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[Bolgfred]

I am unhappy with my fortress and complaining.

I play on the smallest map to increase my fps for any tiny frame I get. I want to make my fortress high populated wealthy save and much more things that are not FUN. Now my population is about 100 dwarfs with 15 children and I barely keep them alive. The alcohol production is very close to waterdrinking and even if I planned to build short routes dwarfs seem to be running all the time for drinks and food. Now I have my first tantrums and I am not sure why or what had been missing to inject the maximal happiness into dwarf bodies. As I don't have a particularly question, but my own unhappiness, here's my fort in screens and shotted. Maybe someone can give me some tips how to improve the productivity of Cloisterportal.

Surface
A big hole for surface farms with walls around it and a walk south/north with a drawbridge. cages around for massive encagement. low value items I do not want inside got stored here

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1st Sublevel
From the southern ramp there are two ways to the lower levels. right for the caravans and left for sieges with ballista and traps. The inside is surface farming surrounded by a small corridor that can be locked if neccessary.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

2nd Sublevel
 NorthWest is Depot and  bone storage. NorthEast/south are suburb farms for cave wheat plump helmets and sweet pots. Aquifier got pierced here and all 5 stairs and ramps get concentrated to one stairs.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

3rd Sublevel Aquifer

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

4th Sublevel Aquifer and aspiration hole for bathtub and shower

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

5th Sublevel
Water canal and floodgates to turn on/off bathtub and shower

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

6th Sublevel 4 rooms on the left are shower, in the middle there is the baththub and lever room. The corners got the staris for different level so a dwarf will always cross the bathtub. The empty room will be the hospital, suothern is ammo store and on the right theres dining hall

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

7th Sublevel On the levft 4 showers again. Bathtub is high-traffic area to force longest route through the water. Three rooms for military purpose and on the right side drink/food storage and food workshops. The door next to the southern east stairs is a quantum stockpile for... anything

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

8th Sublevel
3 drains for shower and bathtub on the left. corridor with workshops and a high value material stockpile in the middle for moods. the single stone on the right is the all-purpose quantum stockpile

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

9th Sublevel bedrooms

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I am happy about every mayor minor mistake or undwarfiness you can show me. Oink

[PatrikLundell]

- Drinks: Should be fairly simple to keep that up, as I usually battle over production, rather than lack of booze. Firstly, I only produce brewable or threshable plants in my fortress, and forbid all cooking of brewables and threshables. I start with a 3*3 brewables farm and a 5*5 threshables. I complement that with a number of single tile over ground farms that rotate the brewable overground crops such that each crop is grown one season per year (I want to give the dorfs variety, although I think 3 or so different drinks is sufficient technically). I par down my 3*3 to a single tile plot after about a year. If there is a wide variety of overground brewables I still run at a significant surplus. However, I tend to have 50 dorfs total, versus your 115. I cut down on threshables once I get a silk farm going. My dorfs are mainly egg and meat eaters, apart from the raw plants they steal from the booze and clothes production. I start out with 3 males and 3 females of sheep, dogs, cats, blue peafowl, chicken, and turkeys. I cull their numbers down to 2 males and 2 females by slaughtering the excess ones as soon as they mature (an exception is that I may place guard dogs by entrances). The reason for 3+3 on embark is to handle non breeders. I identify the breeders with Dwarf Therapist.
- Happiness: You can usually figure out why they're not happy by looking at their thoughts. The most common reason is corpses from invaders lying on the refuse pile. Each "sentient" corpse on the pile will yield one "saw the death of an X last season" unhappy thought each season it's seen. Each refuse hauler (as well as e.g. bone carvers) visiting the refuse pile will thus get a significant unhappiness refresher each season. The solution to that is to hide "sentient" corpses and body parts away either in a separate refuse pile or by dumping the bodies in a hole (or, better, into magma). Also note that caravans will bolt if a merchant sees a "sentient" body or body part.
- It looks like you've got bodies lying around in your 2:nd level refuse pile. Underground refuse piles produce miasma that result in unhappy thoughts. Pure bones do not, but I just let my bone carver visit the regular refuse pile to get the bones to carve. My regular refuse pile is a quantum stockpile above ground just outside the entrance, but inside the completely enclosed courtyard (where I also keep sheep and the above ground farm plots).

Since you use a different tile set than me, I haven't spent too much time trying to decipher your screen shots.

[Albedo]

I am unhappy with my fortress and complaining.

...Now my population is about 100 dwarfs with 15 children and I barely keep them alive. The alcohol production is very close to waterdrinking and even if I planned to build short routes dwarfs seem to be running all the time for drinks and food.

I usually have 1 primary farmer (skill starts at 5, works up from there, so maybe around 10 by year 1) and he does ALL the planting.

