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[Serefan]

Hello my dorfmaster friends...

Finally, after many failed attempts, I've been running a secure and successful fort lately. It's been running on and off for a few months now, and a few days ago I reached a point where I decided it was time for opulence and decadence.
As I was scouting the interwebs for ideas I suddenly came upon the unbelievably pointless and silly idea to map out the genealogy of my minions. So I've been working for an entire afternoon now, and mapped out the heritage of some of my nobles already, and I must say, interesting things are starting to pop up. It's still very much a work in progress, but I wanted to share an example already, for your Fun and Amusement.

My fortress was founded somewhere near the end of the Age of Legends. It is now the year 145. There are currently 114 dorfs living in my fortress; though many more have already died and are resting in my ziggurat. I have one single dwarf left from the founding party, my Glorious Leader; he is now 159 years old. I'm not sharing his heritage here at the moment though, since he apparently never bothered to find a girlfriend, and he was born before the dawn of time.

I'm sharing here the lineage built up around my Dragon (the Champion & Captain of the Guard). You can see his picture in the middle. What's interesting is that his great-great-grandparents meddled twice in his lineage: you can see Dakost Endoknëlas X Èrith Mengoddom twice in the picture. I've also built up the lineage around his great-great-grampa Dakost to compare.

Some notes:
- The only dwarves whose families are already fully mapped are the ones with a picture.
- The dwarves that don't have a date of birth won't get a picture; those are the ones that aren't living in my fortress.

Tell me what you guys think (besides me being out of my mind). If you're interested, will post updates once work has progressed a bit. I did not embed the images here because they are far too large.

Lineage centered around The Dragon:
http://i.imgur.com/EmU3TzE.jpg

Lineage centered around grampa Dakost:
http://i.imgur.com/bFKUnxk.jpg

[DS]

Fascinating. I've been considering doing something similar once the queen migrated - her line is quite prolific, and there are almost certainly several of her descendents currently living in the fortress, although I don't know who they are.

I for one am interested in whatever updates you have to offer regarding your fortress. If you've reached the point where you decide to focus any effort on extracting genealogies, it's worth a look.

What program/website did you use to create these images?

[acetech09]

1+ to the thread. Awesome.

What program/website did you use to create these images?

See the bottom center of the pics.

[Russell.s]

Great work! I'd love for legends mode to do this automatically one day.
Also, I feel sorry for dwarven mothers. They have SO MANY kids!

[Fluoman]

I would love to write some code to do this automatically, but I don't know how to extract the data from DF 

[Serefan]

I for one am interested in whatever updates you have to offer regarding your fortress. If you've reached the point where you decide to focus any effort on extracting genealogies, it's worth a look.

What program/website did you use to create these images?

Well I am at a point where I can put my fortress into total lockdown safely for several years if not decades. I was going to start work on a huge meeting/market hall, then proceed outwards from there creating several function-specific burrows to eventually end up with a realistic dwarven city. But then I saw this idea, and now that I started this I figured I'll just proceed until it's finished, then adapt every time a migrant wave arrives.
You can find the program on www.myheritage.com. It's very intuitive, and you can auto-generate a bunch of different types of trees. Only downside is the fact that it doesn't recognize the dwarfy calendar, otherwise I could've added each dorf's age, since it's a calculated value.

Great work! I'd love for legends mode to do this automatically one day.
Also, I feel sorry for dwarven mothers. They have SO MANY kids!

That'd be indeed very awesome. And yeah, I was kinda surprised when I suddenly entered my Dragon's lineage, so many cousins, nieces and nephews o_O I think there's an even bigger family going on somewhere, I'll dig into it further right now.

I would love to write some code to do this automatically, but I don't know how to extract the data from DF 

I thought about that myself but then I pictured all the potential troubles with the connections and overlaps and I kinda gave up on it It'd be an awesome tool to have though.

Well, thanks for the replies guys, if I have any meaningful progress by this evening I will post an update

[sirdave79]

Its interesting to read this post.

Im currently playing a fort where im growing the population from natural births only. I kept the populaion down to 41 and married everyone off (16 couples). I currently have a population of 80 after a round of births. Everyone has 2+ children. Im currently halfway through marrying off 16 couples from the "2nd generation". I plan to double the population again once the 2nd gen are all married off.

