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[vanatteveldt]

OK, I sort of understood the old emotions - keep em boozed up, have some waterfalls and statues around, give them a grand dining hall with masterwork roasts and their own bedroom and hope their relatives and pets have good karma.

Now, I think I have a fairly good fortress running, not too many deaths, good food etc, but one of my dorfs is unhappy:



The thing is, I don't understand where the stress comes from. Is it residual stress from back when dead crundles still meant something to him? Is there anything (apart from expanding the dining hall) that I can do to improve his emotions?

[ShinQuickMan]

It's likely a personality and values conflict. More often than not, these types of dwarves are averse to hard work, stress, and/or loneliness. Try giving her a vacation, see if that helps.

[Splint]

...Dumb question, but has he had to go out in the rain frequently or dump a lot of dead crundles/trogs?

Because I had a similar issue a while back, and I was able to trace the source to the fact my embark was only dry for like... One or two months a year combined with constant trog corpse removal. The friggen militia who was doing all the killing was better psychologically than some of the clean-up crew members.

Would certainly help if it didn't seem like the "horrified seeing an x die" had the same weight regardless of what died...

[PatrikLundell]

Death normally are dealt with as two different stress types; animals and sentient beings. Most dwarves don't care about dead animals (such as crundles, yielding "nothing after witnessing death" below). I've heard it said sensitive dwarves may get horrified even by animal death though. Corpses and body parts (including a single tusk) of sentient beings evoke the horrified negative feeling among all but the most hardened dwarves (militia training helps with hardening, which is what Splint noted, I think it's the Discipline skill), and each season the same body (or any part of it) is seen a new dose of stress is added. Ergo, sentient bodies should not be kept in the general refuse stockpile together with stuff you want to recover and where dwarves visit frequently. Dumping into a hole or magma are frequent methods of sentient body refuse disposal.
Stress is reduced slowly through positive feelings (there might be a natural decay as well), but it takes a long time to destress a dwarf that's reached the yelling stage (and if yelling is stressful to that dwarf that might not actually help). For this particular dwarf, note the stress level and check again in 3 months time: I suspect the stress level has decreased unless you have significant stress factors (the miasma and dining table ones are probably of a lower value than all the positive ones).

[Splint]

Discipline does indeed seem to be a factor with it. I'll admit initially I thought it just affected how they responded to various threats (a coawrdly dwarf with no dicipline woul run away from thier first few fights or drop to thier knees in horror after one or two sapient kills while braver dwarves with no discipline would charge headlong into battle and keep fighting like DF2012 and back no matter what.)

I had one fort that suffered from a rash of accidental suicides because one asshole decided he was too good to use the ramps like everyone else and tried climbing, and many dwarves followed suite out of the blue, trying to scale walls to get around and falling to thier deaths 50 z-levels below.

The militia, with legendary discipline, didn't start to finally crack under the strain of dozens of deaths and even having to kill tantrumers (they can and will kill anyone they see attacking other dwarves at least the last time I had such a situation,) and berserk dwarves themselves, until nearly two thirds of the population was dead and the ones that weren't were being murdered by tantruming children (because those little pukes are apparently immune to justice, the fortress guard just let it happen.)

Since off-duty solo drills mainly raise discipline, you could try assigning the dwarf to a militia squad that isn't active and let them do solo drills for a few months. The discipline they instill in themselves may help smooth this over.

[Larix]

The discipline skill and tragedy hardening are two completely separate things. AFAIK, discipline enables dwarfs to experience trauma/horror without panicking and running away (very useful), but does _not_ remove horrified thoughts when witnessing death. That one's done by the tragedy hardening trait (as was already the case in earlier versions).

It seems that tragedy hardening works differently now - in older versions, any kind of "tragedy" would produce tragedy hardening: deaths of loved ones, being wounded, combat...
Now, only being involved in combat (actual combat, not sparring) appears to give tragedy hardening. Soldiers are usually fully hardened after two or three goblin assaults.

Some few dwarfs have the "fearless in the face of danger" soul attribute, which appears to nullify horror in the face of death as well.

BTW, tantrums and berserking are bugged to hell and back currently - any combat caused by those is prone to lead to loyalty errors; deaths caused by tantrummers are generally not counted as crimes. Seems that defending yourself from a tantrummer counts as a violent assault on a citizen, which obviously results in the execution of the traitor, which is no more of a crime than killing a goblin from a siege squad.

Re: original post -
It's almost certainly residual stress from several months ago. Just keep the dwarf away from causes of stress (bad weather, corpses, thieves), perhaps give him more work to do or a slightly better bedroom. He ought to get down below the "stressed" threshold in a few months if nothing new crops up to make him unhappy again.

[Splint]

Well I made the suggestion based on the militia's lack of extreme stress indications of any sort until the fort was beyond salvaging. They only ever fought a single bandit attack, one elf ambush, and some trogs otherwise, which lead me to conclude that discipline helps cope with stress in general, not just combat.

As to tantrum stuff, since they only ever attacked the aggressors and there were no job interruptions (I saw a couple kids haul off and start beating a guy hauling some fish inside; a nearby soldier sprinted over and killed the kids and went back to what he was doing, with nary a crime report or any further aggression towards dwarves from the soldier or other citizens,) I dunno if I can count it as bug or just an unintended feature. Or maybe a personality thing, since none of the other soldiers in view got involved.

[vanatteveldt]

Thanks, it was indeed residual stress.

Now one of my soldiers is unhappy, but he's just a coward - he's horrified by slaughter and afraid of trauma. Sheesh. I'm sure that problem will solve itself somehow

[Splint]

Enough gaps in fighting sapient shit and out of the rain should do it.