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[Staalo]

It is possible to get a playable dwarven civilization with no living dwarves in it. I had one world where the only dwarf civ consisted entirely of conquered goblins.

In another world the only surviving member of my civ was the last king living as a bandit leader somewhere in the wilderness. It still counted as a playable civilization.

However, the effects of these scenarios were fairly boring. With no historical dwarves in the world the game just rolls random migrants and the fortress proceeds as usual, except with citizens that have no earlier background or relatives. Even caravans and liaisons seem to just poof into existence when they are needed.

[Varnifane]

Strange.

I'm running a world where the dwarves died out and while I get migrants and merchants I don't get a liaison.

[Devin]

There's a guy doing a succession fort now of a world where the dwarf civilizations were all wiped out by goblins.

[MDFification]

However, the effects of these scenarios were fairly boring. With no historical dwarves in the world the game just rolls random migrants and the fortress proceeds as usual, except with citizens that have no earlier background or relatives. Even caravans and liaisons seem to just poof into existence when they are needed.

Is there any way to avoid this? That's my biggest problem right now... caravans and migrants coming to existence without a civ around to support it.
I can make sure I get no migrants and caravans... but not without cutting off all the caravans for other races, which I actually want.

[NW_Kohaku]

However, the effects of these scenarios were fairly boring. With no historical dwarves in the world the game just rolls random migrants and the fortress proceeds as usual, except with citizens that have no earlier background or relatives. Even caravans and liaisons seem to just poof into existence when they are needed.

Is there any way to avoid this? That's my biggest problem right now... caravans and migrants coming to existence without a civ around to support it.
I can make sure I get no migrants and caravans... but not without cutting off all the caravans for other races, which I actually want.

You could just use a pop cap of 1 in init for a simple way to stop migrants, which is easy. 

For caravans, you need to get more tricky.  You could disallow dwarves from using [COMMON_DOMESTIC_PACK], [COMMON_DOMESTIC_PULL], and [COMMON_DOMESTIC_MOUNT] in the entity_standard raw.  This disallows horses and things at embark. Then take away [DIPLOMAT_BODYGUARDS] and [MERCHANT_BODYGUARDS], as well.  Maybe all you really need to do is take out the ACTIVE_SEASON tag to stop them from ever coming.  You should probably also eliminate or mod all nobles that aren't appointable. 

To help ensure dwarfy death, I'd recommend further changing your worldgen parameters.  I like to massively mess around with my worldgen parameters, anyway, since I like having more diverse biomes, so I tend to put variances up to 2000 or something instead of 10. 

Anyway, what you want to do is make mountains less common, and mountains are caused by elevations greater than 200.  Go to your elevation weights, and make them something like 2x2 and 5:10:1:1:1 with 2000 variance to make mountain ranges tiny and sparse.  (The first number is the weight of oceans, last three are mountains, the second is everything else.  "Everything else" appears for half of the third number as well, but you get 100% not-mountain if you weight the second number.) 

You can change what biomes dwarves will cross when looking to expand their civ by taking away [BIOME_SUPPORT:FOO] tags in entity_standard. You might also want to drop MAX_POP_NUMBER to something more like 100.  MAX_STARTING_CIV_NUMBER of 1, as well, better ensures extinction, and lets you spawn more civs of other races, especially things like elves, that tend to like to genocide dwarves if they have a chance.

By extension, go to rainfall, up variance to something high like 1000, and set weights to be more like 3:1:1:4:30, and you'll have a TON of forests.  Guaranteed elf conquest of the planet. 

Then, you can ensure their demise either through upping megabeasts and unique demons (which create goblin civs) or through just letting the elves conquer.  You can increase the odds of making elves conquer by further tweaking their ethics, although that's probably overkill by this point. (Keep in mind, if an elf civ is what destroys your dwarf civ, they will never have declared peace, so you will still be at war. They WILL ambush you early.) Try setting things like LYING or OATH_BREAKING to ACCEPTABLE. (This also changes the penalty of mandates, apparently.)

[Staalo]

Is there any way to avoid this? That's my biggest problem right now... caravans and migrants coming to existence without a civ around to support it.
I can make sure I get no migrants and caravans... but not without cutting off all the caravans for other races, which I actually want.

Not that I know of, sorry... this has been one of my major peeves of .40.xx.

I've found that better "dwarfkind on the brink of extinction" scenario can be had in a world where the dwarves are under threat but still with sizeable settlements. In one world the parent civilization was almost overrun by goblins and megabeasts when I embarked; the migrants I had seemed to reflect this. There was a constant stream of refugees from the mountainhome, dwarves whose family members were killed in attacks, and some with actual injuries or memories from fights with megabeasts. I had much stronger feeling of an epic story from those dwarves than from the pod people the game engine rolls when it decides that it needs some migrants out of thin air.

