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[ImagoDeo]

How do you do it?

Personally, I follow this set of rules:

• My original seven are named One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, and Seven.
• Every migrant is assigned a name with a letter (A for the first wave, B for the second, etc.) and a number (1 for the first one in the wave, 2 for the second, etc.). This helps me to remember individuals.
• Each of my original seven tends to be a multitasker until I get migrants to fill in roles like stonecrafting and woodcutting.
• Once enough waves have arrived that I have plenty of each kind of worker and most of the skills I'll need for the foreseeable future, I begin to strip dwarves of all of their individuality: everyone except military skilled dwarves gets the standard designation 'Hauler'.
• When I need a job done for which I have no designated dwarf, or not enough designated dwarves, I'll assign a hauler to it. If that dwarf will be doing that job more than once or twice, I also remove their 'Hauler' designation and they'll eventually switch professions to the right one.
• Military dwarves who earn it may have their real name back.

I've run one or two forts on this method now and it helps me to keep everything straight.

So how do YOU do it?

[backora900]

I usually separate my civ into 3 groups:
-workers (everyone has all works enabled)
-soldiers (no work enabled, assigned to squads)
-nobles (no work enabled; everyone on the noble screen; they are there to represent my forts and make stupid demands)

exceptions:
-miners = lower nobility (no work enabled except mining)
-legendary workers - they get their own workshops and other non-legendary jobs disabled
-working nobles - bookkeeper, chief medic,...

(inappropriate remark removed)

[Grim Portent]

I give nicknames to notables and assign them better quarters. I reward dwarfs not for talent or skill, but for catching my attention. An interesting artifact, a good fight or even just being a survivor of a migrant wave that got caught in an attack.

Non-notables are left to pick a room as they can and do their jobs. Dwarfs are given a task based on their best skills when they arrive, dwarfs with no good skills are given a list of generic farming skills I need done and left at that, or assigned to the military.

When my fort is limited to a smaller population, either naturally or artificially I take a great deal more interest in each individual, examining their likes and dislikes and trying to sort them out accordingly.

I do not discriminate based on a meaningful scale of usefulness, I discriminate on an arbitrary scale of interest.

[itg]

I... don't. Basically, I look at all the migrants as they arrive, enabling useful labors on the cheesemakers and fish dissectors, disabling detrimental labors like fishing or engraving (when I already have a team of legendaries). I use the "workshop profile" menu to make sure only suitable dwarves can make goods. I assign other labors on the fly--for instance, if I need to mine faster, I'll pick a few idle dwarves and tell them each to go grab a pick. If I need my dwarves to do some actual work instead of dumping trash, I disable hauling on a bunch of them.

Dwarves that catch my attention usually get special treatment and/ or positions of power. Unfortunately for the dwarves, that often means surviving a serious injury.

[Baffler]

I just look through every migrant wave to find creative, intelligent, or otherwise remarkable dwarves to assign to standardized set of labors according to their skill and attributes (or need in a pinch). Everyone else gets assigned to the 'laborer' profession. These guys make up the majority of dwarves in the fortress and are responsible for all of the hauling, pump operating if applicable, as well as almost all of the workshop labors that don't have quality modifiers. Military dwarves are conscripted from among the laborers.

I've never used DT.

[EvilBob22]

This is what I do:

• My original 7 get special names based on the use I have for them.
  
  • "Farmer Udib" is the main farmer, "Urist the axe" and "Iden the shield" are the first military squad, "Ironhands Catten" is the weapon/armor smith, etc.
• Migrants get a number based on their migration wave ("4 Cog").
• If I've lost a fort and reclaimed, then new migrants get a letter added to the number ("2a Udil").
  
  • If I had lost and reclaimed twice, "2b Udil".
• Babies born in the fort get a "N" (for native) added to the number of the most recent migration wave. ("6N Thob" was born between wave 6 and wave 7)
• Dwarves with medical skills get "Dr" added to the front. ("Dr 5 Tun")

Everyone (except "Trader Tobul") gets masonry and architecture enabled, and hunting and fishing disabled.  I'll turn fishing back on if I can get a walled off section of river or cavern lake.

[Nuoya]

I give each dwarf a nickname that pertains to the works that they have enabled. I try to have as many specializers as possible and have labors like masonry and carpentry very selectively enabled. It means that I will typically get masterworks furniture without even fiddling with workshop profiles later down the road. I try to have as many smiths as possible too, for the artifact equipment. When I get a migrant who has no skills except soap or dissecting or potash or cheese, I'm actually very happy, because I can just flick on weaponsmithing and level it a bit. Once they get a mood that's a new artifact candy armor or weapon!

I also try to have as beefy a military as possible, something like 50% of dwarves are soldiers (though only for half the year), so competent/skilled military migrants are the most valuable ones for me. A good chunk of migrants get tossed in. A large majority of the pure peasants that migrate have military skills, so I like them. I also like the rangers that migrate in.

Whoever remains generally gets support skills like farming, brewing, stonecrafting, weaving, clothing, plant gathering/processing, and woodcutting enabled. Usually many or all of those skills are all enabled because once you hit "worker saturation" at around ~150 dwarves then it really doesn't matter how slow or fast your kitchen/resourcesgathering/crafting dwarves are. You can put "craft xxxxx repeat" in every spring and it makes enough barrels and clothes and drinks and food for a year or more until your raw resources run out. Then just do repeat again in next spring.

[Urist Imiknorris]

I sort my dwarves into a couple of groups:

Medics (medicine/hauling)
Soldiers (engraving [to avoid unhappy thoughts from peasants getting deactivated], nothing else)
Workers (masonry, basically everything where the skill of the worker does not affect the quality of the product)
And whatever for everything else.

