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[Urist MacNoob]

Okay, this is not how to make my dwarves have kids thread. It's to address a problem with the tides of children ebbing from my constantly pregnant femdorfs.

Whenever they reach 'child' stage they immediately become unhappy and tantrum from having no clothes. I attempt to fix this by making pants and robes and the like from my clothier place but it would seem that whenever I make them they don't take them or someone else does. There's an artifact leather shirt lying there and the little ingrates aren't taking it. Their bitching is waking up other dorfs at night and causing noise. How to deal with them or make them happy without murdering them?

[wierd]

I don't really have this problem.. you need to have LOTS of clothes on hand to deal with the "somebody saw my ugly hairy wee wee! Whaaaa!" Problem, even from adults.

Adults are actually worse, because they hold onto XXClothingXX ownership, even after shamelessly just throwing them on the ground to get stomped on.  Dfhack's tweak clearowned helps, so that then you can properly dump owned garbage clothes.

The only things you need to look for, is if the kiddies can actually get to the clothing stockpile (is it in the same burrow that they are assigned? If not, they can't claim the clothes!), if there are enough unclaimed clothes available, etc.

If they simply won't claim clothes, upload the save, and file a bug report. Toady had issues with kids and clothing in the inital releases of v34, so you might be experiencing a noteworthy regression.

[Mr. Palau]

You known this is what makes me love DF, the instance you mentioned problems with children I was chanting "kill them! kill them! kill them!". It was saddening when you specified the lack of murder.

Also, you need to just make more cloths, or force the children into a nice room with a clothing stockpile in it. Also, insure the children are not doing anything else when they should be dressing themselves.

[BlackFlyme]

There's an artifact leather shirt lying there and the little ingrates aren't taking it.

Just as a note, artifact clothing will never be claimed by a dorf, to my knowledge, unless assigned to them as part of their military uniform. However, woodcutters will be more than happy to run off with your brand new artifact battle-axe.

The only way I've been able to deal with clothing issues is to create a surplus of clothes before the existing clothes wear away, either by raiding buying out a caravans leather and cloth stocks or by embarking with several shear-able animals such as sheep and plenty of pig-tail seeds.

However, one idea that may work is to lock them away from the rest of the fort with a burrow containing a food/drink stockpile, a clothing stockpile and one personally assigned bed for each child, and leave them in there to see if they will take the clothes stockpiled within the room.

[Larix]

I was delighted to see a thread concerning children which is _not_ about their brutal murdering and where killing them isn't the first suggestion when encountering a problem. It's a breath of fresh air really.

Yes, you need to keep more clothes on hand. Importantly, those don't need to be fresh clothes, filling empty equipment slots has such a high priority that children will readily take a first equipment consisting entirely of xclothesx. If your textile industry isn't up to speed yet, it actually helps if you manage to reclaim old clothes of your dwarfs but _don't_ destroy/sell them right away.

[krenshala]

On a related note, how long until ownership goes away on its own when a dwarf has dumped his xshirtx on the floor?  I remember Toady mentioning that he tweaked things to have owership go away but i don't remember what timeframe, if any, he mentioned was related to that.

Myself, I'm debating if I want to rob the human caravan once the goblin ambushers are defeated.  I'm at that point in my fort where the majority of the clothing is at x or xx, but due to zombies for a year my textile industry got interrupted.

NOTE: When embarking near a necromancer tower, I highly recommend you focus on building a curtain wall as your highest priority. Doing so makes it so you don't have to abandon your perfectly good rope reed farm to the zed's while you turtle up for a year in your 31x31 keep with an aquifer two z levels down.  And for those that were curious, the other posters were correct -- the siege lasted for one year, 19 Obsidian 73 to 19 Obsidian 74.

[Larix]

Never measured it exactly, but in my experience ownership can still be active after a week and is normally gone after two weeks. Definitely after a month.

Ownership will persist indefinitely if the item is 'stored' - sits in a room owned by the dwarf. It doesn't matter if the item is stuffed into a cabinet or dropped on the room's floor. To actually reclaim such items for the fort's use the only reliable in-game method is to forbid all the old clothes, dwarfs will give up ownership of forbidden items in the same way they 'disown' forgotten socks that never got stored. DFHack has other, faster means available.

Hmm, is there a DFHack script/mod yet that disables the 'store owned item' job? That job wastes time and currently does nothing but give rise to the 'dwarfs hoard their old socks' problem - it causes a dwarf to pick up a discarded clothing item and move it into their room, to be held onto and cherished forever. It does something with a seriously detrimental effect and exactly no benefit whatsoever, while wasting a dwarf's time on it. Just murdering that idiotic job with extreme prejudice should slow the rag buildup quite a lot.

[krenshala]

I remember someone mentioned making all bedrooms into refuse stockpiles so anything stored on the floor (primarily food and ragged clothing) would rot away in a relatively short amount of time.  Not the same as a DFHack script to avoid dumping stuff there at all, but a reasonable middle ground nonetheless.

[Vid_the_Impaler]

I've never tried this myself, but I've heard that if you get a dwarf in a cage, you can sell them to caravans. If you drop a child onto a cage trap it should stun them so that they'll be trapped inside. Then you just have to wait around until a caravan arrives and sell them off. Of course, if you actually want to keep the kids around, this wouldn't work, but it may be feasible if you just want to avoid giving their parents unhappy thoughts from their deaths.

[Urist MacNoob]

These are my slaves. Not the damn humans' and certainly not the elves'.

[Di]

If you drop a child onto a cage trap it should stun them so that they'll be trapped inside. Then you just have to wait around until a caravan arrives and sell them off.

It's not just stun, creature in question needs to pass out unconscious, which means you either lock them in room till they fall asleep, or you sell them seriously damaged and hope humans don't demand cashback.

[Merendel]

Personaly I've found the best way to deal with this issue is to have an overabundance of clothing.   I endup useing the workflow plugin for DFhack to manage my textile industry.   if I dont manage to ship all the XX clothing out on the next caravan I just bump up the limits to ensure plenty of supply.

[kingubu]

Murder them.