[Master Catfish]

You can change what biomes dwarves will cross when looking to expand their civ by taking away [BIOME_SUPPORT:FOO] tags in entity_standard. You might also want to drop MAX_POP_NUMBER to something more like 100.  MAX_STARTING_CIV_NUMBER of 1, as well, better ensures extinction, and lets you spawn more civs of other races, especially things like elves, that tend to like to genocide dwarves if they have a chance.

I did only this and it worked pretty well!   I generated two worlds with a history of 125 years each.  In both cases, a single (small) dwarf settlement appeared, but the dwarves died.  I even tried reclaiming it to see if there were still dwarves milling about.  There were none. 

No option for being a dwarven adventurer, but it was still possible to play fortress mode.  Migrants arrived as normal.  I didn't wait to see if a merchant would arrive, though. 

[Edit: Merchants do arrive, but with the announcement "No outpost liason?  How curious!" Also, important to note that you can tell whether or not a civ is extinct during world gen by the icons for your settlements.  A settlement that has the icon of a crown is a ruin.  If you pause world gen periodically, you can check.  If you only see ruins, your civ is dead.]

[davesoft]

Starting in very early history can have this 'build the empire' effect, I tend to start around 5 or 7 so that a few things have happened, but not much.
In my current world the dwarves were near extinction, a girl in the dwarf became queen and the only goblin civilisation is miiiiiles away, so no sieges

It's now year 28, the capital is worth 3mil and have good defenses, and the current fortress (3rd) is close to 2mil with 1 shoddy squad. The first fortress fell to a megabeast I released from the depths, which eventually attacked the 2nd fortress and died.

I think that's what nearly finished off the dwarves, I started very early, got very wealthy so they all came to me, and then I got them all killed.

[Master Catfish]

Neat idea.  Do the other civs continue to grow in the background, or does the rest of the world go into stasis? 

[davesoft]

Over the 4 decade maps I have so far, I can see territories of civs miiiiiles from me growing and shrinking. And without any me-interaction with elves at all, dwarves now seem to be at war with them, and they occasionally ambush me now. Can't wait to see how that happened off screen

Also! I passed into the age of legend a few years ago, just checked legend mode and AFTER the age of legend started a Forgotten beast killed another one, then on the other side of the world another Forgotten beast got killed by a cave crocodile.
There's still plenty of powerful monsters on the list, but thier killing each other at an impressive rate without me!

[Epicfaillord]

I once started a fortress in a world where the dwarves had gone extinct within something like 12 years of world creation with no intervention by me. That fall I got a caravan and exactly two waves of migrants, but no liason.

I don't see why'd you play without migrants since you will probably get the starting seven killed off by some beast within 5 years or so unless you lock yourself in a mountain. A year in the life of a fort is like two-three hours on my end, so just waiting for the first few children to grow up would be mind numbingly slow. As it is the scarcity of seiges is to the point where I end up with 120 dwarves and 7 squads of legendary supersoldiers in full steel/silver by the time they show up on year 15 of the fort's life or whatever. I rarely see (semi)megabeasts, and when I do they just die in three or four hits to my squad of legendary+5 hammerdwarves with legendary or higher in every combat skill. Forgotten beasts are another story, but I don't pierce the caverns at all until like year three because forgotten beasts tend to show up as early as the first fall or second spring and massacre my dwarves. Not to mention stuff like blind cave ogres being able to appear with no population or wealth requirements. Once I got a cave dragon in my caverns and made the mistake of penetrating the side of the caverns. My population of 30 non-military dwarves died in minutes.

[NW_Kohaku]

I once started a fortress in a world where the dwarves had gone extinct within something like 12 years of world creation with no intervention by me. That fall I got a caravan and exactly two waves of migrants, but no liason.

I don't see why'd you play without migrants since you will probably get the starting seven killed off by some beast within 5 years or so unless you lock yourself in a mountain. A year in the life of a fort is like two-three hours on my end, so just waiting for the first few children to grow up would be mind numbingly slow. As it is the scarcity of seiges is to the point where I end up with 120 dwarves and 7 squads of legendary supersoldiers in full steel/silver by the time they show up on year 15 of the fort's life or whatever. I rarely see (semi)megabeasts, and when I do they just die in three or four hits to my squad of legendary+5 hammerdwarves with legendary or higher in every combat skill. Forgotten beasts are another story, but I don't pierce the caverns at all until like year three because forgotten beasts tend to show up as early as the first fall or second spring and massacre my dwarves. Not to mention stuff like blind cave ogres being able to appear with no population or wealth requirements. Once I got a cave dragon in my caverns and made the mistake of penetrating the side of the caverns. My population of 30 non-military dwarves died in minutes.