I started the fort in year 6 and im currently in year 34. I am doing this to pick a young baron with no item preferences and hopefully who will have an heir also with no item preferences. This person will be the baron. Ive modded the age of dwarves to 250-300 and changed the child to adult age of 6. I know this is a bit cheaty but I also like to control the artifacts I make, so ive also used splinterz therapist to force labours on the children so i can force their moodable skills before adulthood.

I am a perfectionist player and i do save scum but once ive set up my "dwarven clans" and nobility lines I want to try to reduce this tendancy and accept some deaths and whatnot.

I would love something like this to be built in but would obviosly take a lot of work and so i dont expect to see it any time soon. I also wish the dwarves would share family/clan/surnames to facilitate easier tracking of the lines.

I also hope that my stock of married couples will be able to provide easy/fast replacements for the military, which I will start training in much larger numbers once I have 160 population and moodable skill trained 3rd generation.

Thanks for sharing your work, very interesting.

[Serefan]

Im currently playing a fort where im growing the population from natural births only. I kept the populaion down to 41 and married everyone off (16 couples). I currently have a population of 80 after a round of births. Everyone has 2+ children. Im currently halfway through marrying off 16 couples from the "2nd generation". I plan to double the population again once the 2nd gen are all married off.

My good sir, are you breeding your dwarves like rabbits? I must say that sounds very interesting to do as well! I don't have any knowledge of how the dwarves currently pass on their traits to their children, but reading your post I would assume there is at least some form of natural evolution already programmed into the game.

I've processed a few more dorfs as of now and will grab a bite to eat first, there isn't much to say about it yet though other than the fact that the biggest part of my dorf clan is essentially the offspring of two cousins doing the nasty.

[sirdave79]

Lol, 2 cousins doing the nasty. Gotta love dwarf fortress.

As far as I know very little is inherited. I beleive attributes and preferences are fully random. I beleive size/fat/musculature IS inherited but I dont know how much that affects anything else.

The primary reason for this is so that I can get young dwarves into positions that will effectively last the length of the fort before fps death or boredom or whatever. DF hack allows one to take control of ones citizens I beleive and start playing as an adventurer from your fort. Also allowing you to equip from your fort and utilise a hospital should it be necessary or practical. I havent tested any of this yet but thats the hopeful eventual plan for the fort. I think youc an set up another fort also, so once ive explored my world I may set up another fort. Also ensuring that nobility have heirs will hopefully keep the positions alive whilst possibly exposing some nobility to some danger.

Anyway thats pie in the sky for now, im just enjoying breeding my lines and training up everyone to be as good as they can be. Ive never conquored a cavern but this will be a goal once ive got a big enough military. Also it would be nice to breach the HFS, something else ive never done without my entire fort dieing.

Everyone is fully clad in masterwork steel and carrying shields so I can now be more relaxed about gate security and that random dwarf who insists on collecting a severed foot as far away as possible from my fort and then inevitably die. I do danger room everyone to lvl 10 armour user.

Ive been thinking about your family tree and imagining ingame portraits, with inherited appearence, hair and eye colour stuff like that. It would be a lot of work I think, and not the sort of thing toady entertains also. Wed have to make do with text descriptions I think

1 problem with this type of fort is not having skilled medical immigrants. Theres a mod called higher dwarven learning which allows training from books and a special workshop. I need to investigate.

EDIT also most people probably know about the growth bug but if you attempt anything like this it should be researched. Failure to do so might result in 90% of poulation being midgets.

[weenog]

Potential megaproject: Create an array of bedrooms/tombs that mimic the layout of the family tree.  Rooms or crypts for absent dwarfs just get a statue and a note describing who they belong to, I guess.

[Serefan]

Potential megaproject: Create an array of bedrooms/tombs that mimic the layout of the family tree.  Rooms or crypts for absent dwarfs just get a statue and a note describing who they belong to, I guess.

I think I will be doing something similar eventually. I'm gonna have a full overview of my families anyway, it would be a waste not doing anything with it. I'm thinking of keeping this fort up for a very long run (every time I'm bored and want to play DF I will continue this fort and this fort only).