You want ONLY high-level farmers, so you can guarantee large stacks of plants. This reduces jobs massively - like over 5x the work for 1-stack plants to be brewed vs. 5-stack.

(If migrants come in w/ Grower skill, I might add them to the mix. Also, once you have a couple high-skill farmers, you can risk adding "apprentice farmers" and switching {o}rders to "only farmers harvest" for faster experience gain.)

Then just remember to NOT cook those plants and* to brew booze at the end of every season, using the kitchens tab under stock[z].

(* Edit - problem from older version, no longer a consideration)


I also have 1 dedicated Cook (also a "5" at embark) and choose 1 dedicated Brewer after embark.  A high-skill Brewer is NOT "needed" at Embark, as Booze has no Quality (sadly), so anyone ~could~ brew for the same result, but 1 dedicated Brewer skills up quickly and then he takes less time to do the same job. The Cook creates high(er) quality meals, and I put them in a stockpile w/ no barrels so I can trade away the low(er) quality meals while my dwarfs get happy thoughts from eating Masterwork meals.*

(Do NOT trade away Masterworks, as this will cause unhappy thoughts when they leave the map!)

Now I have my first tantrums and I am not sure why or what had been missing to inject the maximal happiness into dwarf bodies.

If you use Dwarf Therapist (highly recommended!) you can see what their good/bad thoughts have been lately.

... even if I planned to build short routes dwarfs seem to be running all the time for drinks and food.

Your fort is sprawling, almost a full 48x48, and few diagonal paths.* That means that, to get from one corner to another, a dwarf has to walk almost 100 tiles. If you had made it maybe 30x30, it would be MUCH tighter and all distances far less.

(* That we are shown? I assume you have a Dining Room somewhere?)


Look at your bedrooms alone. While very pretty, the average dwarf has to walk ~about~ 25 tiles to/from his room to the stairs, and some MUCH further. If you had made it house only 16 dwarfs, and put it on 7 levels, you could cut that in half easily and have a few beds for growth.

(And the average dwarf only needs 3 tiles for a bedroom (1 bed, 1 chest, 1 cabinet), not 9. Perhaps too generous?)

Now, while "beds" are only used very seldom and so probably that walk has the least impact, the principle is the same for all other things (esp workshops) - think in 3 dimensions, not just 2. Overlap stockpiles 2 levels over/under workshops, with short runs of stairs in that "work pod", and you'll find less walking overall.

[PatrikLundell]

My play style differs a little from Albedo's, so I don't take any skills at all on embark. I usually get myself a combined brewer/cook from the summer migration wave, and get him to brew the spring/summer batch of crops. I switch crops between spring and summer to not lock the seeds up in unprocessed plants, but don't care too much that I'll run out of seeds during the spring. I don't actually have the Brewer/Cook do any cooking until winter.
Later on I get myself a second Brewer/Cook.

I have to admit I hadn't considered the masterworks food trading issue. I may have to reconsider that.

You don't need Dwarf Therapist (DT) to see thoughts (though I use it extensively for a lot of other things, and second Albedo's sentiment) as you can enter dorf thoughts from vanilla. However, I use the DFHack extended unit screen to catch dorf mood at a glance to find problem dorfs. It's all a matter of finding a style that works for you.

A legendary dining room tends to help improve moods in the fortress, so that's highly recommended.

I use 3*3 bedrooms because I like that, and it also allows the bedroom value to be higher after it has been engraved, but I spread the rooms over several levels (dorfs expend no more effort walking vertically than walking horizontally). Ideally they should probably surround the central shaft(s), and dorfs have no privacy issues, so you can easily have the access to the "corner" dorf rooms being through other bedrooms (or do away with the walls altogether!). Having said that, I typically use a corridor along which I place 7-10 rooms on each side with one 3*3 staircase shaft in each end and the 3 tile wide corridor actually having a staircase array along the middle.

Lots and lots of vertical access is a good thing, but you should still keep everything packed tightly together in a cube, provided you're after efficiency and not some kind role playing or visual style (some people go to great lengths to ensure everything is suitably color coded, for instance).

Quantum Stockpiles can also be used to reduce sprawl, and my current strategy is to have one for the workshops, one for booze/threshing input+thread, cloth, and masterworks clothing, one for ordinary refuse and one for "sentient" refuse. Apart from that I use a regular refuse stockpile for raw hides only around my tannery, a leather stockpile around my leather workshop, a large food stockpile, one seed stockpile each for above and below ground crops, a separate regular lye stockpile (due to the lye barrel bug), a trade junk stockpile with bins for trade junk, a low quality clothes stockpile near the trade depot for clothing fit only for foreigners, and feeder stockpiles for the Quantum Stockpiles. Some special purpose stockpiles can be added, such as block stockpiles by each cavern for securing it.
I'm currently considering transforming the regular food stockpile into a QS, given Albedo's comment, but the worn masterworks clothing will be sold off regardless.

