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[hiS_oWn]

I've got 40 of these all variations of the same theme. these must be the most boring dwarves in existance.

Incidentally in this particular game I set the max population to 50, get I keep getting more migrants every year and now am at 69. Do I have to set the INIT file before world gen? Can you not change it once you start your settlement?

[ArkDelgato]

Hey Urist, what should I make this picture of a pigtail on my sock out of? I was thinking kitten leather, goblin bone or cave lobster shell.

Ingish, don't be stupid. Just make it out of pigtail. It's not like anyone cares.

Oh. Ok.

Urist McWeaver cancels Strange Mood: Conformity

[Pilsu]

You need high skill to fashion fancier images

[Deathworks]

Hi!

First of all, the population cap seems to adapt when you change it. At least in the past, people have played increasing their population cap over time.

Secondly, skill does not impact the fanciness of the images that much. Even Grand Master Engravers still do a lot of the common engravings....

I suggest you turn on revealing engraving history in fortress mode. My guess is that the pigtail is the symbol for your civ or your fortress and thus a common engraving/motif is nothing else is available.

Finally, dwarves take the following sources for their art:
* Things they like or dislike (I have one dwarf who detests toads, but half his images are depictions of toads (^_^;; )
* Fellow citizens with things they dislike/like (those are the "dwarf embraces mules" thingies)
* Local history events (settling of dwarves in your fortress, nomination of nobles in your fortress, death and wounding of named creatures in your fortress)
* Regional history events (historic events like battles/woundings/killings which took place in any of the subregions your fortress belongs to. For instance, my current fortress is located in a jungle dominated by elves and bordering on a human civ and bordering on a goblin civ the elves whiped out - so I get a lot of engravings about elves and humans fighting or elves fighting goblins or elves fighting the demon)

Especially the last point is important in my opinion, so if you want lots of interesting engravings, you need to choose a fortress location at least partially in a contested subregion.

Deathworks

[Tormy]

I've got 40 of these all variations of the same theme. these must be the most boring dwarves in existance.

I don't know, but it looks like that your dwarves are obsessed with pig tail. 

[Mcshay]

The pop-cap change won't take effect until the dwarven caravan comes and goes, they have to relay the new cap back to the mountain homes.

[MuonDecay]

The pop-cap change won't take effect until the dwarven caravan comes and goes, they have to relay the new cap back to the mountain homes.

Which is a nice idea in theory but in practice it means that players can't really have a lot of faith in the popcap and that it can easily fail to a startling degree (IE 20 more dwarves than the cap number, which is an awful lot if your pop cap was set for CPU burden reasons and has been significantly exceeded).

[Martin]

My current fort was supposed to be immigrant free, but due to a lack of females I kept inching the cap up hoping for a female to show up. That worked the first two times - one or two immigrant each, but when I went from a cap of 10 to a cap of 12, I got 20-something immigrants.

The cap is a very loose threshold.

[blue emu]

My current fort was supposed to be immigrant free, but due to a lack of females I kept inching the cap up hoping for a female to show up. That worked the first two times - one or two immigrant each, but when I went from a cap of 10 to a cap of 12, I got 20-something immigrants.

The cap is a very loose threshold.

I suspect that the pop-cap number represents the point at which the Fortress stops receiving new waves of Immigrants... not the maximum number of Dwarves.

Eg: with a pop-cap of 12, a Fortress of 13 Dwarves should receive no Immigrants, but a Fortress of 11 Dwarves will get a new wave of Immigrants, of unpredictable size... 20 or more, perhaps.

[MuonDecay]

My current fort was supposed to be immigrant free, but due to a lack of females I kept inching the cap up hoping for a female to show up. That worked the first two times - one or two immigrant each, but when I went from a cap of 10 to a cap of 12, I got 20-something immigrants.

The cap is a very loose threshold.

I suspect that the pop-cap number represents the point at which the Fortress stops receiving new waves of Immigrants... not the maximum number of Dwarves.

Eg: with a pop-cap of 12, a Fortress of 13 Dwarves should receive no Immigrants, but a Fortress of 11 Dwarves will get a new wave of Immigrants, of unpredictable size... 20 or more, perhaps.

That's about right, it's what you'd call a "soft cap". This, combined with the fact that said "soft cap" doesn't even bother to take effect until a certain time of the year, makes the population cap the single most volatile option in the game.

I'd send a donation as a thanks if Toady would just make it an instantaneous hard-cap. Its fickle nature has caused me considerable distress in the past, especially when it was set at a low value (24) which it ignored outright for well over a year.

[POPULATION_CAP:24]
Fortress population: 43

"Fuck you, player! Here's another wave of migrants!"