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[anewaname]

...The worst emotions they have are "lack of decent meals" or "being away from loved one"...

Are these the most common negative emotions, or the strongest ones? Usually the sum of the "lack of decent meals" and "away from loved ones" emotions is less than the effect of one "horrified from seeing a dead goblin" emotion.

How can you tell this? Is there some way to see the numeric values for each currently active emotion?

DwarfTherapist shows the number in the tooltip for each dwarf (see about 6 posts back in this thread, there is an image of the emotion info without the numbers. That is where the numbers will show, unless you changed the settings in the manner as I did). The numbers are likely available through DFHack but I don't know how to get them there.

[Immortal-D]

In my current Fortress, I have relatively careful management of corpses.  There is a stockpile near the front entrance with a 1-tile pathway & airlock.  I have also limited Refuse/Corpse Hauling to just the peasants.  What seems to be slowly but surely stressing my Dwarves, is literally everything else.  Seeing a corpse for most is just 'feeling uneasy'.  The bad thoughts which are really stacking up are being away from friends/family, plus lack of abstract thinking, merry making, decent meals, & practicing a craft.

I have a legendary dining hall (soon to be Tavern), and a temple that is literally just a zone overlapping the Soap Maker's workshop.  I started pumping out crafts so my Dorfs could acquire stuff, and adding statues at major intersections.  Planning to start engraving the main traffic areas as well.  I like to mix in the occasional low & medium quality meals for the lulz (because biscuits & stew), but have no shortage of ☼roasts☼

I have had major projects going on since the Fort's founding, no idlers in nearly 5 years (5 year anniversary, woo! ).  All of this leads me to believe that idle time is an unfortunate necessity now.  The lack of merry making, praying, and abstract thought; despite having all of those amenities, makes me think that Dwarves require free time now.  I have paused mining operations (there is already several floors of stuff waiting to be sent to the Forges & Jewelry Crafter), and should be finishing the next phase of my walls in short order.  After that, I plan to sit back and watch.  Hopefully some downtime will improve their moods.

[PatrikLundell]

I run my fortress on a season schedule, starting around year 3 or so (working flat out before that). As I run low pop fortresses, there's always work to be done unless I stop it...
My schedule is:
- Spring: Elven traders, surface boozable plants, shearing, all workshops at full speed.
- Summer: Human traders, underground plants that can't be grown in spring, boozable fruit harvesting, all workshops at full speed.
- Autumn: No trade (dead civ, so no caravan), most workshops disabled (smelter and strands extractor kept going, when goblinite/candy is available, quire making). Hauling of the hauling backlog.
- Winter: R&R. One month of martial arts training for most dorfs when I've gotten up on my feet. Nuptial encouragement/baby production encouragement. Only maintenance work (butchering of killed critters, trapped creature hauling, etc.). It's intended that there should be about two months of free time.

Obviously, the schedule gets interrupted by sieges, when cage hauling, prisoner stripping, and prisoner elimination override much of the "real" work.

Note that I haven't run my fortress since 0.44.05, and have to start a new one shortly, so I can't guarantee the schedule above still is useful.

[FantasticDorf]

Dwarves are just "alarmed" at seeing the stacked goblin corpses lately, maybe those early animals dying and the occasionally put-down of a crazed impossible mood dwarf has toughened them up a bit, most of them have the minimum level of discipline with no training.

I use double doors to just block a line of sight between my sentient corpses stockpile collected in wheelbarrows (which is 2x4 because large stockpiles of bodies causes MORE horror) to quickly escort them nearby the trash compactor opposite my corpse & animal refuse (cartilage etc) pile which is seeing a lot of use because a lot of unusable teeth were knocked loose, in which 44.12 for not having horror per teeth part is very nice.

> I actually wonder if it was teeth being very commonly knocked loose that elevated the horror if the amount of corpses = stress was true being counted seperately as body parts for exaggerating the problem rather than actually being knee high in corpses.

[Robsoie]

As i started a new fort in 44.12 , i immediately decided to go with the small tavern trick i was testing before with a tile line reserved for a booze-only stockpile, one reserved for food-only stockpile and one empty so the dwarves would accumulate there but without dancing space.
And no furniture to avoid them getting distracted by chairs, tables and etc...

As i did no temple and no library on purpose, i decided to not force burrow/ lock doors the dwarves inside for a month regularly as they would then only gather there.



And it has worked greatly, after 2 years on that fortress i have more than 50 dwarves and all of them have multiple friends.
Looks like making very early in your fortress those kind of small tavern setup is really a must .

Though the real test will be once gobs invasions will start, and gob body parts start to be seen and horrify dwarves before being atom smashed, and see if those friends will help them recover faster than before.

[Sver]

So, the tavern works, if done properly? Or is it just a meeting area, with no locations assigned?

[forgotten_idiot]

And it has worked greatly, after 2 years on that fortress i have more than 50 dwarves and all of them have multiple friends.
Looks like making very early in your fortress those kind of small tavern setup is really a must .

Actually, dwarves seem to make friends even without tricks now, although not as quick as before. In my forts it usually takes ~3 years for each dwarf to make at least 2 friends. Most social ones sometimes make as many as 10.

Also, I am really getting in love with the new stress system. One of my starting 7 got ripped apart by a giant cave spider, then was left to decompose in front of his buddies, and what followed was:

Urist 1 - Horrified, then depressed, never recovered, eventually died of stress.
Urist 2 - Horrified, depressed, then started "accepting" his friend's demise and now on the way to full recovery.
Urist 3 - Became impervious  to the effects of stress
and Urist 4 - became not just immune to stress, but got the trait  "never fails to seek out the most stressful and dangerous situations".

