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[GavJ]

Tried this. Do not recommend.

Literally 90% of my guy's time was spent building coffins for the game's ridiculous tendency to continue sending dozens of migrants at a time, despite previous migrants having a 0.3% survival rate so far.   Whatever happened to "The fortress attracted no migrants this season" when things got really bad?

I can't do anything fun, because I have to constantly bury suicidal dwarves who come in such numbers their bodies choke the rivers and pile against the front door in a festering mountain. Maybe they think enough bodies will act as a wall for the new migrants against spearelves?

And since you can't turn off ghosts for some reason, you HAVE TO bury the things (slabbing takes even more time and gets you even further behind, as it involves 2 jobs), or ghosts will just kill you.

Yawn. I suggest other challenges instead for those considering this.



(Or do something like 3 separate hermits in different corners, which is high enough population the pop_cap will respect you. Or keep 2 vampire pets? etc.)

[escondida]

I'd recommend changing the population cap in the settings, and if you have dfhack, running fix/population-cap to immediately update the Mountainhome.

[tussock]

Why not turn them all into peasants and feed them with your Hermit? Consider them imaginary friends, in need of magical tea parties with plentiful food, fine clothes, and nice booze. Luckily the Hermit can avoid doing any hauling, because "imaginary" production is sufficient for "imaginary" friends to store as they please.

OK, quite a bit harder than a proper hermit with so much more work to do, or is there? Can't be any harder than burying them all, 1x1 bedrooms are only ... cut tree, make bed, no hauling of anything, much less work. Hmm.

[GavJ]

I'd recommend changing the population cap in the settings, and if you have dfhack, running fix/population-cap to immediately update the Mountainhome.

I DO have pop cap at zero. Doesn't matter. AFAIK, Pop cap is ignored for no apparent reason if your population is below 4 (or some sources say 2 or lower). In any case, I can verify that at population 1, it is certainly ignored. I am having my hermit meet with the liaison and the caravan is coming and leaving, doesn't matter, still migrants forever. They die of thirst within the same season, so they don't affect the next wave (pop is 1 again by the time migrants are ready to arrive next)

Why not turn them all into peasants and feed them with your Hermit?

That seems unlikely to be less work, but I suppose I could give it a whirl. You'd only have to take care of half a dozen or so to get population to the size where pop cap isn't ignored anymore. If so, it is possible he could support them with less work. And I like the attempt at flavor explanation =P

[Orange Wizard]

Or dump the migrants into the Killing Room before they ever see the hermit, and keep said hermit well away from the Killing Room.
I think ghosts work like that.

[GavJ]

Nope, they all die topside from thirst, and my hermit is living in the caverns.  The ghosts home in IMMEDIATELY on the hermit and follow him around one tile away, etc. Usually even while other dwarves are still alive, the ghosts still bee-line it for the hermit. I don't know how they even figure it out. Maybe they go for people who are doing jobs?

But yeah, anyway, it's pretty much the exact opposite: they are avoiding the people they died near and seeking out the one important guy.

[Diggums]

I DO have pop cap at zero.

That might be a problem in itself.
Try setting it to 1 or 2.

[Larix]

I think there's some kind of lower limit for actual population. I have a fort with 19 dwarfs which gets no migrants with a pop cap of one. But i've heard of population caps of one or two not being respected when so few dwarfs actually lived on the site.

You can remove the active season of the dwarven civilisation, this removes all their caravan visits and the liaison. Migration will no longer occur, you'll keep getting "the fortress attracted no migrants this season" messages instead. Alternatively, you could split your fort into the hermit and the rest of the bunch. Preferably with low (10 or so) population cap and the group locked away somewhere with production for their basic needs on automatic, so you don't spend more time observing and managing them when the hermit's supposed to be the focus.

[Manivald]

Dig down to adamantium and send all your immigrant's there. If they die gruesomly enough, perhaps others will think twice.
(This adwice is useless, I just found the tactic to be amusing)

[slothen]

slabbing doesn't require finding or moving the body.  Once he's legendary, you can build a 1-man slab factory practically.

[GavJ]

slabbing doesn't require finding or moving the body.

In this particular case, the cavern is only like 15 z levels below surface, and it's a nano embark, so it takes no time to grab bodies once the front gate is unlocked.  But yes, in more normal circumstances, slabbing might save time over hauling long distances.

I will try out the 1 vs. 0 pop cap, and the no active season thing! Although I do sort of like the mental image of a crazy old coot shambling out of the mountain with like 3 random crafts that he hauls himself, then putting on a special broker hat and trading it.

[Quietust]

You cannot set the population cap to anything less than 7 - if you try, it'll just increase it to 7.

Running "fix/population-cap" will reduce the size of migrant waves (in your case, it will shrink them down to 6 each), and it's theoretically possible to make them stop entirely - simply keep your other 6 dwarves trapped somewhere until the first Dwarven caravan arrives, let it depart safely (and report that you have a population of 7), kill the other 6 dwarves, and then make sure no Dwarven caravan ever leaves your fortress alive (so that the Mountainhomes continue to think that you have 7 dwarves present and don't need to send more migrants). Of course, you'll still have to bury/slab all of the merchants and caravan guards (or otherwise ensure that you always have an active Siege during the time they'd try to arrive), so you'll probably be better off killing the migrants.

You could use DFHack to force the population cap to 1, but you'd need to do it every time you start the game.

[forsaken1111]

Accept the situation and work it into the story. Your dwarf is not a hermit, he is the dwarf equivalent of an undertaker. All of the terminally sick, stupid or insane are sent to him when they are near death and he cares for the preparation of the bodies and lays them to rest.

Your dwarf is the gatekeeper to the dwarven land of the dead.

[Thormgrim]

The last time I did this, I let the new migrants have one job... to bury those who came before.
A new batch of migrants would show up, bury the dead (I was putting coffins in little channels which I would then put a floor on top of), build new coffins for themselves and then wait for the inevitable.

I was fortunate enough that my hermit picked a spot that was easy to make totally inaccessible to immigrants by way of removing ramps.

[Ravendarksky]

I had this same issue. Fortunately I was doing a 7 dwarf hermit challenge so we could afford to devote two dwarfs to full time slab creation/engraving/hauling.

I have over 1000 slabs memorilising dwarfs we've never met. Filthy surface dwelling dwarfs. It needs doing though... one of the more angry ghosts managed to remove one of my dwarfs lungs.... After that we prioritized slab production.