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[Doppel]

Hya. I've got this,...strange idea.
Namely, i want to make an UNhappy fortress and its proving to be much more difficult then i anticipated.
Firstly, why. Well, i want to make a fortress where the only artifacts that are allowed to be created have to be from a fell or macabre strange mood. Thus, for that to happen my dwarfs have to be unhappy and any non fell or macabre strange mood dwarf has to DIE immediately. (preferably not simply from being unable to acquire all the needed materials, thus, elaborate deathmachines designed to kill dwarfs that simply can't be directly controlled by drafting them, muhahaha). Anyways.
The difficulty first comes from making dwarfs unhappy. I embarked with the usual 7 dwarfs, i didn't give them chairs, i gave them communal beds above the workshops, i drafted them several times, i made them eat the same food over and over again, i tried making nothing of value that can be admired, i made a butchery in the center of my fortress. I gave them no place to hang around, i even killed off one of them by making him attack a giant mole. Result? All ecstatic. 
There haven't been an immigration wave yet though.
The second problem (which will come if i'm able to make them unhappy) is not making them too unhappy. I obviously do not want my fortress to go to utter oblivion. I need to find that sweet spot, between anything above unhappy and mass suicidial or tantrum spiral dwarfs. At the same time there still needs to be a relatively good defense against goblins invading my fort, oh and probably against skeletal and zombie enemies too.
Any ideas? Any suggestions? This is proving to be very difficult indeed.

[Yanlin]

Did you accidentally happen to build a legendary dining room?

[Doppel]

I have no dining room whatsoever.
WHY ARE THEY SO HAPPY? 
Hmm gonna start over.
Any ideas on embarking places that could make dwarfs unhappy?

[Yanlin]

Did you try checking their thoughts...? What do they say? If you tell us WHY they are happy, we can tell you how to fix it.

[Captain Xenon]

may i suggest the nasty water? higher rate of death, but they hate that... nauseated by sun, ect.

[Doppel]

Bim has been ecstatic lately. She had a pretty decent drink lately. She has complained about the draft lately. She has lost a friend to tragedy recently. She had a fine drink lately. She became caught up in a new romance lately. She made a friend recently. She has been attacked lately. She has been annoyed by flies lately. She has complained about the lack of chairs lately. She has been satisfied at work lately.

Another one is pretty much the same but also took joy in slaughter lately.

Another one is again about the same but also made a satisfying acquisition lately. (dunno what, i haven't made anything yet). Was also caught up in the rain lately.

Another one also substained minor injuries recently.

I also got these traits on them:

getting used to tragedy.
being a hardened person.
doesn't care about anything anymore.

[Mirefrost00]

If you're still brewing, STOP.  They might go crazy after a while of no booze.  Set a water source in the river, or a pond.

[WCG]

I don't know, but at the beginning of a fortress, dwarves seem VERY easy to please. And that's reasonable, I suppose. You don't expect legendary bedrooms when you first start carving a fortress out of the wilderness.

Later on, they seem to get more demanding.

Bill

[Yanlin]

To avoid relationships keep EVERYONE busy. Stop brewing and let them drink. It will slow them down but they wont be happy.

I don't think you can prevent "Satisfied at work"

Also, bad thoughts tend to decay slower than good thoughts.

Please refer to the legendary dining room meme.

[Derakon]

You want relationships, because that makes them all the more angry when their friends/lovers/spouses are killed.

Dwarves don't like being attacked if they're civilians, so you might try embarking to a terrifying swamp...though, then your main problem will be keeping all your dwarves alive, not keeping them happy.

Stay in soil layers as much as possible (you'll need to go into stone to get materials to trade to traders for things you need to satisfy moods). Only feed them plump helmets (raw) and turtles (for shells/bones for the moods). Make a stagnant pool outside, zone it for drinking, and forbid non-zone drinking. Don't give them beds. Or chairs, or tables. Don't make a refuse pile, so the vermin killed by your cat(s) fill the fort with miasma. Better, don't bring cats - the bad thoughts from seeing vermin are universally worse than the bad thoughts from miasma. Plus, you can get miasma by making a butcher's shop and killing kittens, then not dumping the remains. Alternatively, make a bunch of size-1 refuse dumps throughout the fortress, underground, so that the corpse and each of the chunks get distributed about to spread the miasma more.

[duro]

Reminds me of feline-dwarven relationships. You think you are the all-knowing all-powerful unhappyness deity of your fortress, but in reality your dwarves make YOU having unhappy thoughts.

Remember the cats. AND SLAUGHTER THE BASTARDS, for god's sake, before it's too late and your FPS get killed by a dwarfsplosion.

[efraker]

I had a fortress with a fire extinguisher/sprinkler type system. I liked to use it to flood people's bedrooms when they needed swimming experience/death.

You could use something similar above your work-shops.

Also, read "I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream". Its a motivational story for malevolent fortress-makers.

[Doppel]

Awesome idea efraker, but that won't be for anytime soon i'm afraid. (never played the game btw, or is the game unrelated? Dunno)
I embarked on a desert/mountain. (hot, so i hope that will make my dwarfs atleast a little less happy) Actually, several deserts to be more exact, and apart from one petite corner of the map being a normal grassland everything is something very bad. (haunted/terrifying)
The map has a pit chasm (the round hole type) and a normal chasm (completely on the map). It also has a magma pool somewhere far in one of the corners. (i can't traverse the map too much though, its way too dangerous) and i think it has the pits and a complete underground river as my only water supply, which will take a while before its found. It also has a vast cave beneath a large part of the desert i didn't even know about. I have two friendly kobolds, the master kobowld (get it?) has already bitten the dust, literally, and it won't be too long before the dual legendary stat swordkobold also gets slaughtered by the marauding skeletal two-humped camels. Them freaking nightmares i tells ya.
The map is filled to the brim with undead chasm creatures, and not just antman but also huge packs of undead naked mole dogs, worse, it has Iron man and a pack of skeletal trolls. (and the underground river creatures also seem to be undead, have a dead undead Giant Toad on the units screen. Anyways, this place is freak'n awesome

About trying my dwarfs to be unhappy, i changed strategy a little bit, namely like WCG said (or Bill? dunno what you prefer) you pretty much have to kill off atleast two dwarfs for the remaining five to feel unhappy (if you're lucky and they witnessed death or something) so for the time being them feeling content-happy is fine enough, i won't be creating any artifacts any time soon anyways. (too many any's, yikes)
I figure that the first few immigration waves will start of being reasonably happy until i start killing the non-unhappy moody dwarfs it generates, then the fortress will naturally progress into an unhappy one. Then it will become a bitch to balance on that thin rope of unhappiness. Hehehe.

What i'm wondering though is, the amount of artifacts are capped at 200 right? If i kill off moody dwarfs before they can even get all their needed materials, then does the non created artifact still count towards that cap? Also, the population is capped at around 50 or so. But through all the killing that will be going on (i might even kill off the fell or macabre artifact creators and give them HUGE burial chambers so that they may rest in peace as a sort of thank you for their valuable contribution of evilness to the fortress) i will probably go through 200 different dwarfs in no time, so i hope the pop cap of 50 won't interfere with the amount of artifacts that can be created, or will it? (as if this fortress will live to see even 10 created artifacts, lol)