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[Maldevious]

So I'm currently running a fort based on a two main ideas:

1) No standing military/guards. All dwarfs are issued leather armor (and when I get them) wooden swords.
2) No forging or stone crafting, main industry is clothing.

I'm sort of at a loss over what to do with all my extra idlers. I already have about 30 or so dedicated to making rock blocks, but I have maybe 35 more migrants coming at some point and have roughly no jobs for them. Any suggestions?

[Legendary_Catsmith]

Craftsdwarfship is a good one.  I had the same trouble, and making mugs keeps my dorfs occupied.  Also, any food industry can be as labor-intensive as you want it to be.  Preparing super-nice meals, hunt/butcher/tan/leatherwork, farm/mill/weave...

Just build up your industries.  It's working for me so far...

[Skid]

Megaprojects. Put those blocks to good use building a tower to your glory.

[Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]

That's a good question. In my next for I plan on avoiding a lot of crafts if only because I think the reason my last few forts have turned into 0-fps lag deaths has been because of the vastly huge item counts my craftsdwarves racked up.

You could have them all train up in military skills, just use Dwarf Therapist to watch their skill levels and stop them when they get close to locking into the military. That would buy you a few seasons. Similarly, build pumps and have them train pump operating, just for stat gain. Restrict your meeting area to 3x3 or so and watch their social skills skyrocket as they idle there.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

extra dwarfs + Magma = !!extra dwarfs!!

[Maldevious]

I'm actually finding that my self-imposed "no military or weapons" tends to do a nice job of keeping the population stable. I just lost about 7 dwarfs to an ambush.

I have also begun the base of a massive tower, as well. Good suggestions, all.

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, if you REALLY want to consume massive amounts of labor, make a serious textile mill/sweatshop.

I kind of went overboard on my first fort, not really knowing what a good number of tiles or workshops would be...  Wound up with around 300-400 tiles of farmland, about half of which were to pig tails, rope reed, or dyes.  Five farmer's workshops, four looms, four clothier's workshops, four dyer's workshops.  A dwarf for each workshop, about four or five growers, plus a constant unfulfilled demand for harvesters.  (even with a dozen or so children plus nobles with nothing better to do, plenty of my crops were left to rot on the vine.)

On the plus side, when they all get up to legendary, you can start pumping out absurd numbers of socks (which all fit in bins) that are worth something like 400-600 dbs apiece, for the effective cost of half a rope reed and half a dimple cup... whcih grow in stacks of five. 

Yeah, sure, not nearly as valuable as a 80-unit stack of masterpiece quarry bush leaves (holy crap! That sells for 20,000 dbs!), but the advantage of using bins can add up when you start really expanding on this.

[Aspgren]

hm ... large amounts of unprotected goods you say?

Gobbos! Move out!

[Maldevious]

Unprotected would be the wrong word. Instead of investing in fancy accoutrements like "weapons" or "armor," I rely on the hardy wrestling skills and a general tactic of "pile on the goblins" for defense. I have yet to see if a siege can be broken using these methods. It seems to be adequate for ambushes (average of about 5 dwarfs lost per ambush string... and I have plenty of dwarfs).

If nothing else, the goblins will pay a steep price to clear out this fort.