Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Ancalagon]

So...starting a new fort. First migrant wave...5 out of 7 are children.

Will this setup work? How long till they succumb? Should I prepare the same for the parents?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[zeziba]

You should drop food to them and ALOT of animals. Make it into a danger pit for children so as to train them to be real dwarfs.

Personally I would put them in a smaller room and have a repeater spike going on them(Has to be a wooden training one for this or they die too often) Who ever survives gets a Royal bedroom w/ their own study and statue garden. Also forgot about putting a bunch of dogs in thier with them puppy's preferably, Then they will grow strong together. Also they need clothes or they will go ape shit crazy.

[Ancalagon]

The goal was merely to get rid of useless mouths. Being that I've never tried this before, merely was curious as to what would happen/what to expect.

All five children died of thirst fairly quickly (about a season), after a few tantrums. The poor horse and camel died far sooner. Had I looked closer at the children, I would have realized one was near adulthood. Bit disappointing. The parents, as I feared, did not handle it well. They are both lost, one mad and the other melancholy. The overall outpost level of happiness and order remain unaffected by 7 rapid deaths.

Another wave (3) gave me one child with it's parents. I repeated the process with some small tweaks and it seems as though the parents will handle to death, albeit somewhat unhappy.

[zeziba]

To cull the unhappy thoughts make a metal statue garden even non-masterwork ones will give tastefully arranged. You can turn the metal ore on in the z menu under stone if you don't have the coke to make a metalsmithed one. That will save your dwarfes, also if you can keep your melancholyone at that stage for a while you will get some real !FUN!

EDIT:bad spelling is my Achilles Heel

[GiglameshDespair]

Seal each child in its own 1-square room, lock the door and build a wall. The bodies are never found, parents remain happy. Or channel a 2-square ditch, build a ramp at one side. Order the ramp to be removed with all adults busy. once a child has removed the ramp, build a floor over the pit. The corpse is never found, and for both methods you engrave a memorial and all is well.

[Di]

Yeah, kill them in a way that don't leaves traces and you're good to go. Either separate them or kill in one swing, like cave-in or atom smashing.

[Ancalagon]

Funny thing about doing that is, all parents dropped to between 40-0 happiness as soon as their child died. The more damaging happiness drops when multiple children were involved. At no point did the parents have contact, visually or otherwise, with their children as said children underwent the dehydration process.

So I had to bury the remains (not a problem, done to eliminate "rotten body" unhappy thoughts) and stretch out the deaths in the bigger families by a season (not a problem either).

Out of 72 dwarf children killed, only two parents were lost. Those being the first two parents that brought five of the little ones with them. The combination of meager surroundings and the rapid deaths was too much for me to combat.

So let this be a lesson! Never forget an integer when setting the child cap... >.>

[i2amroy]

Funny thing about doing that is, all parents dropped to between 40-0 happiness as soon as their child died. The more damaging happiness drops when multiple children were involved. At no point did the parents have contact, visually or otherwise, with their children as said children underwent the dehydration process.

If one of the children dies and the body is then seen by another dwarf (including one of the other children) then the dwarven psychic field knows that they are dead and react accordingly. If, on the other hand, you smash them to bits instantly with a drawbridge or magma them one at a time, then they will remain "missing" for the rest of eternity (assuming their ghost never shows up, make sure to make slabs) leading to no bad thoughts for their relatives.

Also adding a Mist Generator to a high traffic area can stack up happy thoughts so fast that most things that would drive a dwarf insane can be safely ignored.

[Tirion]

Funny thing about doing that is, all parents dropped to between 40-0 happiness as soon as their child died. The more damaging happiness drops when multiple children were involved. At no point did the parents have contact, visually or otherwise, with their children as said children underwent the dehydration process.

If one of the children dies and the body is then seen by another dwarf (including one of the other children) then the dwarven psychic field knows that they are dead and react accordingly. If, on the other hand, you smash them to bits instantly with a drawbridge or magma them one at a time, then they will remain "missing" for the rest of eternity (assuming their ghost never shows up, make sure to make slabs) leading to no bad thoughts for their relatives.

Also adding a Mist Generator to a high traffic area can stack up happy thoughts so fast that most things that would drive a dwarf insane can be safely ignored.

Add the mist generator, assign high value bedrooms, have a legendary dining room, buy plants from merchants to brew ALL the booze, have a legendary cook and churn out lavish meals, have enough cloths etc... and kill children one by one, within sight of everyone. Urist McFatherOf10Children has been happy lately. He lost a child to tragedy lately. He was forced to endure the decay of own child. He has eaten in a legendary dining room lately. etc
...
He doesn't really care about anything anymore.

[doublestrafe]

Funny thing about doing that is, all parents dropped to between 40-0 happiness as soon as their child died. The more damaging happiness drops when multiple children were involved. At no point did the parents have contact, visually or otherwise, with their children as said children underwent the dehydration process.

If one of the children dies and the body is then seen by another dwarf (including one of the other children) then the dwarven psychic field knows that they are dead and react accordingly. If, on the other hand, you smash them to bits instantly with a drawbridge or magma them one at a time, then they will remain "missing" for the rest of eternity (assuming their ghost never shows up, make sure to make slabs) leading to no bad thoughts for their relatives.

Also adding a Mist Generator to a high traffic area can stack up happy thoughts so fast that most things that would drive a dwarf insane can be safely ignored.

Add the mist generator, assign high value bedrooms, have a legendary dining room, buy plants from merchants to brew ALL the booze, have a legendary cook and churn out lavish meals, have enough cloths etc... and kill children one by one, within sight of everyone. Urist McFatherOf10Children has been happy lately. He lost a child to tragedy lately. He was forced to endure the decay of own child. He has eaten in a legendary dining room lately. etc
...
He doesn't really care about anything anymore.

Hmmm...single tile atom smasher fed from a pit above, surrounded by expensive gem windows, in the dining room, along with some pre-fab slabs? All the dwarfy entertainment value with no pesky decay!

[sum1won]

Why are these valuable children being wasted?  Kill them in front of your military units to harden them, instead of wasting valuable dogs!

[vadia]

Why are these valuable children being wasted?  Kill them in front of your military units everybody to harden them, instead of wasting valuable dogs!

Fixed

[sadron]

Hey I like that texture pack, which one is it?

[Darkening Kaos]

It looks like Ironhand, it's in the LNP.

[Ancalagon]

Why are these valuable children being wasted?  Kill them in front of your military units to harden them, instead of wasting valuable dogs!

The reason why I didn't go that route was due to an error in my child cap. I set it incorrectly, resulting in nearly every migration wave being two happy parents and 2-6 children*. Rather than restart, I decided to practice some less than ideal ways to maintain happiness and see how far I could push my dwarves.

(* I could have set it up so that the parents with killed children, kill the children of the new migrant parents. Didn't occur to me at the time though.)