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[Repseki]

If the system isn't overly complicated and utterly convoluted it clearly isn't Dwarfy enough to make.

The biggest obstacle I've run across is keeping the children in the burrow, and not running around the fort bashing the heads into things the moment they are assigned to it.

I haven't gotten around to trying after the "children not following their mothers as much" fix though, so that might have helped some.

[Staalo]

Thank you for your kind words, CancerousCthulhu! The original boarding school was an experiment in old 34.11 fort that predates this thread so it's not nearly as ambitious as some of the initial ideas here. Initially the purpose was just keep the children safe from snatchers and to teach them some skills at the same time. With ideas from people in this thread the concept has developed somewhat.

Repseki, the Flying Dwarf Syndrome seems to have been fixed. When I migrated the save to 40.11 I had an initial spike of dwarves crash landing all around the fortress but after that I haven't had a single case of FDS.

Overall, the upates aren't that much of a problem now that the saves are compatible. This world was initially genned in 40.06 and the fort's hundred children were a gift from 40.07's "breed like animals" bug.

[Repseki]

Good to know, I'll have to give it another shot.

[Staalo]

Well well, speak of the boiling demon, a student broke his hand and impaled his liver in a classic FDS case. I was switching rapidly between civilian alerts at the time so at least it's not as common occurrence as it used to be.

I also ran out of dogs to murder brutally. Most of the students don't "really care about anything anymore" and almost all the rest are "hardened individuals." Few students haven't gained any hardening at all from the slaughtering; I think there could be some specific personality attributes in play there.

Nevertheless, I'm going to be happy with this result and declare the tragedy training done. The cleaners can finally mop up all the dog blood and teeth from the floor and classes will resume normally. Next batch of students will reach adulthood in about two years.

[Girlinhat]

So I've not kept track of the entire thread.  What's the currently 'running theories' on room design, and what have we learned?

[khearn]

From what I've gathered, it's basically a danger room with food, drink, and beds on various sides so the kiddies have to traverse the area with spears. This has managed to train defensive skills pretty effectively. A few years of it seems to be almost as effective as a week or two in a regular danger room, except it doesn't train weapon skills. But this can be done to with kiddies, instead of waiting until they're adults.

Various attempts at exposing them to caged/chained/visible critters seem to be largely unsuccessful in improving discipline.

Modding puppies to be sapient and dropping them so they splat seems to work, but has limited application in the real world (for DF definitions of "real world"). This would probably be effective with a decent supply of actual sapient creatures, like goblin or elven volunteers.

Some success training climbing may have happened, but probably is of limited value. There has been discussion of training swimming, but I'm not sure if anyone has implemented anything.

But I haven't been paying close attention to everything that has been done, so I may have missed details. I'm currently working on research into which animals are the most effective for food production, which isn't nearly as amusing as dwarven child endangerment care.

   Keith

[Staalo]

Also, Swimming training is easy to add in by building a swimming pool adjacent to the spear traps. Once the children start truly moving when dodging (around Adept or so) they'll spend a lot of time in the water. I'd like to add some kind of controlled drowning to build up recuperation but that would likely result in heavy casualties in the name of science.

So, at this point, the following skills can be trained automatically just by leaving the children in the daycare:

- Fighter
- Dodger
- Armor User
- Swimmer
- all social skills trainable just by idling
- combat hardness (by killing lots of any sentient creatures within view, preferably in some automated way)

Climbing might be feasible to add in but the problem seems to be in motivating the children to go wall climbing.
Discipline proved to be a problem for some reason; the children seemed very resistant to all kinds of horrification attempts. Still, that's one that should be teachable.

I think there aren't a lot more that could be taught to children; Growing could be trained of course with a connected farm plot. Very occasionally children will gain combat skills like Wrestling of Shield User when sparring soldiers bump into them.

[Urist McWhatTheHellGuys?]

