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[avdpos]

In my fort I got booze-problems, forgot to order more...
Also forgot to trade so my 70 dwarfs hit winter with thirst and no booze.
Then I found out the problem and ordered brewing and a second stil.

Now the problems finished up where easy with around 20-30 dwarfs ded from thirst and the rest survived.

I now expected the tantrum spiral to kick in but my yet only artifact I have am a silver table, placed in the dining room that seems to make everything good. not a single dwarf killed due to tantruming  got a bit dissapointed and thought of the table as cheating.

I think I should have got the fortress killed by this. What do you think?

[Veylon]

Tantrum spirals seem to be heavily dependent on friendship. If there's a meeting area, they can hang around, make friends, and subsequently fly into a rage when said friends perish. Without a meeting area, the deaths of dwarves are less traumatic as they are all strangers. I doubt the table had too terribly much to do with it, though dwarves do get a good thought when they dine in the same room.

[Yazman]

I've never had a tantrum spiral, not even once, and I've been playing for maybe a year and a half to two years.

[deepdowner]

Don't dwarves socialise in Dining rooms?

If so, is it possible to set a dining room (table) each in every single room, so that only the dwaf belonging to the bedroom takes it to dine?

[weenog]

I've had a tantrum spiral so bad that I couldn't even kamikaze the fortress, the CPU choked trying to process all that battle and miasma etc.

You need a lot of idle time for dwarfs so they make friends (and even better, build families).  You also need to scrape by barely subsisting, not really living.  Many tiny bad thoughts add up over the years, until a few dwarfs start throwing tantrums, you might see half a dozen to a dozen tantrums go off in rapid succession.  This is not the tantrum spiral.  Sooner or later, somebody will be killed in legitimate combat, or by a tantrum, and then most of his friends or relatives will throw tantrums (or go insane) and kill other dwarfs, and all of their friends and loved ones will flip out and start doing damage, starting a feedback loop of negativity.  This is the beginning of the tantrum spiral.  It'll get worse than you think it will.

[Drazinononda]

I'm betting your problem was that you had a poor incubation. By which I mean, it was too early in your fort for everyone to be all buddy-buddy so when half of them died, the other half hardly cared. If it was your first winter (which it sounds like, if you were just now running into thirst problems) then seven of your dwarves have been working hard for three seasons, and the other 63 have both arrived since then AND likely been working a lot. So there's not a lot of social connection within the fort. I mean, if 30 dwarves died, chances are only about 30 more even knew them at all, and that was probably as "passing acquaintances."

[Larix]

Don't dwarves socialise in Dining rooms?

If so, is it possible to set a dining room (table) each in every single room, so that only the dwaf belonging to the bedroom takes it to dine?

Possible, but that'd be totally overdoing it. Dwarfs socialise in 'meeting areas'. If your dining room isn't set as a meeting hall, your beards will only use the place for eating, which will make them happy, but they won't hang around there to chat/party.

I agree with the others, the fort was probably saved by its low age - most of the population should have been second-year's immigrants with all of three to eight months of fort membership.

[deepdowner]

Thanks Larix for the answer

Now I wonder what happens if I set up individual dining rooms in their bedrooms...

[Miriage]

It lowers the room value. Having a communal dinning room has the added benefit of absurdly high room value which equals high mood bonus from eating there. 

[gunpowdertea]

It lowers the room value. Having a communal dinning room has the added benefit of absurdly high room value which equals high mood bonus from eating there.

More detailed: Setting up a room that shares tiles with another one lowers both rooms' value. A communal dining room with the same furniture and size as a private one does not have a higher value. However, they tend to be bigger and have many more tables and thrones / chairs inside, so these do add up. Plus then there's 12x12 tiles of masterful engravings (all depicting you Baron being frightened by rats, 'cause who could resist engraving that one...).
The added benefit of communal dining rooms is the socialising, which gives good thoughts (right until a kobold jams the nose of their best friend through the skull, tearing the tissue and fracturing the brain). Plus you only need to build a limited number of seats and tables, not all dwarves eat at the same time.

[EvilBob22]

It lowers the room value. Having a communal dinning room has the added benefit of absurdly high room value which equals high mood bonus from eating there.