Generic workers tend to comprise about two thirds of my fort.

[firsal]

I let whatever skills migrants come with stay. Should I have a deficiency in a certain industry or a megaproject to undertake, I set most useless dwarves (anyone with a green profession, dwarves with skills I don't use) to whatever skill is needed. So far, this has worked out well for me.

[VerdantSF]

My original Seven were named after their mineral preference, Sphalerite, Olivine, Phyllite, etc.  They were the only ones with special nicknames.  For all new inhabitants, I changed the name display to show nicknames without surnames.  Then I gave everyone nicknames according to surnames that actually mapped out to the families in the fort. 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

First born children are usually named after their mother or father, according to gender, unless another family has created a line with that name.  At this point, I've got a few dwarves who are the "IV" of their names.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

My fort is 95 years old at this point and this method has made it easy to keep track of who's related to whom.  It's been fun watching the rise and fall of prominent families.

[sirdave79]

I wish we could fully rename our dwarves and that a family would have a clan name that was maintained between familial groups.

I tend to do it all manually using therapist at the minute and over the course of a forts history the names of my dwarves slowly mean more and more to me as time goes on. Sometimes the titles dont help!

Just a touch more flexibility on the currently available means of customising the names of dwarves would be most appreciated by me. (I think/know it will happen at some point).

My current bent is for all my dwarves to wear full steel armour negating the need for replacement clothing.

Not sure if its a DF hack thing but ive been renaming my squads to help with squad selection, appropriate military responses etc.

I have a "LADIES XBOW 1", "LADIES XBOW 2", "NOBLES XBOW" and the plan is that when my melee squads are trained ill have "AXE 1", "AXE 2", "SPEAR 1" and "HAMMERS 1". I feel like these squad names help me to keep the wrong people away from the wrong situations, know (militarily) what im sending where and have a clue whos who when responding to military threats.

All my ladies are kept out of melee squads to avoid unwanted infant mortality during combat.

I havent quite figured out If I can have a squad with full armour and no weapons successfully equip an axe/pick for mining/woodcutting duty or if I will have to equip a squad with picks on the squad equip list and then label that squad "MINERS 1", im hoping i can have a squad labelled "WORKERS 1" that can flit between woodcutting and mining with no weapons equipped. (im aware of there being bugs/issues). I wont even get into hunters.

[Lielac]

I wish we could fully rename our dwarves and that a family would have a clan name that was maintained between familial groups.

I tend to do it all manually using therapist at the minute and over the course of a forts history the names of my dwarves slowly mean more and more to me as time goes on. Sometimes the titles dont help!

Just a touch more flexibility on the currently available means of customising the names of dwarves would be most appreciated by me. (I think/know it will happen at some point).

My current bent is for all my dwarves to wear full steel armour negating the need for replacement clothing.

Not sure if its a DF hack thing but ive been renaming my squads to help with squad selection, appropriate military responses etc.

I have a "LADIES XBOW 1", "LADIES XBOW 2", "NOBLES XBOW" and the plan is that when my melee squads are trained ill have "AXE 1", "AXE 2", "SPEAR 1" and "HAMMERS 1". I feel like these squad names help me to keep the wrong people away from the wrong situations, know (militarily) what im sending where and have a clue whos who when responding to military threats.

All my ladies are kept out of melee squads to avoid unwanted infant mortality during combat.

In [YOUR DORF FORT FOLDER'S NAME]/data/init/d_init.txt , at the very bottom, there's

Code: [Select]

You can use these to say how nicknames are displayed in each mode
Options are REPLACE_FIRST, CENTRALIZE (between first and last), REPLACE_ALL
[NICKNAME_DWARF:REPLACE_FIRST]
[NICKNAME_ADVENTURE:REPLACE_FIRST]
[NICKNAME_LEGENDS:REPLACE_FIRST]
I think REPLACE_ALL is what you're looking for.

I havent quite figured out If I can have a squad with full armour and no weapons successfully equip an axe/pick for mining/woodcutting duty or if I will have to equip a squad with picks on the squad equip list and then label that squad "MINERS 1", im hoping i can have a squad labelled "WORKERS 1" that can flit between woodcutting and mining with no weapons equipped. (im aware of there being bugs/issues). I wont even get into hunters.

From what I've gathered from other people's science, the mining, woodcutting, and hunting jobs all have uniforms of their own that are incompatible with each other and with military uniforms, so... you're kinda screwed.

[sirdave79]

Yeah ive read plenty about the "uniform bug". Ive heard  a story claiming their hunter is working. I think he said something like, hunting labour was enabled, dwarf was added to squad and equipped as a marksdwarf and continued to work as a hunter. (I am going from memory)

Another thing for the wishlist.

Cheers.

[VerdantSF]

I wish we could fully rename our dwarves and that a family would have a clan name that was maintained between familial groups.

If you do it manually in the game, you have upwards of 40 characters to work with, rather than the 16 limit in therapist.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(Just an example, but now you've got me interested in going back through Legends mode and creating clan names from the earliest ancestors of each family.)

All my ladies are kept out of melee squads to avoid unwanted infant mortality during combat.

I used to do that, but in my current fort, I needed every migrant skilled in combat to join the military.  That included a lot of dwarfettes, so I used a "kindergarten" burrow to house toddlers and new moms.  My child cap is usually low, and it's usually non-military women who get pregnant, so there's been very little disruption of military duty due to maternity leave.

[Mushroo]

Usually I leave them with whatever skills they arrived at the fortress. By the time the population is 200+ all of the important professions ought to be covered.

There are two exceptions to this:

1. Children who grow up to be Peasants might get a job based on fortress labor needs
2. Dwarves who have a strange mood and become legendary in a skill get that skill enabled