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[Bumber]

According to the wiki... nothing is stopping the confetti from hanging onto the  party-decorations if their climbing skills are high enough. Climbing just gives a chance to suspend the in-flight status by grabbing onto an adjacent tile.  So yeah, the shaft should be 3x3.

Or use some smoothed natural stone. I'm pretty sure that's impossible to climb.

[Repseki]

I seem to be having some issues in my current fort.

Upon adding my forts children to my "Child Care" Burrow, with their bedrooms in the main "exercise" room to hopefully keep them in there, they not only almost entirely ignore the burrow and continue to follow their parents around in small packs like swarming kittens, but have started constantly hurling themselves into the floor, wall, or anything else. This has already cause five deaths via collision with they wooden minecarts I use in my quantum stockpiles.

I'm hoping Toady's note about children not seeking their mothers as much helps, but it's hard to do any Child Care related science when all of the children die of completely non spear-trap related injuries. I could deal with the deaths and unhappiness if they were reasonable about it, but these darn kids wont even die like real Dwarves! The least they could do is dodge off one of the many bridges into the central tube and land in the Main Hall, but no, they have to go for the stationary objects...

[Staalo]

That's exactly the same behavior I noticed in my fort! I was sure I couldn't be the only one... I've only had two deaths from it but plenty of broken bones and pierced lungs. I hope the next update will fix it.

EDIT: Right after that two more took a dive... one broke his both hands and the other died with a false rib through the heart.  The dead one seems to have been friends with just about everyone so now I've got to do some unhappiness management for a while. Avoiding tantrums is tricky now that I've let the students bond for years.

In other news, I was wondering why my graduates and in fact most of the military are now Administrators by their civilian profession... turns out all those biting and other demonstrations train Organizer at incredible rate. It's only logical!

[Staalo]

Congratulations to Udil Containedletters for becoming the third graduate from the Searingmines Boarding School! Here are his final grades:

Legendary +5 Fighter
Legendary +5 Dodger
High Master Armor User
Proficient Swimmer

Unfortunately young Udil can't join with us here in the graduation ceremony. In his eagerness to join his fellow graduates in the military academy, he decided to strip naked and run to the armor stockpile for his uniform... forgetting that he was still surrounded by hundreds of spinning training spears. I'm sure he'll be more cautious when he's released from the hospital.

EDIT: I've left it out of these reports but every single one of the students aged six or older is Legendary +5 in all social skills, in addition to being friends with every other student. One of the drawbacks of this approach...

[ImagoDeo]

all social skills

Actually, only certain personalities can train Liar and Comedian, as far as I'm aware.

Beyond that, the social skills of your recruits shouldn't matter if you can get them 1) used to tragedy and 2) disciplined. That's one thing I've tried to emphasize all along: it doesn't really matter how many people they're friends with if they don't care when they die. Solitary confinement has always been unnecessary so long as adequate tragedy training takes place.

[Skullsploder]

I have to say, despite my personal preference for solitary, the gains made by group schooling are indisputable. All you need to do is add in some serious tragedy training, else the social skills will be a disaster for your fort.

The death of animals trains tragedy. 30z plus is apparently the required drop height for goresplosions, according to the wiki.

I've been too busy to do anything in my own fort, sadly I'm still sitting with 1 child, 4 babies, and 4 furnished cells. Drop chute is aaaaaaalmost done, just need to smooth it up and down and remove the staircase, since I assume falling creatures can now cling to staircases. Or maybe I should take the 3x3 chute option, just to be safe. Meh. Also I have traps set up in the first cavern layer, but my hopes aren't very high. I'm currently mining for the next layers, and ramping up my food production temporarily so that I can fill the stockpiles and surplus can start flowing into the cells, and I will set up one of the cells with a repeating spike to test the viability of danger room training in solitary. This weekend I should finally be able to give you all some proper data about solitary confinement.

[MDFification]

I'll be interested to hear your results! I'll likely set up a test chamber once I finish my science fort. I really don't have any time to play what with frosh week ending and classes starting and all that. I had to read 140 pages of the Odyssey today! This was not an accident of poor planning!

[khearn]

My testing in 34.10 showed that a 25z drop is sufficient for full dismemberment. Eight test subjects were dropped and all 8 were dismembered. I also did a 24z drop, which was not sufficient for any of the 8 test subjects to be dismembered. Both drops were done with the test subjects starting out standing on hatches. I haven't done any rigorous testing on 40.XX, but the falls I've seen seem consistent with what I observed on 34.10.

If you drop from a retracting bridge, they start with a random velocity (horizontal and vertical) which can result in collisions with the walls on the way down. I did a 30z drop off a retracting bridge and one subject (out of 10 dropped) actually survived after hitting the wall on the way down. Presumably the wall collision slowed him down enough to survive the landing.

I don't think I did any testing of pitting test subjects. All my notes are of subjects starting out standing on either retracting bridges or hatches.

BTW, my tests also determined that the acceleration due to gravity in DF is ~= 0.032075 z/(tick^2).

   Keith

[StagnantSoul]

All you need to do is throw in flash cloning, and we can start the ORION Program/Spartan Project here.

[Staalo]

I've had serious trouble with early tragedy training. The students just don't seem to flinch no matter what amount of gore I'll spray them with. I even tested the drop chute idea by burrowing most of the fort population to the bottom of the disused invader V.I.P. entrance (25z high dodge trap with lead floors) and dropped a wolf cub in it. Nobody seemed to care.

I now do the hardening part during the year or two of military training right after graduation. Discipline will be trained automatically during sparring and I'm sure there'll be chances to get used to tragedy at some point. At least I'll make sure the graduates will be in the front line during those rare times when something hostile shows itself.

In few game weeks the last of the migrant children will graduate and then there'll be several years before the children born during the Great Orgy of 40.07 start maturing. I should have plenty of time to test new ideas for tragedy and Discipline training. Those kids will be monsters when they grow up.

[StagnantSoul]

It's because they're probably too small to leave a corpse. Want to truly scare the living (soon to be dead) urists out of these kids? Drop one of their own mothers down there. I accidentally pitted an unconscious dwarf into a daycare in 40.04, and it happened to be one of their mothers. Yeah.... The tantrum training helped a lot.

[Staalo]

Oh, it left a very nice corpse, it's just that the dwarves didn't seem to mind animal deaths at all. The students didn't react even when I packed their school half full of dwarven corpses and body parts. Straight out splattering their relatives would probably provoke a reaction but even that would probably be the wrong kind of reaction, resulting in tantrums, violence and unnecessary student deaths.

Sometimes an occasional Dwarven Flying Syndrome victim ends up where the students could see them and as far as I can tell they only get a bad thought about a dead friend.

[StagnantSoul]

Huh... Odd. Worst case scenario, I'd say place a wolf in there.

[MDFification]

Hrm. I think the drop chute method can still be used to train discipline due to (possibly a bug; sauce) dwarves still panicking at the sight of horrifying corpses. This does not seem to work with all corpses, only with specific ones dwarves find terrifying - of which the notable ones are trolls, ettins and forgotten beasts. Further testing may be required with these specific species - regular creatures are not known to cause the same effect.

tl;dr further testing required, change the corpses to a more frightening species (like trolls) and try dropped captured (and stripped) invaders.

[Staalo]

I'd believe dropping other sentients could work... maybe some kind of automated goblin salsa machine would harden students enough during training?

I'd test it but I'm still not getting any sieges... perhaps it would work if I'd mod [CAN_LEARN] tag to wolves or dogs?