Problem is that you don't want them to train social skills, dwarves with friends are tantrum spiral bait.

[Reelya]

Growing is better taught to specialized kids rather than all kids. You only want new farmers occasionally, and you want the new recruit to start as maxxed out as possible.

Here's one idea for that (which I haven't tried but should work). Put the farmers in a burrow that does not include the stockpile to take the crops to, and burrow a kid or two in there who have access to both the fields and stockpiles. Then, the farmers can focus on planting (where skill does affect crop stack size) and the kid can focus on harvesting/hauling (which doesn't affect crop stack size).

[Staalo]

Problem is that you don't want them to train social skills, dwarves with friends are tantrum spiral bait.

That's very true; I've had few chilly moments when a child dies from a bad case of FDS and half of his 90+ friends  are suddenly flashing red.

Dwarves seem now to befriend each other faster than in 34.11, although one of the fixes for 40.13 will likely help that somewhat.

[Staalo]

Growing is better taught to specialized kids rather than all kids. You only want new farmers occasionally, and you want the new recruit to start as maxxed out as possible.

True, but on the other hand each child has eleven years to use for schooling. There's plenty of time to max out everything that is maxable. Actually, there's no reason to not max out everything.

[blue sam3]

From what I've gathered, it's basically a danger room with food, drink, and beds on various sides so the kiddies have to traverse the area with spears. This has managed to train defensive skills pretty effectively. A few years of it seems to be almost as effective as a week or two in a regular danger room, except it doesn't train weapon skills. But this can be done to with kiddies, instead of waiting until they're adults.

Various attempts at exposing them to caged/chained/visible critters seem to be largely unsuccessful in improving discipline.

Modding puppies to be sapient and dropping them so they splat seems to work, but has limited application in the real world (for DF definitions of "real world"). This would probably be effective with a decent supply of actual sapient creatures, like goblin or elven volunteers.

Some success training climbing may have happened, but probably is of limited value. There has been discussion of training swimming, but I'm not sure if anyone has implemented anything.

But I haven't been paying close attention to everything that has been done, so I may have missed details. I'm currently working on research into which animals are the most effective for food production, which isn't nearly as amusing as dwarven child endangerment care.

   Keith

Because I'm cheap and lazy, I'm using a mess of corridors rather than just a big room (yay, linear rather than quadratic growth!), but basically this. My approach is notably larger, but has the advantage of allowing for easy flooding of parts of the system without flooding others, for swimming training, along with other tweaks.

[Girlinhat]

Have you read the thread where swimming can be trained during sleep?  A careful application of pressure plates should allow some amount of water control.  The main thing is trying to split 4/7 water out and dump it in a room, easily.  I have solutions for this, of course, but it's kind of fidgety.

A question on climbing: Will they climb if they have to?  If food is placed up on a pedestal, will they climb up to get it, or will they starve?

[Arcvasti]

Problem is that you don't want them to train social skills, dwarves with friends are tantrum spiral bait.

From what I remember, dwarves with high Consoler or similar skills can actually lessen the impact of tantrum spirals. Or maybe that's just if they're the mayor? Plus social skills train mental attributes, which may or may not be useful.

[Reelya]

Have you read the thread where swimming can be trained during sleep?  A careful application of pressure plates should allow some amount of water control.  The main thing is trying to split 4/7 water out and dump it in a room, easily.  I have solutions for this, of course, but it's kind of fidgety.

A question on climbing: Will they climb if they have to?  If food is placed up on a pedestal, will they climb up to get it, or will they starve?

Sleep training swimming is an awesome idea.

Linking the sleep area to a water repeater should flood it to alternating 3/7 and 4/7 water. Would that work for sleep training, or is it preferable to have to be 4/7 all the way? I guess with alternating depths they could get washed around. I wonder how that affects sleep. It definitely feels like an exploit though. xD Falling asleep in a room half-filled with water should drown you.

This sounds like a really awesome idea though.