Keep in mind that time generally passes relative to the size of your fortress, and how much intervention you are performing. 

A 100-dwarf fort can take dozens of hours per year, while a 10-dwarf fort can go through a year in only about one or two.  If you reach a point of total stability, you can just leave the fort running for hours, which means you could simply go eat dinner, and come back to see if there were any major changes.  In some of my slower forts, I bear with an FPS of 5 or less by making multiple complex orders, and then just letting it run overnight.

[Epicfaillord]

I once started a fortress in a world where the dwarves had gone extinct within something like 12 years of world creation with no intervention by me. That fall I got a caravan and exactly two waves of migrants, but no liason.

I don't see why'd you play without migrants since you will probably get the starting seven killed off by some beast within 5 years or so unless you lock yourself in a mountain. A year in the life of a fort is like two-three hours on my end, so just waiting for the first few children to grow up would be mind numbingly slow. As it is the scarcity of seiges is to the point where I end up with 120 dwarves and 7 squads of legendary supersoldiers in full steel/silver by the time they show up on year 15 of the fort's life or whatever. I rarely see (semi)megabeasts, and when I do they just die in three or four hits to my squad of legendary+5 hammerdwarves with legendary or higher in every combat skill. Forgotten beasts are another story, but I don't pierce the caverns at all until like year three because forgotten beasts tend to show up as early as the first fall or second spring and massacre my dwarves. Not to mention stuff like blind cave ogres being able to appear with no population or wealth requirements. Once I got a cave dragon in my caverns and made the mistake of penetrating the side of the caverns. My population of 30 non-military dwarves died in minutes.

Keep in mind that time generally passes relative to the size of your fortress, and how much intervention you are performing. 

A 100-dwarf fort can take dozens of hours per year, while a 10-dwarf fort can go through a year in only about one or two.  If you reach a point of total stability, you can just leave the fort running for hours, which means you could simply go eat dinner, and come back to see if there were any major changes.  In some of my slower forts, I bear with an FPS of 5 or less by making multiple complex orders, and then just letting it run overnight.

The issue I have with that is that if you run out of food or booze or whatever for any reason, by the time you come back everyone will be dead. You'd probably have to seal every entrance to your fort and deal with the hordes of invaders when you got back on, too. Plus theres always moods and babies and pretty much anything that pauses your game. I run the fort with a lot of intervention, but thats probably because I don't use autolabor. I have a three year fort thats at 50 FPS and I already want to abandon it to restart with a 2x2 embark square so I can have 80 or more fps throughout the life of my fort. I just can't handle my dwarves taking 3-4 minutes to haul gold statues to the nobles quarters. I can't wait until Toady implements complete multicore utilization so we can double, triple, or even quadruple the size and life of our forts. That really should be next on the agenda, since the game already maxes out a single core of all reasonably priced processors.

[davesoft]

You can generally plan for 8 hours booze and food needs, artifact creation is what ruins my overnight attempts

[NW_Kohaku]

The issue I have with that is that if you run out of food or booze or whatever for any reason, by the time you come back everyone will be dead. You'd probably have to seal every entrance to your fort and deal with the hordes of invaders when you got back on, too. Plus theres always moods and babies and pretty much anything that pauses your game. I run the fort with a lot of intervention, but thats probably because I don't use autolabor. I have a three year fort thats at 50 FPS and I already want to abandon it to restart with a 2x2 embark square so I can have 80 or more fps throughout the life of my fort. I just can't handle my dwarves taking 3-4 minutes to haul gold statues to the nobles quarters. I can't wait until Toady implements complete multicore utilization so we can double, triple, or even quadruple the size and life of our forts. That really should be next on the agenda, since the game already maxes out a single core of all reasonably priced processors.

Stocking up on enough food and booze to last 10 years is not difficult, and simply leaving a still and cook making food and booze on repeat forever or using workflow is also not difficult.  Also, the game pauses at certain points, including on a siege or the annual save if you set it up that way.

I leave games running while I go to sleep all the time, and I have nearly no fatalities outside of megaproject snafus that cause cave-ins. But yeah, pausing on artifact creation tends to leave me with plenty of interruptions.

Furthermore, people have been begging for multithreading since 2006.  Don't hold your breath.  I don't think I've ever seen a quote where Toady's even considered it, no matter how many people complain about how easily it could be done, mostly because Toady's never worked with multithreading, and thinks it would be too much of a bother (would require destroying a ton of code) to try learning it.

EDIT: Somehow double-bracketed the urls...