I guess I should note that the one time I did a hermit challenge I had no issues with the lone dwarf getting angry, he got a tad bit overwhelmed about how a couple friends died, but I fixed that up real quickly, a little masterful engraving here, a sprinkle of mist there, happy dwarf!
I guess I just had a lucky draw that time, huh?
Yeah, I didn't have that much of a problem either.
However, since I've had him smooth and engrave a ton of stuff, the fortress wealth is through the roof. Two waves of immigrants so far - the first had 8, the second had ~15.
I assigned the first wave as soldiers, posted them in a huge empty dirt room I dug out, then locked them in. They died.
My hermit got unhappy thoughts even though none of them were friends, so I said, hey, there's got to be a cleaner way to do this!
I went out to the brook (yeah, only a brook, but this makes it more fun...) and dug a large room, about 30x20 next to it. I think put a floodgate in the entrance hallway, and a floodgate in a small hallway, next to the river. Channeled from above, and now the water is flush against the floodgate.
Wave of ~15 gets here... immediately soldier them up, order them into the room. Closed the hallway floodgate -trapped! Opened the brook floodgate... and...
Water slowly trickled in. It took about fifteen minutes @ 100FPS for them to die. One of them even went into a fey mood while it was happening! Set up a screw pump to empty the water out, and after they finished rotting (just bones - corpses give my hermit bad thoughts) I went in and collected any loot.
Great fun! The fortress is coming along wonderfully. I'm thinking of putting a trade depot in that brook-adjacent room now.
Oh... and I grow plants exclusively for booze. I brought ~10 dogs along with me, and after a few seasons, I have about 50 dogs (lots of puppies...) running around. So I've been butchering them. And for one dwarf, a few dogs a year will easily feed him...