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[Adequate Swimmer]

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the slopes are half the problem. It's deceptively easy to get accelerating returns.

Also while testing polders and badger domestication, I've had a 2yo fort that had no attacks and no sources of stress of any kind, with all the butcher's stockpiles hidden behind several doors and with vents to remove miasma. Everything including the pasture is inside to minimize time spent in the sun or rain.

Even with zero enviromental pressure I've had to dfhack the stress after 2 years. One or more dwarves were about to get haggard, simply from the pressure of everyday life. The frustration from not being able to do something creative while having no marketable skills, eat prepared octopus-man brains cooked by a master chef or join the constabulary at the ripe age of 87, is apparently enough to send some dwarves down the drain.

[PatrikLundell]

Some comments on the first page's summary:
- Unable to help: Giving water/food seems to satisfy that need as well.
- There are two different needs to get stuff. One for trinkets and one for clothes. The clothes one seems to be satisfied by getting a new uniform armor piece. Is it known whether uniform clothing parts are replaced when worn out? If not, having uniform pants rot off before replacing them, and being badly worn before that may well give a worse negative thought than the positive one of getting a replacement (after a rather long time).
- Socializing to fulfill the need to socialize doesn't require a burrow: a tavern is sufficient. In the tavern they socialize at random, so friendship and family formation requires intervention to happen normally, rather than as abnormal events, as indicated. It might work with just a tavern if visitors are banned and the fortress population is small.
- Need to wander: posts above say hunting fishing and plant gathering works for this need.

Issues that need to be dealt with by DF:
- The dorfs are lousy at prioritizing their time off, performing things satisfying needs already in a decent shape, while badly distracted by something else they ought to spend their free time dealing with. That "other thing" is often praying, and it's not unusual to see them pray to the wrong deity, while slipping further down towards madness.
- Trinket acquisition needs to be reworked so residents actively get trinkets, rather than pilfer trinkets only when hauling them (and I don't think they pilfer trade depot hauled trinkets either). Mere residents don't haul, and some resident types never apply for citizenship... Given how sensitive the balance is, 2 years without trinkets can break some of those that would have applied for citizenship, especially given that the crafting need can't be satisfied either.
- Food needs should be dealt with. Stupidities like vermin butcher products need to be removed so they never appear as preferences, and the specific butcher products are far too specific (and not even displayed by DF itself). There are lots of other things that could be done, and things should be done in general, but that's a large discussion topic in itself.

[mikekchar]

I have had dwarfs take trinkets while hauling them to the  trade depot before.  But I find that dwarfs often don't take trinkets even if they are hauling them and they want them.  So I regularly (about once a season) dump all the trinkets and pick them back up again :-P

I have yet to form any friends in my fortress even though I have a small, crappy tavern which is often full of dwarfs.  I do notice that there is almost never a time when someone is not reciting poetry, so maybe that's a distraction.  Anybody have better luck with friends.

Family I don't have any troubles with, I think due to the "house" centric design of my fortress.  I try to keep families in their house as often as possible.  But of course, many dwarfs have no family in the fortress.

I don't allow visitors in this fortress, so I'm not sure about petitioners, but I can believe that it's pretty difficult.

[Adequate Swimmer]

Does this mean dwarves with hauling labor disabled, like scholars and high-value craftsmen, will never obtain trinkets unless they're dumped and reclaimed in an organized manner?

Also does the presence of temples soft-limit the amount of time the dwarves spend socializing?

[Shonai_Dweller]

Does this mean dwarves with hauling labor disabled, like scholars and high-value craftsmen, will never obtain trinkets unless they're dumped and reclaimed in an organized manner?

Also does the presence of temples soft-limit the amount of time the dwarves spend socializing?

Yes, seems that way.
Well, yes, but praying at a temple is one of the most powerful positive thoughts in the game. You wouldn't want to get rid of that.

[FantasticDorf]

- Socializing to fulfill the need to socialize doesn't require a burrow: a tavern is sufficient. In the tavern they socialize at random, so friendship and family formation requires intervention to happen normally, rather than as abnormal events, as indicated. It might work with just a tavern if visitors are banned and the fortress population is small.