[Linkxsc]

If you wouldnt mind, post a screenshot of your "z" menu (mainly showing how much plants you have and various traied dorfs)
That or your save file would be nice to look through also.


See the fort itself isnt too bad, and I play with the same gfx pack. But your brewers (probably your most important workshop) are quite far from the main stairway, though not from your food stockpile., they dont appear to be manned in your screenshot though, which in average, I assume I need 1 fulltime brewer for every 50-60 dwarves (brewing only task, doesnt even have hauling set)

My best suggestion to start with for getting your drink supply up and stable, and happyizing your dwarves.


1, rearrange that food pile into a couple stripes. Make suer that your brewing plants are being placed right outside of the brewer to save time walking.
2, get them brewers fulltime man, if what you say is true and your borderline drinking water, then some probably ARE drinking water, and thats an unhappy thought. Perhaps even build another brewer or two, when it comes to food and booze, always have a surplus if you can.
3, your diningroom is suffering from 2 problems.
a. There are too many chairs for the tables. If a dwarf is using a chair, that means they are also using the adjacent table, if another dwarf tries to use the other chair adjacent to the table, they are unhappy because of the "lack of tables"
b. You can only really seat 16 dwarves, you can easily move some chairs, and fit 16 more tables in there, which may jump up the quality of the dining room to the next tier (stronger happy though from eating there). As well as throw in a couple nice statues.

[PatrikLundell]

Further thoughts based on Linkxsc' input:

My 50 dorf fortress only has brewing about half time (I keep running out of plants to brew), and I'm still running a surplus. The brewables QS is located right beside the still, though. Linkxsc is right in that you need to up the priority of brewing if you're running out of booze, but only if you actually have plants to brew, of course, otherwise making more plants available is the top priority.

3. My understanding is that you ought to arrange the chairs/tables as this:
tcct
tcct
if you want the dorfs to make friends (and dorflings). The pattern can be repeated upwards/downwards, but you shouldn't overdo it, as dorfs socialize with adjacent dorfs, and with too many options the chances of ending up beside another one is reduced. If you want to reduce contact (to avoid drowning in dorflets), you should separate them instead:
cttc

cttc
or

 cttc
ct  tc
 cttc


Also make sure to use high quality furniture in the dining room and engrave the floor. Statues won't hurt, as long as they don't block access, of course.

[Eldin00]

(Do NOT trade away Masterworks, as this will cause unhappy thoughts when they leave the map!)

Trading masterwork meals (or other items) does not create unhappy thoughts. Neither does having masterwork meals get eaten. 'Losing' a masterwork only creates unhappy thoughts in its creator if the item is destroyed (other than by being eaten by a member of your fortress), or if the item is stolen (leaves the map while still belonging to your fortress).

[fractalman]

I am unhappy with my fortress and complaining.

I play on the smallest map to increase my fps for any tiny frame I get. I want to make my fortress high populated wealthy save and much more things that are not FUN. Now my population is about 100 dwarfs with 15 children and I barely keep them alive. The alcohol production is very close to waterdrinking and even if I planned to build short routes dwarfs seem to be running all the time for drinks and food. Now I have my first tantrums and I am not sure why or what had been missing to inject the maximal happiness into dwarf bodies. As I don't have a particularly question, but my own unhappiness, here's my fort in screens and shotted. Maybe someone can give me some tips how to improve the productivity of Cloisterportal.
*snip*
I am happy about every mayor minor mistake or undwarfiness you can show me. Oink

You are willing to do anything, no matter how undwarfy, to help with FPS?
The ultimate bedroom:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This will cut down on lag by an enormous factor.  Legendary Bedrooms for all your dwarves, with the bare minimum of pathing required. Simply resize each bedroom to include the whole room.

A possible layout to put basically everything into one layer:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Note that this layout almost fits into the big square in the middle of sublevel (you can ignore the bundle of beds in the south, those were temporary beds).  Keep in mind that not everything is stockpiled, and that you will experience cluttered workshops as a side effect. This is perfectly fine; the slight loss in workspeed is worth the decrease in hauling distance. 

Once you've got that, you can make sure there's nothing in the other portions of your fort, and wall them away, decreasing the amount of pathing your dwarves need to do.

[Albedo]

Trading masterwork meals (or other items) does not create unhappy thoughts....

I guess I'm guilty of remembering caveats from older versions of DF. I just had a Caravan visit (running.40), so ran a couple experiments*. No change in "happiness" and no bad thoughts, as reported by Dwarf Therapist.