More interesting things are popping up! The previous Dragon of my fortress was a good and just military leader, but unfortunately for him his reign was during the Great Construction period; where my fortress was under heavy modifications to render it impregnable. Alas, he fell bravely in combat during that time.
I used Dwarf Therapist to find a decent marksdwarf with the highest Teacher skill; and appointed him as the new Dragon. Turns out, this new Dragon was the old one's son! Leadership must run in the family

The amount of dorfs in my tree has already surpassed 400. It's getting more and more fun to continue this though; because the rate of new dwarves added is decreasing, while the rate of new connections made is increasing.

[Meansdarling]

This is so cool!
I always feel more connection to my dwarves when I know things about them.
Like that they have a wife and kids or that they have grandchildren.
That's valuable because after a while in DF I get really apathetic about their living or dieing.
I'm interested in your project. I don't have the mental fortitude or time to do this for myself.

[Serefan]

This is so cool!
I'm interested in your project. I don't have the mental fortitude or time to do this for myself.

Thank you. Ofcourse, as I said in the OP, this is a ridiculously ambitious project. I'm really starting to get into it though, it is mighty fun; it'll probably be one of my new passtimes for the next couple of weeks.

The program notes that I now have 505 dorfs listed, encompassing 104 families. I also noticed that it notes how many of your dorfs are contained in the auto-generated chart you've currently requested...

Behold the relatives of Atír Âbirlogem, a deceased farmgirl (Listed as 404/505 dorfs). You can find her picture under and slightly left of the title bar. The incestuous family line is still in there (Asmel Ducimilid x Tobul Kälánoslan; slightly to the right of the title bar) but it is starting to pale in comparison to the total family size.

I noticed, unfortunately, that the auto-generation doesn't handle circular relations very well, instead choosing to add duplicates into the chart. It is however possible to change the chart manually after it is generated. Once I'm done adding all of my dorfs, I might give it a shot to actually remove all duplicates from the chart to end up with a prettier one.

Here's a fan chart of the farmgirl's grampa Lorbam Zulbanvumom. I'm betting this type of chart will be awesome once I have all of them in there.

NOTE: I started having serious issues on file size of the images, so I had to leave them in PDF instead, I wasn't sure where to host them online so I made them available for download on Google Docs.

EDIT: I didn't realize Google Docs has separate urls that allow you to actually view the image in detail online. I changed the urls above to those.

[Snaake]

Just showing them as duplicates is probably the easiest and clearest thing to do. Besides myheritage, I think Crusader Kings II's in-game family trees also show people as duplicates, if they show up multiple times in a family tree. In that game, you have the choice between a fully dynastic tree similar to the ones shown here (marriages of females to non-dynasty members are shown, but any of their descendants are left out), or 2 smaller-scale family trees. One being an ancestor tree that showed the parents, grandparents and great-grandparents of the selected person, and the other a family tree, which showed IIRC wife, kids, grandkids etc. I'm a bit hazy on the latter 2 versions, since I mostly look at the dynasty one.

I remember in one of my wife's games, she intermarried with her own dynasty a lot, and there was eg. some character for who only had 4-5 actual unique great-grandparents, instead of the expected 8 or so, due to extensive cousin-to-cousin marriages (which wasn't all that rare with European nobility/royalty even in the start of the 20th century). The game rewards inbreeding by keeping money and the titles in the family, but punishes it by higher risk for negative traits: minor physical defects like clubfooted or harelip, or major negative traits like "imbecile".

I actually used myheritage to build a family tree for one of my games in Crusader Kings I, which didn't have an in-game gui for that, beyond showing the selected characters parents, siblings, children, and IIRC grandparents and grandchildren.

Anyway, back on track: It shouldn't be too complex to code a family tree generator (somebody did one for CKI, I think), although I probably wouldn't be able to do it myself, at least not just with what I know now. Assuming the dfhack dwarfexport command includes familial relations (and if it doesn't, can a similar script be made?), it shouldn't be much more than first identifying dwarfs based on their names, then recording the relations they have in their descriptions, then building the family tree off of comparing those links. I initially thought 2 dwarves with the same name might cause trouble, but they'd of course have different family ties.

[sirdave79]

I nearly mentioned royal family interpreting. Interestingly marrying your cousin is not illegal in England and I therefore assumed genetic defects don't generally occur between.
I'm now thinking about doing an Excel spreadsheet family tree for my dwarves. All this talk o family trees also makes me think of total war family trees. I always liked farming those too and trying to keep various lines alive.