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Author Topic: No Migrants? This one has me stumped!  (Read 2968 times)

Melting Sky

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No Migrants? This one has me stumped!
« on: June 11, 2014, 05:34:39 am »

I have a bit of a problem. I want to become a metropolis and thus I have raised my population cap which was previously set at 120 to 140. My population is currently 138 including even infants. Unfortunately despite the fact the fortress is thriving with no recent deaths, no immigrants are showing up. I just keep getting the message about how no new immigrants were attracted this year. I thought it might be the constant goblin sieges this fortress seems to have but then I remembered back before I hit the cap that this was never an issue back then and I was actually losing more beards back in the early days.

I've heard that there is a kill list bug out there where if you get past a certain number of dead units that immigration starts getting buggy. Just how big does the list of dead need to be to cause this problem?

The fortress is currently sitting right at about a thousand dead units which doesn't seem high enough to be causing this issue. I seem to remember in the situation where I heard about this bug there was something like 3 times this many dead but I can't think of what else would be causing the immigrants to avoid my fort like it was a sobriety test. I really don't want to wipe the kill list unless I absolutely have to as I remember hearing it mucks up the world's legends and history. Any ideas what the issue might be?
« Last Edit: June 11, 2014, 06:19:54 am by Melting Sky »
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MrsStick

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Re: No Migrants? This one has me stumped!
« Reply #1 on: June 11, 2014, 06:29:57 am »

Was your mountainhomes liaison killed during one of the sieges?
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Melting Sky

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Re: No Migrants? This one has me stumped!
« Reply #2 on: June 11, 2014, 07:11:29 am »

Was your mountainhomes liaison killed during one of the sieges?

Hmmm, very good question. I get a siege about once a season so it is possible during one of them the liaison got murdered without me noticing it. Does the game give you any sort of indication when a liaison is killed? As far as I can remember the only caravans which have been wiped out were the elves on two different occasions but I could see how a Liaison could have been hit on the way in during one of those many times I was sieged.
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wierd

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Re: No Migrants? This one has me stumped!
« Reply #3 on: June 11, 2014, 07:26:17 am »

he should show up on the deaths page if he died and somebody saw the corpse. also, if he died and you didnt bury or slab him, his ghost will show up.

another possibility is that dwarves are extinct in your world. did you only get 2 migrant waves?
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FallenAngel

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Re: No Migrants? This one has me stumped!
« Reply #4 on: June 11, 2014, 08:42:07 am »

I think the "attracted no migrants" message only appears if your race is still alive in the world. Plus, if dwarves were extinct, would caravans visit? I've heard reports of human and elven caravans overlooking forts related to a dead civilization.

Button

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Re: No Migrants? This one has me stumped!
« Reply #5 on: June 11, 2014, 08:42:52 am »

he should show up on the deaths page if he died and somebody saw the corpse. also, if he died and you didnt bury or slab him, his ghost will show up.

another possibility is that dwarves are extinct in your world. did you only get 2 migrant waves?

I don't think extinct dwarves prevent migrants in the current version. My worldgen settings are extremely hostile, so I've embarked from an extinct civilization a number of times, and migration has never been a problem.

I'm seconding the guess that you haven't had a liaison successfully leave the map since you updated your pop cap. If you have friendly corpses set to auto-forbid, you may be able to find his body in the corpses stockpile.
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Larix

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Re: No Migrants? This one has me stumped!
« Reply #6 on: June 11, 2014, 11:42:14 am »

I have the same experience - i guess "fort attracted no migrants" means your civ's records of your fort's progress didn't get updated, because the liaison/caravan failed to visit (afaik running sieges prevent them from showing up) or failed to leave (dead, insane or worse).

I played with no-trading forts and in one case, where caravans showed up, loitered around on the map border and left again (depot present but inaccessible to them), i never got migration and no "attracted no migrants" messages - in spite of total lack of contact, pop count was apparently transmitted to the mountainhome correctly, and the 10 population cap respected; liaisons kept piling up, i had over 30 loitering around the surface in the end.
In my most recent go, i disabled dwarfs' active season and got no immigrants past the first two waves, either - but i kept getting "attracted no migrants" messages every season. Seems that the mountainhome updates the population count every year automatically and puts down "unknown, presumably none" for both population and wealth if there was no contact.
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Quietust

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Re: No Migrants? This one has me stumped!
« Reply #7 on: June 11, 2014, 11:59:45 am »

Was your mountainhomes liaison killed during one of the sieges?
The liaison has nothing to do with migrants - the caravan is what does the reporting for that.

If you open your (u)nits list, what are the counts for Citizens, Pets/Livestock, Others, and Dead/Missing? If they add up to more than 3000, then you will never get migrants again (unless you run the DFHack script "fix/dead-units").
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wierd

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Re: No Migrants? This one has me stumped!
« Reply #8 on: June 11, 2014, 12:38:12 pm »

That's interesting...

So, to kill off all chances of migrants, all one has to do is mass-hatch turkey poults, then kill them?  That could push the 3000 unit mark very quickly if done on purpose. Could be useful for hermit fort players.
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Melting Sky

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Re: No Migrants? This one has me stumped!
« Reply #9 on: June 11, 2014, 04:28:06 pm »

Was your mountainhomes liaison killed during one of the sieges?
The liaison has nothing to do with migrants - the caravan is what does the reporting for that.

