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[Shazial]

Greetings from the hills.

I updated my dwarf fortress version to a newer one, and moved over my old save. It's not completely compatible, as I think this fortress was started at 40.11, and the version I currently have is 40.16 (Surprisingly stress hasn't been an issue in my fortress despite this version having a bad reputation for it). Transitions between versions have been rather smooth and I've been using the LazyNewbPack while playing.

Now however, the babies are proving a bit problematic. Not really because dwarves breed like rabbits, but because their mothers refuse to take them to the hospital despite quite a few of them having numerous body parts mangled beyond recognition (thanks to my McCheaterson style danger room on a popular hallway). Is this.. normal? I know dwarven ladies are prone to using the babies as shields and I've had it happen quite a few times myself, but I think I've always seen at least some of them in the hospital later on. My hospital is fully stacked and has free beds and traction beds too, so there's no reason not to take them there.

I spoke to mr. Google about the issue and it seems to be a known bug from somewhere earlier, but I wonder if anyone else has ran into it in recent times?

There is also another very annoying baby created problem. One of my miners recently spawned a little one. This now makes 6 kids for her (makes me want to geld her husband...) i.e. She currently has 4 babies of different ages and 2 children of different ages. I don't mind them breeding, future work force and cannon fodder is always nice, however the problem is that ever since the birth of the youngest one, she keeps spamming Cancel Job: Seeking Infant. At worst I had 24 pages of only this report and it annoyingly drowns every other announcement made by the game.

It doesn't really even make sense to me, she's already carrying a baby, a badly mangled one at that (see earlier baby problem). I don't know if she's looking for another baby that she's trying to carry at the same time, or... Never mind, I just checked, 3 out of 4 kids are in a grave with their upper body missing.  So I guess trying to find another baby isn't really the cause of it (Should I be worried about her having such a high infantile death percentage..?).

Any ideas what could be causing it and how I could stop the spamming? She does seem to do some work e.g. item hauling despite all the time spamming a cancellation message. Is concentrated baby/child camp somewhere in the depth of the fortress a viable idea (Build a big hall with food and entertainment and lock them all up in there)?

Ideas appreciated!

[Badger Storm]

You can turn off all cancel notices from the orders screen, if you don't mind possibly missing something important.  The baby communes you're speaking of have definitely been done before - someone here has a link in his signature.  I believe the title is something along the lines of "kinder, gentler dwarven child care".  I personally take a free-range approach to child care, but I just started playing with invasions on and I have yet to deal with goblin snatchers.

[Larix]

Babies are a special case. They're generally unable to take jobs, which means they will not eat, drink, sleep, get clothes or get treated in a hospital. Each of these requires taking on a job. They can be fed and watered by adults who notice a hungry/thirsty baby, nothing else (a wounded unconscious baby is not treated, because treatment requires the "Rest" _job_). Consequently, a _baby_ camp won't work, you have to wait for them to pass their first birthday.

Normally, a baby will be carried around by its mother, and mothers put absolute priority on scooping up any loose infants. Take a better look at your cancellation messages for infant-seeking cancel spam, there's a reason for cancellations mentioned right there. "Infant inaccessible" means the baby got loose and ended up in a place the mother cannot walk to, but is apparently still alive. Check the mother's relations screen again, scan through the babies and see if one of the living ones is not in the same place as the mother.

If the mother cancels picking up her child with the reason "too injured", she might have run out of hands to grasp with. There's not much you can do in that case, apart from blocking cancellation messages. Hands rarely grow back.

Locking up children (not babies) is possible and tends to keep them out of harm's way, but they don't care for orders and are thus a bit difficult to move to the childcare area. Assigning them personal bedrooms is the only reliable way to redirect them. Burrows are largely pointless because they control where a dwarf can take _jobs_, which isn't the main cause of child travel - mostly they follow their mother around, which isn't related to any job at all so can be done regardless of burrow settings.

[Thisfox]

Locking up children (not babies) is possible and tends to keep them out of harm's way, but they don't care for orders and are thus a bit difficult to move to the childcare area.

You could put mum on "maternity leave" and lock her up as brood mother in the childcare room with the new bub. Without her husband Urist McStudly. I'm told spore breeding doesn't happen any more for animals, is that the case for dorfs as well?

[Wheeljack]

Locking up children (not babies) is possible and tends to keep them out of harm's way, but they don't care for orders and are thus a bit difficult to move to the childcare area.

You could put mum on "maternity leave" and lock her up as brood mother in the childcare room with the new bub. Without her husband Urist McStudly. I'm told spore breeding doesn't happen any more for animals, is that the case for dorfs as well?

I do believe so. I started up a new fort, and all of my dwarves have been kept busy so far. None of my married couples have popped out a kid yet, and it's been several in game years so far. I'm actually considering putting some of the couples on a leave of absence, because I wanted to grow this fort organically with children.

As for your problems, OP, if it helps, once the babies mature into children they should drag themselves to the hospital to be treated. At least, that's been my experience with them.

[Shazial]

You can turn off all cancel notices from the orders screen, if you don't mind possibly missing something important.  The baby communes you're speaking of have definitely been done before - someone here has a link in his signature.  I believe the title is something along the lines of "kinder, gentler dwarven child care".  I personally take a free-range approach to child care, but I just started playing with invasions on and I have yet to deal with goblin snatchers.

