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[Buckley]

Has any !!Science!! been established concerning the stress scale?  According to DT one of my "fine" dorfs is at -62.5k stressed.  Seems like a lot, but then again I have no idea what the scale is.

Strange thing is, I can't see really anything in thoughts that give me any kind of indication at what is stressing the poor girl out so much....

[Aslandus]

You are checking her thoughts? Anything yellow or red is probably stressing her, but here's a chart of how much:
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Emotion

I think DT is a little buggy right now, but if they're not blinking with the red arrow of sadness, lapsing into depression or tantruming the stress isn't too bad

[Putnam]

Negative is good. It means they have negative stress, I.E they're happy. 0 is neutral. The numbers are way bigger than they used to be. Therapist is correct.

[Staalo]

Yes, negative numbers mean happy, with -99k being the lowest possible value. It can go up from there quite quickly, often a single visit to a corpse stockpile can send it soaring.

At positive 100 000 the dwarf will get a "Stressed" status and will start flashing the red arrow. At 200 000 the dwarf will be "Haggard" and will start to experience periods of insanity. I suppose at 300 000 something more spectacular should happen but luckily none of my dwarves have gotten so far.

[Badger Storm]

Check her personality profile.  Chances are she doesn't handle stress well.  A dwarf with the lowest category of stress tolerance can become officially "stressed" from seeing a dead kobold like twice, so keep your dead bodies out of sight.  I thought red was the worst color for thoughts, but apparently it's yellow? 

[Iamblichos]

Something else to watch out for - in recent releases (not sure about 23-24) stress didn't subside the way it was supposed to, so once they get stressed no amount of good thoughts makes it recede.  So once the red arrow starts flashing, that dwarf is on a one-way trip to Tantrumville.

[Henour]

Stress has been "fixed" in newer versions.

It's still possible that you get Dwarfs with a Personality that will go crazy over time no matter what you do but for over 99% of them it should be fine. (Going by the fact that I had 3 forts > 100 Dwarfes on the newer releases and only one Dwarf couldn't handle the stress no matter what I did).

Before the stress fix I had a fort with a few dwarfs over 300k Stress. They do the same thing other stressed dwarfs do. (Being Melancholic/Throwing Tantrums/Starting Fights) depending on the personality, they just do them more often.

[Larix]

Dwarfs can go entirely mad from stress, there just are _three_ not-quite-mad-yet stages before it (and few dwarfs/fortresses will last long enough for an unhappy dwarf to completely snap). The third stage before full insanity is called "haunted".

Stress has been toned down in recent versions, so that a dwarf can recover from stress when they have regular happy and no further unhappy thoughts for a good long while. Just like it usually takes several seasons to build serious stress, it also takes months to years to remove it.

And whether a dwarf actually gets stressed depends very much on personality. It may be that personality provides _multipliers_ to stress increments, which can make for very vast differences in response.

[Authority2]

There's been one stress bug where a scar will keep giving a dwarf stress like a wound every season forever, inevitably spiralling them into insanity. That's only been fixed in the latest version, 40.24.

[Putnam]

Not a scar, but a legitimate injury, like the loss of a hand.

[Buckley]

Yes, negative numbers mean happy, with -99k being the lowest possible value. It can go up from there quite quickly, often a single visit to a corpse stockpile can send it soaring.

At positive 100 000 the dwarf will get a "Stressed" status and will start flashing the red arrow. At 200 000 the dwarf will be "Haggard" and will start to experience periods of insanity. I suppose at 300 000 something more spectacular should happen but luckily none of my dwarves have gotten so far.

Perhaps 300k sends them 'sploding into grape jelly or something.

Thanks... this was what I was looking for.  Weird thing is she was 'stressed' with a negative stress value of -66k.  It was moving toward the postive end but I didn't notice or see any negative thoughts in game or in DT.  Anywho... my OCD caused me to scrap that game anyway so at least I'll keep a close eye on it now...

[Eldin00]

It seems like discipline might improve a dwarf's ability to avoid tantrums and such at a high stress level. In my current fort, my captain of the guard has stress that just won't go down (it's at 818k as I'm typing this). It's been climbing steadily for about 2 years in game, and been over 600k for more than a game year. He's briefly slipped into depression once in all that time, and otherwise has suffered no ill effects from the extreme stress (so far). The only thing special about him? grand master discipline.

[Buckley]

It seems like discipline might improve a dwarf's ability to avoid tantrums and such at a high stress level. In my current fort, my captain of the guard has stress that just won't go down (it's at 818k as I'm typing this). It's been climbing steadily for about 2 years in game, and been over 600k for more than a game year. He's briefly slipped into depression once in all that time, and otherwise has suffered no ill effects from the extreme stress (so far). The only thing special about him? grand master discipline.

Heh... let's hope this is true... and that the inevitable 'crack' leads to him showing up with a Dwarven Uzi in the dining room... lmao

[Eldin00]

Well, my massively stressed dwarf finally went stark raving mad. The highest his stress level ever got was about 840k, it came back down to 828.9k from that peak before he broke. It's rare that I see a dwarf hit 500k without going insane in some fashion, but this dwarf, with a stress vulnerability stat of 70 no less, kept it together almost 3 years at over 500k, with a total of 3 bouts of depression in all that time. I can't find anything about him that might explain it except his very high discipline.

He spent the last 3 years of his life with "has been utterly harrowed by the nightmare that is his tragic life" as the first line of his description.

[ComatosePhoenix]

Are tantrum spirals On their way out now? it seems that since not all dwarves respond to stress with unrestrained violence, it doesn't seem like one unhappy dwarf will cause the collapse of the entire fortress anymore.