Sixty people double stacked onto each other in my 44.12 fortress and the Mayor is consistently re-elected every year for actually posessing friends, as mikechar said its still too slow because they're distracted. I can get friends but you have to imagine that some storyteller LOVES to butt in almost constantly and all dwarves stop to listen to a terrible story they've heard already, or is just a local fortress event they've no doubt grossly exaggerated.

I do notice that there is almost never a time when someone is not reciting poetry, so maybe that's a distraction.  Anybody have better luck with friends.

On consideration i am actually very close to deleting traces of musical and poetry types from entity.txt so its all foriegn import and self made compositions only and there's nothing to recite in taverns so patrons can drink & socialise in peace in the cozy drinking holes that i make, which if that worked would be a considerable improvement i think until the behaviour gets changes.

Might not actually stop storytellers in retrospect thinking about it but its worth a try, maybe just mod dwarves to be incapable of levelling the 'speaker' skill.

[anewaname]

...
- There are two different needs to get stuff. One for trinkets and one for clothes. The clothes one seems to be satisfied by getting a new uniform armor piece.
...

For the clothes happy thought, in 43.05(?), my military dwarfs only received happy thoughts from the finished goods that were assigned to their uniforms (cloaks, trousers, dress, hoods, etc), and not from the armor items (helms, leggings, etc). Has this changed?

[garlicfiend]

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the slopes are half the problem. It's deceptively easy to get accelerating returns.

I think what might be missing in dwarven psyches is a normalizing force. Dwarves seem to be caught between the push-pull of good and bad thoughts. But in real life, humans and most mammals in general, will psychologically classify their current conditions as "normal" as long as they are consistent, and will be continually pulled back towards baseline neutral. Happy things happen, shitty things happen, but afterwards, things go "back to normal". A continuous stream of events can still push a person past the ability to normailze.

And it wouldn't be hard to implement either. Give each dwarf a "stabilty" attribute on a decent bell curve, and then a snibbet code that adds or subtracts a few stress points back to neutral every tick, modified by stability attribute. Just a thought.

[Adequate Swimmer]

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the slopes are half the problem. It's deceptively easy to get accelerating returns.

I think what might be missing in dwarven psyches is a normalizing force. Dwarves seem to be caught between the push-pull of good and bad thoughts. But in real life, humans and most mammals in general, will psychologically classify their current conditions as "normal" as long as they are consistent, and will be continually pulled back towards baseline neutral. Happy things happen, shitty things happen, but afterwards, things go "back to normal". A continuous stream of events can still push a person past the ability to normailze.

And it wouldn't be hard to implement either. Give each dwarf a "stabilty" attribute on a decent bell curve, and then a snibbet code that adds or subtracts a few stress points back to neutral every tick, modified by stability attribute. Just a thought.

I don't know jack about psychology, but on a motor, generator or heater it's far easier to control the ups and downs than continually go towards a desired value. The former can be easily done with several lines of code or a crude analog device, the latter needs to run once per frame and needs a ton of code and input.

[garlicfiend]

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the slopes are half the problem. It's deceptively easy to get accelerating returns.

I think what might be missing in dwarven psyches is a normalizing force. Dwarves seem to be caught between the push-pull of good and bad thoughts. But in real life, humans and most mammals in general, will psychologically classify their current conditions as "normal" as long as they are consistent, and will be continually pulled back towards baseline neutral. Happy things happen, shitty things happen, but afterwards, things go "back to normal". A continuous stream of events can still push a person past the ability to normailze.

And it wouldn't be hard to implement either. Give each dwarf a "stabilty" attribute on a decent bell curve, and then a snibbet code that adds or subtracts a few stress points back to neutral every tick, modified by stability attribute. Just a thought.

I don't know jack about psychology, but on a motor, generator or heater it's far easier to control the ups and downs than continually go towards a desired value. The former can be easily done with several lines of code or a crude analog device, the latter needs to run once per frame and needs a ton of code and input.

I'm not sure the ups and downs here need control. All the stress effects are working as intended. A series of tramatic events should be able to drive Urist over the edge. I personally see the problem being the cumulative effects over time, so that dwarves are being driven to insanity and depression by being rained on. Rain is annoying, but it's also normal to get rained on. Dwarves should know this, should know what kind of world they live in. But until Toady decides to program in rational cognitive structure to balance out emotions in each dwarf, a simple normality mechanic would likely suffice.