If you open your (u)nits list, what are the counts for Citizens, Pets/Livestock, Others, and Dead/Missing? If they add up to more than 3000, then you will never get migrants again (unless you run the DFHack script "fix/dead-units").

The more I look into this the more puzzling it becomes. Total, I have around 1500 units including both dead and living but when I went looking through the list for all my dead dwarves to see if any mountain home merchants or liaisons were killed I didn't find any. The strange part is I know I have more dead fortress dwarves than were shown in my list so there is something wrong with my dead/missing list. I have had at least 7 notable beards meet their end in a variety of different ways and only 3 are shown.

I also noticed that my dragon's kills don't seem to be getting counted either, perhaps because the bodies are vaporized by the dragon fire reaction.


« Last Edit: June 11, 2014, 04:37:37 pm by Melting Sky »
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blue sam3

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Re: No Migrants? This one has me stumped!
« Reply #10 on: June 11, 2014, 05:57:28 pm »

Was your mountainhomes liaison killed during one of the sieges?
The liaison has nothing to do with migrants - the caravan is what does the reporting for that.

If you open your (u)nits list, what are the counts for Citizens, Pets/Livestock, Others, and Dead/Missing? If they add up to more than 3000, then you will never get migrants again (unless you run the DFHack script "fix/dead-units").

The more I look into this the more puzzling it becomes. Total, I have around 1500 units including both dead and living but when I went looking through the list for all my dead dwarves to see if any mountain home merchants or liaisons were killed I didn't find any. The strange part is I know I have more dead fortress dwarves than were shown in my list so there is something wrong with my dead/missing list. I have had at least 7 notable beards meet their end in a variety of different ways and only 3 are shown.

I also noticed that my dragon's kills don't seem to be getting counted either, perhaps because the bodies are vaporized by the dragon fire reaction.

Run fix/dead-units. This looks very much like that kind of weirdness.
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Melting Sky

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Re: No Migrants? This one has me stumped!
« Reply #11 on: June 14, 2014, 05:00:39 am »

Run fix/dead-units. This looks very much like that kind of weirdness.
This seems to be a rather rare bug which is making it difficult to find any sort of real information on it, but I think you are probably right about the cause which is unfortunate because I've heard that the DFhack fix for this bug has some unpleasant side effects.

A big part of the problem is that most of the dead units simply aren't getting recorded anymore, making the list appear far smaller than it should be in reality.

During my last large siege I killed dozens of enemy goblins and trolls. Out of the entire crushed siege only 6 kills showed up on the list. Since I've only ever found one other person who describes having this problem, I'm not sure if this really is the same bug or not but given that most of the dead aren't getting counted anymore, the fortress may very well have run past the 3000 unit mark which is supposed to be the point where the migrant bug occurs.

A question for anyone who has seen this before, are the missing names of the kill list part of the same bug as the migrants not showing up or is what is going on caused by two separate bugs?

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§k

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Re: No Migrants? This one has me stumped!
« Reply #12 on: June 14, 2014, 10:25:59 am »

After reading this, I have a few questions:
1) When the list ceases to grow, does it mean that dead units will not further harm FPS any more?
2) When a dwarf dies after the list became full, are we able to engrave slab for him? What is the maximum of how many deaths are shown on the engrave list(I guess there should be a limit)? As goblins are shown on engrave list as well, can they occupy the whole list and leave no room for others?
3) If we fail to either memorialize or to entomb him, since he is not even listed on the dead/missing list, will the ghost rise?
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Melting Sky

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Re: No Migrants? This one has me stumped!
« Reply #13 on: June 14, 2014, 10:15:20 pm »

After reading this, I have a few questions:
1) When the list ceases to grow, does it mean that dead units will not further harm FPS any more?
2) When a dwarf dies after the list became full, are we able to engrave slab for him? What is the maximum of how many deaths are shown on the engrave list(I guess there should be a limit)? As goblins are shown on engrave list as well, can they occupy the whole list and leave no room for others?
3) If we fail to either memorialize or to entomb him, since he is not even listed on the dead/missing list, will the ghost rise?

Damn, I'm an idiot. It was late at night when I went looking for my fallen dwarves on the list of the dead. The dwarves were not actually missing. I searched using "dwarf" as my criteria without thinking about it. Most dead dwarves do not have "dwarf" listed as part of their name and thus only a couple babies and marksdwarfs showed up.

I don't remember every dwarf that has died in my fortress but I do remember about half a dozen notable ones which I searched for one by one and I found each of them on the list so there is a good chance all of the dead dwarves are on there.

Recently, I had a bunch of animals and a dwarf die of old age and they all showed up properly but I killed a lot of enemies in the last siege and not all of them seem to be on there. I'll wait one more year and see if there are any immigrants and if not, I will use the DFhack command to erase the kill list.

In the mean time I will watch my dead/missing list very closely from here on out and see if I can figure out exactly what is going on.
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§k

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Re: No Migrants? This one has me stumped!
« Reply #14 on: June 15, 2014, 12:02:15 am »

Thanks for replying. When engravers are feeling bored, I always let them engrave for goblins, in order to prevent them filling the whole engrave list.
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