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[Chandrak]

How do you set the population cap for your fortress? (That is to say, what file and heading is it under?)

And does it matter that I've already started a game but havent reached the limit I want to set it to?

[Lytha]

dwarf fortress/data/init/d_init.txt

[POPULATION_CAP:x]

You have to save your fortress and to quit and restart DF for this change to be recognized.

Beware that if you have 19 dwarves right now and set the population_cap to 20, then your next immigration wave might still be like 35 dwarves in total or so.

[zwei]

And does it matter that I've already started a game but havent reached the limit I want to set it to?

All it does is to prevent immigration waves from being generated if your population is equal on more than cap. You are free to change it at any time during fortress lifecycle because it essentially just fuctions as conditional off switch to immigration.

[Chandrak]

Ok, so the main thing to remember is to save and reload. Thats cool; I was about to update to the new version anyway, I'll do it then.

Thanks for the help

[digitCruncher]

Related question which may or may not be useful for the OP:

If you are over your pop cap, does that stop pregnancies? Or is that another setting?

I know that if a dwarf gets pregnant, and THEN you go over the pop cap, the baby is born, but I want to know if the baby growth will make you creep up to 200 if you set the pop cap to 100?

[JAFANZ]

AIUI whilst you are at or above your Population cap, no new Dwarven migrations or pregnancies will be triggered, pending migrations & births will still happen.

So if your Pop Cap is 100, you have 50 married couples & have exported D$20,000,000,000 worth of goods recently, I would expect a Dwarfsplosion...

[NecroRebel]

The population cap does not affect pregnancies. There's a seperate cap, just below it in the init file, that allows you to set the maximum number of babies/children in your fortress and the maximum number of babies/children by percentage of your adult population.

There are mods that make the playable race something that breeds and matures quickly, for example inexplicably-sapient housecats, and it is somewhat-recommended that you turn your popcap down low and just rely on homegrown people for your needs. This wouldn't work if the population cap affected pregnancies.