A small update to hopefully clear up and confirm some things that I've determined after some testing. You definitely need over 20 dwarves or so for you to start getting strange moods. If you drop below that number, the moods stop. It appears making a dwarf lose a friend to tragedy (like being crushed under a bridge) does not cue up a possession, but this may require more specific testing (albeit results are doubtable.) Those in the strange mood definitely tend to make their favorite item type, if possible. Now, for my method of bootleg artifact farming.
In the case of looking for weapon artifacts:
As usual, start with all at novice or adequate in weaponsmithing, and having the starting items I listed in the first post. Dig up and process all of the ores you're going to need and process them while getting up to 20 dwarves. Out of these migrant dwarves, kill all of the ones with any crafting skills other than weaponsmithing. Just strain out the dwarves that you can make into weaponsmith only dwarves. Plain old peasants work best for this. Do this until you have 20 or more novice weaponsmithing dwarves. Any excess migrants you get, immediately send them to a room sealed off from the rest of the fort and have them atomsmashed out of sight of anyone. Ensure that you almost always have about 21 dwarves at all times, and that they are all weaponsmiths. Anymore, and it's a waste of resources. To keep your food and drink supplies up, sell the items you have your new weaponsmith dwarves (I'll get to this in a minute) create as you train them to novice. Buy booze, food, and seeds with them. Or, if you really want to, just use the forbid depot trick to get the items. Planting all of the seeds and harvesting the crops is safe enough, and you can live off of this and caravan goods alone.
When a weaponsmith makes an artifact, you can just atomsmash him for food efficiency, and quickly bring up a new peasant to take his place. Because eventually, (for example) if you get 10 artifacts made, you'll likely have 10 dwarves that can't be mooded any more and are just leeching resources. This is why I suggest having slightly over the threshold of dwarves required for strange moods. If you had 20 dwarves, and you killed a weaponsmith after he made an artifact, you would have to wait until the next wave of migrants to possibly get any moods. You would then have to go through the short process of picking out (a) usable dwarf(s), atomshashing the others, and training him/them. However, if you had 21 dwarves and you killed the 21st one, you would be at 20, and you could comfortably wait to bring in the next one while getting your mood rolls.
There is one possible horror I would like to point out. The problem is skill rusting, as was mentioned by someone earlier in the thread. I didn't know what to make of it at first, but I think I understand now. As far as I see, skill rust completely negates the fact that the dwarf has the skill at all, as far as moods are concerned. For example, a peasant with nothing but Novice Weaponsmithing (rusty) won't default onto weaponsmithing, but will instead turn to the default skill choices, such as masonry and bone-crafting. If this is incorrect, please let me know, as I have not had clear testing conditions for a clear answer. This has been cleared up to me by Kofthefens. It actually doesn't seem to affect it.
I find this is quite easy to do with minimal effort beyond the initial ground-laying. Mainly just managing their farming, filtering out the migrants as needed, dealing with merchants, and supplying for the moods. This technique will work with other types of artifacts just as well. With this, hopefully one can equip a few god-like warriors in a decent amount of time.
As an added note, Mining counts as a crafting skill. Frightening. Very frightening indeed. It seems to be treated like masonry. But it is advisable to have one dwarf to digging a bit, for the sake of artifact limit extension.
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Topic: Strange Mood cherry-picking (Read 5338 times)