More detailed: Setting up a room that shares tiles with another one lowers both rooms' value. A communal dining room with the same furniture and size as a private one does not have a higher value. However, they tend to be bigger and have many more tables and thrones / chairs inside, so these do add up. Plus then there's 12x12 tiles of masterful engravings (all depicting you Baron being frightened by rats, 'cause who could resist engraving that one...).
The added benefit of communal dining rooms is the socialising, which gives good thoughts (right until a kobold jams the nose of their best friend through the skull, tearing the tissue and fracturing the brain). Plus you only need to build a limited number of seats and tables, not all dwarves eat at the same time.

I disagree with the socializing being a benefit, and I always make my dining rooms non-meeting areas.  As previously mentioned, socializing creates relationships, which can lead to tantruming -- which outweighs the social "good thoughts" in my opinion.  I still create a meeting area so that migrants don't mill about at the map edge, but I make it huge: lately I've been making it 31 x 31.

[fricy]

I disagree with the socializing being a benefit, and I always make my dining rooms non-meeting areas.  As previously mentioned, socializing creates relationships, which can lead to tantruming -- which outweighs the social "good thoughts" in my opinion.

True, but where is the FUN in that? 
IMHO dwarves should be murderous psychopaths on the verge of imminent breakdown. And not filthy do-gooder Hobbitses.

[BoredVirulence]

True tantrum spirals take a while. When people run short forts, tantrum spirals tend to be rare, or at least recoverable (because the negative feedback is lessened).
Personally though, Most dwarves are very happy in my forts. The ones who are unhappy enough to tantrum get killed by my (off duty) military, and his kids / spouse / brother are too drunk in the most glorious dining hall, or staring at our artifact mechanisms, or enjoying a good nights rest in their large, high quality personal bedrooms to care. Of course, if a real tragedy occurs, and several dwarves died in that legendary dining hall, they don't get hauled away fast enough and the miasma kicks in, then you might as well build a second fortress from the new migrants while the spiral occurs for the next 3 seasons.

Also, its the dwarves who survive tantrum spirals you want to put in your military. Those dwarves will live to a ripe old age.

[wierd]

optimum tantrum FUN in 7 easy steps!

1) turn off all industries. Let all dwarves idle.
2) make one enormous grand dining room, and set it as a meeting hall.
3) wait 2 game years this way.
4) NOW, turn industries back on
5) Train an extensive military. Let no dwarf not know how to swing an axe or hammer!
6) send a recon expedition into cavern layer 3.
7) when they find something horrible, tell them to kill it. (They will likely fail.)

As everyone's favorite darling, Urist, gets felled by Osom Gulakularth the foeted troglodite, or worse, some horrible forgotten beast, the others in the fortress will freak out.

It is important that multiple people die in the recon mission. Send a full squad. Make sure they all die.

Once the freakout begins, they will begin to tantrum. Those that don't immediately will shortly, as they get subjected to killed pets, art defacement, getting punched, etc.  Because everyone is friends with everyone else, this extended relationship causes an implosion of morale. In just a very short time, they will all be angry and murdering each other, and angry that their friends are being murdered. 

Let it play out. Rotting corpses increase the intensity of the pheomenon. Ghosts further intensify the problem, especially since there is a good chance some will be killer ghosts.

At the end of it all, your fortress population will be decimated, ghosts and dead bodies will be everywhere, and the few remaining survivors will be either so traumatized that they literally jibber and do nothing else, or will have lost all sensitivity, and become emotionless husks.

Cleaning up afterward can be challenging, and survival of the spiral is not garanteed.

The fortress' networth will be mostly intact, so very large seiges will continue, even if you only have 4 dwarves left.

Tantrums are great fun!

[VerdantSF]

I had one start in my 70+ year fort.  It was due to friendships created by a small memorial hall.  Two of the most popular dwarves died at the same time due to old age.  One of their friends got upset and went berserk.  When soldiers had to take him down, the rest of the fortress erupted.  I went for ~140 dwarves to ~70 .  The legendary dining hall, the private engraved bedrooms, the masterwork food, the fine drink, nothing mattered.  That memorial hall had created just too many friendships.  Most of the deaths were civilians.  Most of the 40+ military "didn't really care about anything anymore."  The fortress had all content dwarves within a year of the spiral, but it's still recovering population wise in its 8th decade.  I no longer have any specific gathering places of any kind.