You've got to be badass to live under the mountain. Weak ones do not survive.

[Robsoie]

Hmm, there's then something that must have been improved/fixed between .11 and .12 as without doing tricky taverns and instead having regular tavern with enough dance space and tables+chairs, my dwarves were too much distracted by looking at their chair, their table, or were unable to stay in place for long enough (must go to the temple, oh no i must go to the library now, enough book reading let's go to tavern, oh nice table but wait there's the temple let's go there) idling in order to socialize.

[Immortal-D]

Since this thread has become quite the resource, I have amended the OP with all of the observations made here.  Any changes or suggestions are welcome.

[Rafatio]

I haven't reread the whole thread, but have a few comments or actually a lot.

- 'Caught in the rain' is currently the single strongest personality changer, sometimes causing multiple core values to be rewritten.

Supposedly thoughts are categorized now, is there any positive weather thought? Sun and rain are bad, never seen a snow related thougth... mist? Can mist counteract rain by occupying that slot? Edit: or mist+miasma as their own thing?

- It is possible to have a Dwarf with 'doesn't really care about anything anymore' without being completely insane, though often stress for that Dwarf is still quite high.

Still mostly a military thing, probably linked to discipline. Edit: my no carers are generally unstressed

- Lack of decent meals now means not eating/drinking favorite items, and you're unlikely to be able to satisfy more than a small percentage of the population given the complete randomness of their favorites. Cooking quality doesn't have any practical use any more (apart from buying out caravans).

There is important SCIENCE hidden in the utilities forum. Cooking seems to be the difference between a pretty decent and a legendary meal, and booze cooking lets your dwarf get a happy food thought from eating something he likes to drink. Helps a lot since drink preferences are not quite as vast as foodstuffs.

> As a important note, managers & nobles with [MEET_WORKERS] DO work to conduct meetings and de-stress dwarves a bit from red (yelled at) and yellow arrows (crying on) needs but all dwarves without migrated & embark assigned social skills (or newly born children) will not develop enough to replace experts posessing CONSOLER & PACIFIER skills.

I go trough mayors at an alarming pace in unhappy forts, getting yelled at is an unhappy thought for a newbie consoler, maybe a good one would be satisfied that they could help?

Children are categorically the lonliest having no recognisation of even other children, but Toady can't test this because of how long they take to grow up (given that many of his tests are on the starting 7 with already developed skills), many users i've read about have lonely children because the problems are fortress home-grown.

But playing seems to provide both needs reduction and happiness that can counteract all but the strongest problems. Until a parent dies or they grow up.

Also tattered clothing, get rid of loinclothes or arrange to have enough delivered. And then there's the small problem of dorfs not changing their x-accumulatin stuff in a timely manner despite complaining.


I think there are two seperate issues in general, most of the post deals with unfulfilled needs. I can't remember ever seeing a personality change from those. And you get ample warning in the needs section before something makes it up to thoughts. Micromanagment hell but possible.

The others are immediate experiences like seeing corpses, weather, conflicts, tattered clothing, family additions. These lead to personality changes so I think they are generally stronger, or maybe simply a different type of thought.

 
As a general impression I don't like how strong the changes are, the differences in personality between dwarves who haven't met the player yet are so tiny compared to the extreme opinions of long term residents. Would much prefer a gentler nudge from these changes, maybe more than one to the same trait over time, if another change-worthy experience happens. But thats just me griping about dwarves constantly turning their supposed career paths upside down.

[Robsoie]

Battlefield clean up are still a big problem for the dwarves fragile psyche.
After raiding gob pits enough to finally have them attacking me in retaliation (as i wasn't at 80 pop for a regular invasion from them), there was a massive amount of gob, beak dogs and trolls corpses and body parts everywhere.

The cleaning took a long long time (playing without dfhack) , and during it 5 dwarves fell into depression.
Still fortunately it's only a small amount in my fort and there's near 70 dwarves holding up so far, but considering everyone was kept roughly happy until that point, it looks like those cleanings are still a heavy hit on the stress level.

[Rafatio]

I'm not sure I like playing a realistic depression simulator either. Takes the fun out of invasions if you have to decide between losing fps from clutter or a number of dwarves to cleanup, every time. Maybe I'm still playing it wrong, some people seem to manage.

Are there any good theories around what focus actually does? A focussed dwarf being less likely to react to the corpses they haul because they're just so focussed on doing it well would be the best incentive to fulfill all needs I can. This is pure speculation, vaguely based on my kids who are always focussed from playing and do so even inside corpse piles with barely any effect.

[Sver]

The only theory I heard of is that positive focus greatly increases movement and action speed (including jobs), while negative focus does the exact opposite. It was based off the observation that unfocused dwarves were seemingly slow workers, and a focused adventurer gained a noticeable boost in combat.

[Fleeting Frames]

Focus boosts skill rolls, accuracy, speed, etc. 150% at max, 50% at min, iirc (though internal accuracy values and such seem to be actually far more apart.)

There's a comment by Toady in the previous FotF thread somewhere.

[Rafatio]

Focus boosts skill rolls, accuracy, speed, etc. 150% at max, 50% at min, iirc (though internal accuracy values and such seem to be actually far more apart.)

There's a comment by Toady in the previous FotF thread somewhere.

Thank you, I really should read FotF more. There goes my theory, not that the boost isn't nice.