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[dwarfhoplite]

How do you disable migrants simultaneously allowing reproducing?

[GreatWyrmGold]

How do you turn off migrants, period?

[caddybear]

How do you turn off migrants, period?

General consensus is that you can't avoid the first two waves of migrants, but putting the pop cap on 0 should work after the outpost liaison leaves with the first caravan.

[Sphalerite]

How do you disable migrants simultaneously allowing reproducing?

POPULATION_CAP only controls immigration, it doesn't prevent new pregnancies.  Childbirth is controlled by BABY_CHILD_CAP.

[Callista]

Sentry towers, manned by orang-utangs.

or dogs, if you want to do it the easy way 

Build some walls to make the tower 1 z-level up, on top of the wall place an animal surrounded by a ring of windows which are again surrounded by a ring of fortifications. The fortifications keep flying building destroyers away from the windows, and the windows catch any arrows that master bowgoblins fire at your animal. Oh, and don't forget a ceiling.

The animal will detect sneaking enemies if they pass by it closely enough, to really detect them all you'll have to either build a lot of towers or place them at chokepoints.

What do you do when the animals start dying of old age, and it's too ambush-y to safely replace them?  Low-pop forts may take quite a few animal generations to populate military strength.

Keep a few females and a male back to serve as breeding stock.

[dwarfhoplite]

How do you disable migrants simultaneously allowing reproducing?

POPULATION_CAP only controls immigration, it doesn't prevent new pregnancies.  Childbirth is controlled by BABY_CHILD_CAP.

Ok thanks. I've always thought pop cap controls reproducing too.

[Girlinhat]

It always amazes me how many people haven't even looked at the init and read the description of the baby cap or anything.

[Martin]

What do you do when the animals start dying of old age, and it's too ambush-y to safely replace them?  Low-pop forts may take quite a few animal generations to populate military strength.

If you pay careful attention, this shouldn't be a problem until sieges show up - and you'll have 80 dwarves then.


All visitors other than FBs arrive between the 10th-15th and the end of the last month of the season. They're typically gone - or have found their way to your trapped entrance by the 15th of the first month of the next season. At the very least, you should be able to safely swap out your sentries, unclog your traps, etc during the middle month of each season - and you can usually safely extend that to an almost 2 month window with careful attention.

[slink]

Dammit Slink beat me too it!  But he's wrong, I believe.  You cannot mod an entity entry once the game has been generated.

You could copy the dwarven civ entry though, and remove the ACTIVE_SEASON from one of them, and embark as the civilization that has no season.  That way you'd get dwarven caravans with no diplomat, but then again, you wouldn't get any dwarven diplomat ever.

I'm a she, the same as you presumably are.   
I have done it with a fortress after it was started, in 40d.  I've turned it off and then on again some years later.  Whether it still works, I have no idea.

[vjek]

I have removed all [ACTIVE:SEASON] entries in an embark raws, after the first year, and merchant caravans and diplomats stopped.  I did NOT have to regen the world.  In 34.10, just a few days ago.

I then put the changes in the default raws, because it was so awesome not having to deal with those aspects of annoyance. heheh.  Trade Depot: Begone!

[foop]

I have removed all [ACTIVE:SEASON] entries in an embark raws, after the first year, and merchant caravans and diplomats stopped.  I did NOT have to regen the world.  In 34.10, just a few days ago.

Huzzah!  This is great news for my current fort, as I'm hunkered down below ground in a haunted biome and every time a caravan arrives it adds to the FPS-sapping horde of undead above ground.

I assume you have to leave diplomats active until you hit whatever your population cap is set to otherwise you'll keep getting immigrants.  Any ideas about this?

[vjek]

... I assume you have to leave diplomats active until you hit whatever your population cap is set to otherwise you'll keep getting immigrants.  Any ideas about this?

Nope.  I set my pop cap to 60, and I have exactly 60 population, no diplomats, no caravans.  I'm now 17 years post-embark, and still at 60 population.  ( [BABY_CHILD_CAP:0:0] )

Diplomats were NOT active when I got my last few waves and hit the cap.   However, the "your fortress attracted no migrants this season" messages appears 4 times per year, even now.  Presumably this means if you did drop below the cap, you'd get another wave.  I'm testing today to see if I get more migrants if I increase the cap to 90 from 60. (in year embark+18)

EDIT:
Ok, so I've gone through winter->spring, spring->summer and summer->autumn with the pop cap raised from 60 to 90 and no migrants.
It's possible the diplomat notes how many you need above what you have, (and he did visit once in the first year before I turned them off) so I may have to re-enable it, let him come through once, then turn him off.  Going to try that now.

Success!
I added
[ACTIVE_SEASON:WINTER]
in entity_defaults.txt of my saved raws for the dwarves.
and in mid-winter, an outpost liason was sent, along with a caravan, after none for ~18 years.
Now we'll see if I get migrants in the spring or summer.
...

Yep. Migrant wave mid-spring, in embark+year 20.  I removed
[ACTIVE_SEASON:WINTER]
from entity_defaults.txt
after the outpost liason had left, but before the caravan had left.  After the caravan departed, a few weeks later, migrant wave showed up.

So, I think it is safe to say the outpost liason is only required to visit ONCE.  After that, you can turn him and the caravans off, and you're set, provided you don't want to increase your population cap beyond what was set when he visited that one time.  However, you can always enable him again, so it's not a permanent change.

I'll update/reply when the migrant waves stop again. (hopefully at ~90 population)

Update:
At exactly 90 population, the migration waves ceased. "The fortress attracted no migrants this season".
Waves 7 through 10 were: 8, 6, 10, 6 (exactly 30) migrants, and then they ceased.

[Uristocrat]

Diplomats will come, anyway.  They won't leave until they have a chance to complain to the mayor or whatever about how they've been waiting, and haven't been able to see them for the past 5 years, and they'll just keep waiting until they go insane if they have to. 

There is, unfortunately, no way to stop that that I know of.

Do we know what they path to at all?  I seem to remember that they can talk through walls....

[Sphalerite]

Diplomats will come, anyway.  They won't leave until they have a chance to complain to the mayor or whatever about how they've been waiting, and haven't been able to see them for the past 5 years, and they'll just keep waiting until they go insane if they have to. 

There is, unfortunately, no way to stop that that I know of.

Do we know what they path to at all?  I seem to remember that they can talk through walls....

If they can't reach a dwarf in charge, they path to a meeting zone.  Sometimes.  Sometimes they just stand at the map edge, it's not very reliable.

[Zantan]

I removed the active season tags from the trading races (thanks Slink!) and it is working nicely.  I do have a couple of other logistical questions:

Firstly, I don't want 20 FB in each cavern layer, so I have been avoiding penetrating the caverns at all so far.  This is severely limiting the growth of my fort, but at least a new FB isn't popping up every six months.  I know I can turn invaders off, but that would also remove ambushes and any consequence for my fort's vulnerability.  Is there a cap on the number of FBs that can be on the same map?  If so it might be worth it for me to dig into the caverns.

Secondly, I'm holed up in my fort to avoid ambushes, but I didn't bring breeding pairs of animals, so I will be needing to go outside to catch some critters to train / breed.  I'm a little worried that after 10 years a lot of the animals I would like to capture will have died of old age, never to be replaced by offscreen breeding.  Is this a real risk?  Do I need to act now to get my critters?

Thirdly, how many people does a civ start out with at the beginning of the wold?  It would be a little anticlimactic if I built up my military, opened my gates, and destroyed all the goblins in the world after five ambushes.