks, dining room, meeting area all overlapping in the same place) there will be dwarves on the tables as well, so reducing size is definitely more important than layout.

[PatrikLundell]

I had 4 21*21 dining rooms/meeting halls, for the purpose of having all the levers needed for the top plus each of the caverns. Not long before I got my second friend couple I demoted 3 of them to dining halls only. I also initially made the mistake of having a single table surrounded by chairs, but changed that to a long string of tables with chairs on one side as a result of advice. The suggested chair clustering seems like an improvement which I'll use for immediate redecoration.

Well, two of the 8 children have grown up and have been drafted into the militia, while I think the youngest one is still a baby. The production has not been steady. Instead, the child production intervals have varied. It might be an effect of running them hard, but the last 5 years or so I've frequently been running mostly idle (with spurts to clean up after goblin invaders. The undead seem to have given up, though).

[Bearskie]

Am disappointed.  Was expecting to see an extension of the Dwarven Daycare thread, only with more giant cave spiders.

It's a shame that chil dwarves struggling to free themselves from webs don't gain any attribute increases.  You'd think it would