What I'm thinking is pretty simple. Each tick, the game processes each dwarf's indivual state. It would take an addition of maybe two lines of code (pardon the pseudo code):

if Stress > 0 then Stress = (Stress - (x * stability));
if Stress < 0 then Stress = (Stress + (x * stabilty));

where x is the standard adjustment and stability is a dwarf stat to effect how strongly a given dwarf is pulled towards normal. I have no idea what those values would be - I imagine some play testing would be necessary to find out what's reasonable, or if the system would even work at all, lol.

[Fleeting Frames]

Yeah, Adequate Swimmer understood it; his rebuttal was that it is not FPS-efficient (compared to acting only when a dwarf gets new feeling, which doesn't happen on every tick).

[Saiko Kila]

It doesn't to be every tick, it doesn't even need to be every day to be effective...

As for the stressing working as intended - maybe it is, but it doesn't work like in real life at all. In real life responses to stimuli (i.e. perception) are logarithmic. One of guys who tried to quantize it was named Fechner hence Fechner's law, for example. This particular law uses natural logarithm, but for the same of argument we may say that difference between seeing a 1 gobbo and 10 gobbos dead is the same than between seeing 10 gobbos and then 100 gobbos, and then between 100 gobbos and 1000 gobbos. Stimuli is multiplied, but the response is only added, so you need progressively more stimulus to get the same response, and after certain amount of stimuli the dwarf (or human) gives no damn about particular death, because it's too low on a logarithmic scale.

The stressed dwarf should be less and less susceptible automatically, without need for eventual processing (as it is required now), which should still apply, but it's a different process. In real life this is required for survival in dangerous situations.

[Adequate Swimmer]

Aside from performance issues (finding an algorythm that can scale up to 200 instances and doesn't need to update every frame or every N frames) there is a subtle, insidious ideological question at work here.

What sort of humanity are you trying to simulate? Should people, or rather dwarves, be able to accept challenge and survive against the odds, or is everything ultimately just a joke? The presence of suffering, post-traumatic stress and suicidal behavior completely alters the game's tone and presentation. It's like the main characters of a WW2 propaganda movie suddenly and unknowingly ended up at the front door of Auschwitz, or a bunch of foppish, whimsical byronian poets deciding to make a literature club in Sarnath.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Aside from performance issues (finding an algorythm that can scale up to 200 instances and doesn't need to update every frame or every N frames) there is a subtle, insidious ideological question at work here.

What sort of humanity are you trying to simulate? Should people, or rather dwarves, be able to accept challenge and survive against the odds, or is everything ultimately just a joke? The presence of suffering, post-traumatic stress and suicidal behavior completely alters the game's tone and presentation. It's like the main characters of a WW2 propaganda movie suddenly and unknowingly ended up at the front door of Auschwitz, or a bunch of foppish, whimsical byronian poets deciding to make a literature club in Sarnath.

Wait, alters from what? Dwarf Fortress has always (except for a recent period when stress just didn't have any effect) had stressed suicidal dwarves killing their children, plunging the cute world of plump helmets and booze into suden dark tragedy. That's what it's known for and why a lot of people love it.

[Splint]

...
- There are two different needs to get stuff. One for trinkets and one for clothes. The clothes one seems to be satisfied by getting a new uniform armor piece.
...

For the clothes happy thought, in 43.05(?), my military dwarfs only received happy thoughts from the finished goods that were assigned to their uniforms (cloaks, trousers, dress, hoods, etc), and not from the armor items (helms, leggings, etc). Has this changed?

It seems in 44.12 that putting on new uniform parts will count, but only if it's better than what they have on value-wise - I've seen the thought come up for multiple soldiers upon receiving proper armor, which thanks to good smiths was generally of good quality. I also saw it ping when I left troops to sort shit out themselves gearwise and they'd do the song and dance when higher quality gear became available - everyone in the line got a good thought if the armor was of better quality than standard (basically the  "putting on an [insert quality] item." one.)

I have not seen it trigger when donning standard quality armor irrespective of material, so it may need some form of quality modifier to trigger.

Might have to test this out, though I'll need to gen up a fort and train a smith first.