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[ImagoDeo]

That is a possibility.

What I had in mind was embarking to a zone with non-lethal but frightening weather effects. One of my more recent forts, Picksling, has a persistent bitter mucous rain that freaks out my dwarves when they're caught in it. It trains discipline rather slowly but surely. After about one cumulative year of getting caught in the rain, some of my dwarves gained a slight amount of discipline. Three of them - one miner, the duke, and the broker - are Expert.

Unfortunately, I don't know what trait (or combination of traits) produces this effect. The only similarity that stood out in their makeup was that each has some level of built-in depression. The duke "despairs of anything positive happening in the future and lives without feelings of hope;" the broker "tends to assume the worst of two outcomes will be the one that comes to pass;" and the miner "often feels discouraged." (But that's DEPRESSION_PROPENSITY, whereas the duke and broker traits were both HOPEFUL variants.)

The duke and miner were both from the starting seven. The broker was from the first migrant wave. None of my starting seven had any discipline to begin with. No invasions of any kind have occurred, except for the multitude of forgotten beast incursions in the sealed caverns. No deaths have taken place. The weather is the only thing I can think of that would have caused the gain: every so often I've had all the dwarves out woodcutting and hauling timber back to the stockpiles to fuel the steel and other metal industries. Eight other dwarves besides those three are Dabbling, and no one else has any Discipline experience.

Overall, it seems like weather will not consistently train Discipline. I seem to recall seeing minor gains in Discipline in a fort that got goblin invasions, because occasionally my dwarves would need to salvage goblinite and seeing the corpses trained that skill. And you say that the right kind of opponent will train discipline by proximity.

Figuring that out is one of the last steps. In the meantime, I'm going to put together a presentation of sorts to put some findings before the greater DF community. I'm going to go in order of skills trained and methods tried. Anything you think I should add besides the contents of this thread, generally speaking?

[ImagoDeo]

Staalo, did you ever get any deaths to falling while you were training kids to jump off into the pool? One of my adult miners in my current fort just leaped to avoid a spear and fell, crushing his throat and bleeding to death on the way to the hospital. I have shamelessly savescummed but unless that was a complete anomaly I'll need to make some changes to the way I'm doing things.

[taptap]

@ImageDeo: If you care about climbing, look at the white pedagogy thread.

[Staalo]

Staalo, did you ever get any deaths to falling while you were training kids to jump off into the pool? One of my adult miners in my current fort just leaped to avoid a spear and fell, crushing his throat and bleeding to death on the way to the hospital. I have shamelessly savescummed but unless that was a complete anomaly I'll need to make some changes to the way I'm doing things.

I did have some broken bones and I think one liver pierced by a rib from falling badly into the pool, but no deaths. That was in the first version with bare stone floors; since then I've built my pools with wood floors before filling them with water. Willow works great since it's light and commonly available.

[Ravendarksky]

How are people getting the children to hang around the desired areas? I'm wanting to passively train observer skill but can't find an easy way to force the kiddies into the barracks.

[Staalo]

How are people getting the children to hang around the desired areas? I'm wanting to passively train observer skill but can't find an easy way to force the kiddies into the barracks.

Burrows will do that for you. It requires some management with burrow assignments, though, if you're running multiple simultaneous training programs.

I'd recommend to just put the military barracks into the main meeting area right from the beginning; that way you'll train everyone in the fortress to high Observer levels before you'll get the other training programs running.

[Max™]

When all else fails, remember that "management" is just "magma" with an extra "neent".

[Ravendarksky]

How are people getting the children to hang around the desired areas? I'm wanting to passively train observer skill but can't find an easy way to force the kiddies into the barracks.

Burrows will do that for you. It requires some management with burrow assignments, though, if you're running multiple simultaneous training programs.

I'd recommend to just put the military barracks into the main meeting area right from the beginning; that way you'll train everyone in the fortress to high Observer levels before you'll get the other training programs running.

My children seem to be ignoring the burrow restrictions, but thanks for the suggestion

[Staalo]

So it looks I'm back with the program. My current world is crawling with baby snatchers; I had some immigrant couples with all five children kidnapped and almost everyone has some relative living in abduction at some dark fortress or another. Someone had to think of the children and so I decided to relaunch the Child Care program, just to keep the beardlings I had safe from the cruel world.

First I built a simplified version of the old Boarding School structure, powered by a minecart repeater:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This one works just as good as the original; I got the first Legendary Dodgers with only few months of stick whacking. I also have a captured necromancer in storage, in case I need to visit the zombie wool training method again.

I also accidentally did some science on Discipline training. I happened to notice that two students (out of 25) gained Discipline from seeing a body part left over from an unfortunate accident. Those two students didn't have anything else in common but they were the only ones with Bravery trait below average. This led to experimentation.

Skipping over some unpleasant details, I made the following observations:

- only dwarves with Bravery score of 40 or below seem to gain Discipline from seeing dead sentient bodies or body parts; there might be some other traits affecting this
- exp gain for Discipline is 5xp per witnessing a body/part
- this can be gained from same body/part about once per week
- the gain is per dead individual; for example, five teeth from one individual train only once, but five teeth from five different persons train five times
- witnessing the horror builds up stress for about 300 points' worth, but unlike in earlier versions this can now be countered by surrounding the subject with friends and luxury

This means that 

Total discipline gain  = 5xp x number of dead people seen x time in weeks

Can someone verify this? Could all the cowards in the fortress be trained to respectable levels of Discipline simply by exposing them to a mountain of corpses for few months?

[Max™]

The fact that this equation emerged in a thread for child care is amazing.

[OcelotTango]

Hmm, so dump all your bodies in a glass tube(to prevent miasma), and walk your dwarves through the room once every week.

[Staalo]

Or just use skeletons like I did. I also noticed that slower is better with this kind of training; dwarves witnessing dead bodies do gain that 300 stress points per dead individual which can overwhelm any amount of luxury and pampering when huge piles of corpses are used.

In other news, three babies lost their lives when I decided to live dangerously and refresh the training room booze stores while still running the equipment. For some unknown reason their mothers decided to wander to this remote location to have their dinner, with obvious bad effects from the relentlessly grinding wooden spear automata. The new system's emergency shutdown isn't as quick as I would hope; I'll just mark these unfortunate souls as victims of progress and move on.

Next improvement to the Boarding School will definitely be a remote supply drop system. I'll just have to figure out how to get rid of the empty booze barrels.

[Bumber]

Next improvement to the Boarding School will definitely be a remote supply drop system. I'll just have to figure out how to get rid of the empty booze barrels.

Give the boarding school an adult director or groundskeeper whose job is to remove the barrels?

[Staalo]

That could be a solution, although I'd rather not tie up any more adult workforce to this than necessary.

I did have a groundskeeper/doctor/cleanup guy in an earlier version of the boarding school, when there still was an in-school hospital in case of emergencies. In later designs the hospital was scrapped and with it went the resident doctor role. Maybe it's time to rethink this a bit.

[Ravendarksky]

Can babies be kept alive without parents these days? If so it should be possible to use minecarts to separate the two to keep the babies safe from their malevolent parents. I grow tried of mothers charging into battle and using their week old babies as troll bait.