Yeah I would rather not turn the cancel notices off because I tend to be a bit of a control freak - I want to know what's going on so I can respond as soon as I get a hold of the situation.

Oo, good to know. I will have to take a look at those threads and see about building my own childcare. I have some ideas, but it might be a better idea to look into what others have come up with first.

Babies are a special case. They're generally unable to take jobs, which means they will not eat, drink, sleep, get clothes or get treated in a hospital. Each of these requires taking on a job. They can be fed and watered by adults who notice a hungry/thirsty baby, nothing else (a wounded unconscious baby is not treated, because treatment requires the "Rest" _job_). Consequently, a _baby_ camp won't work, you have to wait for them to pass their first birthday.

Normally, a baby will be carried around by its mother, and mothers put absolute priority on scooping up any loose infants. Take a better look at your cancellation messages for infant-seeking cancel spam, there's a reason for cancellations mentioned right there. "Infant inaccessible" means the baby got loose and ended up in a place the mother cannot walk to, but is apparently still alive. Check the mother's relations screen again, scan through the babies and see if one of the living ones is not in the same place as the mother.

If the mother cancels picking up her child with the reason "too injured", she might have run out of hands to grasp with. There's not much you can do in that case, apart from blocking cancellation messages. Hands rarely grow back.

Locking up children (not babies) is possible and tends to keep them out of harm's way, but they don't care for orders and are thus a bit difficult to move to the childcare area. Assigning them personal bedrooms is the only reliable way to redirect them. Burrows are largely pointless because they control where a dwarf can take _jobs_, which isn't the main cause of child travel - mostly they follow their mother around, which isn't related to any job at all so can be done regardless of burrow settings.

Hmm.. That does explain why the wee ones can have half their guts hanging out and not get any treatment. o: I probably need to expand my hospital while waiting on the babies to grow since quite a few of them seem more or less injured (Horay for passive population control...).

Well, I wouldn't be wondering about the spam as much if there was a reason. There is not. There's just a lot of "Seeking infant" ever since that tiny thing spawned to the world, which is what makes me think it's probably some sort of a glitch. There was another dwarven lady who did it for a moment but then quit. This lady.. nope. She seems to cancel every individual job she has queued or is going to do, so there is pages upon pages of this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Thisfox]

....You have a mother frantic about her child, I've got a mother doing the opposite, abandoning her child to my fort, despite the fact that she doesn't belong here....

Find the child. It probably has crawled to an inaccessible place.

[Grim Portent]

If you want the cancellation spam to stop you can either remove all the mother's labours until the baby becomes a child, or you can remove the [BABY:1] token from the dwarfs raws, all babies will instantly be children, any newborns will also be children.

[Aslandus]

Maybe you should turn off the spike trap in your hallway, I generally keep danger rooms isolated so I don't get turkeys and children being randomly impaled by wooden spears...

[omega_dwarf]

Babies are a special case. They're generally unable to take jobs, which means they will not eat, drink, sleep, get clothes or get treated in a hospital. Each of these requires taking on a job. They can be fed and watered by adults who notice a hungry/thirsty baby, nothing else (a wounded unconscious baby is not treated, because treatment requires the "Rest" _job_). Consequently, a _baby_ camp won't work, you have to wait for them to pass their first birthday.

Normally, a baby will be carried around by its mother, and mothers put absolute priority on scooping up any loose infants. Take a better look at your cancellation messages for infant-seeking cancel spam, there's a reason for cancellations mentioned right there. "Infant inaccessible" means the baby got loose and ended up in a place the mother cannot walk to, but is apparently still alive. Check the mother's relations screen again, scan through the babies and see if one of the living ones is not in the same place as the mother.

If the mother cancels picking up her child with the reason "too injured", she might have run out of hands to grasp with. There's not much you can do in that case, apart from blocking cancellation messages. Hands rarely grow back.

Locking up children (not babies) is possible and tends to keep them out of harm's way, but they don't care for orders and are thus a bit difficult to move to the childcare area. Assigning them personal bedrooms is the only reliable way to redirect them. Burrows are largely pointless because they control where a dwarf can take _jobs_, which isn't the main cause of child travel - mostly they follow their mother around, which isn't related to any job at all so can be done regardless of burrow settings.

Is this really the case? I feel like I've been able to burrow kids before (both in fun times as contingency, and just as precaution against snatches), but that may have been because I always burrow them in a food stockpile meeting area, so they came when they took break or eating/drinking jobs. I do recall it taking a nerve-wrackingly long time for them all to get there, though.

[Larix]

Children honour alert burrows, but normal burrows are just "only take jobs in this area" restrictions. Which has little effect on children, because all their jobs are eat, sleep, drink, party, get new sock and harvest plant. All their random wandering about isn't a job and thus doesn't give a flip about burrows. If they hang out in their burrowed meeting hall and bedroom they don't do this because of burrows but because hanging around in such places is an acceptable idling occupation.

(There are probably all sorts of exceptions and anecdotes, but the baseline is that to collect children without an all-hands alert, assigned rooms and meeting areas work decently, while burrows work very poorly.)