(* Traded away a masterwork statue, crossbow, stack of 25 bolts, and 4 MW prepared meals.)

Will edit above, apologies fo my retro-confusion, and thx for correction!

[Extreme Boyheat]

All your farms look empty, did you set things to be planted for each season?

[mobucks]

I don't even farm anymore. I buy plants to brew from each caravan and when stock from that gets low pick cavern plants which is ridiculously easy now, if a bit risky.

Make sure you don't cook your booze!

[taptap]

It is all oversize. You can feed, cloth and even dye all thread in your fort with 10%, nay make that 5% or less, of your farming area (look at the numbers others have provided for their farm sizes). Yes, these tiny overproductive patches aren't realistic at all, but this is how it is in dwarf fortress. Your total farming areas should not be larger than your dining room, and this is likely way too large already. Your stockpiling arrangements are not all that obvious from the screenshots, but distance between raw materials and workshops (seeds to fields, food to dining room etc.) is the main drain on productivity. Where are your seeds? Ingredients have to be brought to the workshop EVERY SINGLE TIME and this job can't be taken over by dedicated haulers (unlike the distribution of products to appropriate stockpiles). Customize your hauling arrangements, when you don't get the important work done likely crucial craftsdwarves (planter, brewer) are occupied carrying silly things around. Fixing this will do wonders already.

[Bolgfred]

Even if it seems to be necromancy on this thread: Thanks for the replies. It helped me a lot in my design decisions. Except for the mass bedroom solutions.. I justcoudnt keep the undwarfiness to do this.

[Fleeting Frames]

Some things that I didn't see mentioned:

• Vast majority of efficiency improvement in layout is in how close your raw materials are to the workshop. You already know how to qsp everything into 1 pile in a general area.

I've written more lengthier post on this recently: 1 2

• I don't see any minecart on the penultimate level for the stone qsp, and it looks like your large pile two zs above has barrels/pots in it.

So, I'd suggest to check that dwarves aren't in a hauling loop with those qsps.

• Your large bathtub has ring of blood. If you drained it once to map edge so that all tiles have at least 1/7 when resealing the floodgates, you'd estabilish a permaflow that would wash all the blood into the walls/floors/floodgates on lowest level, keeping where your dwarves walk clean.

• Pathing over creatures forces detours and drains fps. Just checking that your turkeys in 6th sublevel are in cages and not in the way of dwarves?

• For booze, automation wasn't mentioned. Back in 2015, there was workflow, and nowadays there's also manager update in 0.43. Either would let you keep a constant level of booze handy, with new jobs whenever booze dropped below a level you can decide.

• For providing happy thoughts, being within 1 tile of building to admire works.

I generally put stockpiles on stair or ramp tiles, but if you're not doing that you can instead put furniture or bridges there (though bridges on stairs need to be retracted to allow passage).

Dwarves especially like their own buildings (x2), that are 'tastefully arranged' in statue garden (x2), made from materials they like (x2) [all stacking].

Though note that dance floors in new taverns cannot have anything on it.

• Ballista boast great range, but they're generally not effective as standalone compared to newer options, tending to cause bruises only if you're not a tree. Setups of them tend to favour making the targets dodge into some flavour of doom.

Though here in particular the arrow stockpile is more tiles away from the ballista than the goblin has to walk to get in range of scaring the civilian away (even ignoring the crawling speed of hauling an arrow), so they can likely fire only once.

I'd suggest repurposing the room as minecart grinder, drowning trap (with some buildingdestroyer trap somewhere to deal with singular non-drowning creatures), or even just plain "lock the doors when inside, drop them down and peck to death with bolts".

• To secure hospital against werebeasts, you'd ideally need a multi-level one so that emergency rooms are accessed from above and lockable with hatches - as when one cannot path to hatch's z-level one cannot break it.

• Your fort's a little split between above and below aquifer. Well, once you've broken through once, it is much easier to make a bigger breakthrough for the aquifer with map edge draining to below.

Also, if you muddy stone tiles, you can place farm plots there, allowing you to bring the farms bit closer to the fort.

• Might want to add some magma for magma workshops.

• Also, with 100 dwarves could very well do a cross-training program, putting everyone in military rotation. The increased stats alone make this worthwhile, plus now it also satisfies needs and gives happy thoughts for improvement of a skill.

If you give them armor, you'll also get rid of most clothing needs, though note that metal armor slows raw recruits without any armor user.

[Chief10]

You said FPS is a major concern, but imo a lot of these suggestions feel slightly too gamey, and limit your design options.

Would you consider using a much smaller pop size, so you can keep your fancy rooms and hallways as well as your FPS? I pretty much always play with a pop-cap of 50, sometimes 30, and set the visitor cap to 20.