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[Sarmatian123]

From adventure mode.

My dwarf in his first 3 days created around 100-200 masterworks. Carpentry, knapping, bone carving y'know.

I jump upon camping fire. I drop one single master quality helve. I receive message "master quality item defaced something"... the usual.

I check my dwarf and he has HUUUGEEE in yellow color negative thought for the defacement.

I've thought master crafters with literally 100+ masterworks, should not be getting huge bad thoughts about 1 going missing... I suspect Toady on purpose amplified emotions in this derailed psycho system in order to make his thieving system work. If this spring coming thieving system works only with extremely sabotaged emotional system, then it will be a spectacularly wasted 9 months programming effort... Just saying.

[Putnam]

Color actually isn't correlated with how negative the thought is afaik. See here.

[zeves]

so they changed stuff, well im gonna start playing this game again afther over a year break atleast. wont change the way i play at all and hopefully evrything will work out fine, or not and i learn something new.

[FantasticDorf]

New information, 'millbuilding' (dfhack named idle activity) drives dwarves to occupy a area even in the most mundane of circumstances, as they while actually standing up don't do much so long as there's a chair or walkable piece of furniture to seat upon wherein they will prefer to stop.

If a chair is adjacent to a occupied museum in a zone, they'll observe the seat, then the objects in a immediate 3x3 around them leading to a big dump of positive thoughts at once, therefore all personal dwarf rooms should have a chair centre & a dining table (to avoid no table bad thoughts when they attempt to eat), but this actually minimises the maximum amount of space and designs you can make for a dwarf to acknowledge, though 3x3's are quite basic and also spacious for a single dwarf and family when well outfitted.

(Chair/Museum Pedistal - Display case = 1 tick) (Chair/Museum Pedistal - Display Case - Museum Display = 2 or more ticks)

Without a chair/walkable furniture (like another museum pedistal) dwarves wont hold attention there long enough and instantly shift position after a tick, constantly erratically moving about. This might also attribute to why they dont talk so much.

I believe this is crossover code from Toady messing with nobles on foriegn sites to make them sit at their offices for the player to see in adventure mode, and that it has transferred with the global offsite meeting room behaviour than previous 30. versions, dwarves were never noted to be sitters.

[zeves]

so turns out if you ignore a emo dwarf for to long there are consequences.
my farmer that has been depressed for a long time went and killed my baron, witch normally isnt so bad but this noble was my only skilled armorsmith and trader.
well lessons learned. cull the weak early.

[FantasticDorf]

Made some significant headway into socialisation and happyness, the following configuration of chairs (in a 3x3) will work to smooth socialisation and friendship network building (not that all dwarves are good at it) will occur because dwarves will stand still over chairs for a prolonged amount of time and view them as well as adjacent furniture, which is long enough to get a conversation in. This works best over furniture assigned buildings, so the pictured simple stone statue garden can hold their interest as long as there are no other locations.



All 'walkable' furniture like slabs in memorial halls are valid for this as dwarves will pause to observe, so in meeting areas, they should ideally take up a central 3x3 or the entire floorspace to entice dwarves in.

Secondly a case study on the application of museums, particular 'of interest' objects surrounded by chairs similarly or isolated chairs centre can view objects within/around them, and you will need 4 chairs for the maximum seating arrangement wherein dwarves will occassionally walk over to the chair, view the chair - the pedistal and the contained object after standing for a period of time.

[Sarmatian123]

Chair without table sounds like mood's eating debuff.

[FantasticDorf]

Chair without table sounds like mood's eating debuff.

Happens a lot, but notably stone/wood chairs are cheap and more aesthetically sensible than covering a entire area with unengraved slabs, tables, empty museum pedistals/display. Key idea is that they hang around in the 'furniture' grid either conversing with dwarves on the outside of the 5x5 space or talking with dwarves immediately adjacent. Mathhmatically this room minus statue space, can fit 50 dwarves with 2 on each tile, especially if you burrowed them in there.

They'll also get the happyness from observing the chairs regularly, which keeps them sane and the art desire up to full. The thought for eating without a chair is significantly less hurtful than having no chairs in the fortress to eat at, all balanced out.

[Sarmatian123]

All idle Dwarves are rather in library, tavern or temple. I have meeting area in my dinning hall, lots of chairs there, but it is empty. Is there an effective range for talk? How about sizing tavern location over dinning hall? Will that do the trick with chairs too?

[anewaname]

so they changed stuff, well im gonna start playing this game again afther over a year break atleast. wont change the way i play at all and hopefully evrything will work out fine, or not and i learn something new.

Ensure your dwarfs can do some unimportant crafting to improve their happiness. You will receive a migrant who considers craftsmanship to be important, but they have no crafting skills enabled. Over time, they will become less happy because they have not crafted for too long.

[Sorgklaan]

So is it even possible right now to play a fortress with sieges and everything without an inevitable total collapse and without having to micromanage the absolute shit out of stress?

I just want to play dwarf fortress, but I've tried like a half dozen forts doing every old trick in the book to keep happiness high and they totally and utterly collapse the first time a few dwarves die.

[PatrikLundell]

I believe so. My fortresses have been brought down by the raid equipment corruption crash bug, not stress (although the last one had a fair bit of stress, including dorfs that had to be dealt with). However, I use cage traps to deal with invaders, so there's not as much corpse bit hauling (and underwear replacement on the corpse strewn battlefield) as in ones where you engage the enemies in battle (I still get corpse hauling, both because of invaders butchering merc visitors, and because I have to use militia to get rid of campers once the siege is broken).
Don't ever raid, though, or you'll eventually have to chose between giving up (or proceed into crashing) or playing without any military force at all.

[Loci]

So is it even possible right now to play a fortress with sieges and everything without an inevitable total collapse and without having to micromanage the absolute shit out of stress?

Yes. I have run a successful 30-year fortress in a haunted tundra with regular sieges, ambushes, and undead, so it can be done.

First, a note on stress: while it is possible to overwhelm your dwarves with stress, in my experience most "stress fatalities" are actually caused by personality changes either increasing the amount of stress or reducing the ability to handle it. A few "personality altering events" are much too common, and typical "good thought" tactics do nothing to combat the resultant personality changes.

Option A: Dwarves are expendable. Thanks to conquering and expulsion, you can easily retire overstressed dwarves off-site, to be replaced by unstressed migrants. At one point I probably replaced the majority of my 30-dwarf population in a single year. While losing peasants and potashmakers isn't particularly painful, exiling a legendary armorsmith really stings.

Option B: Avoid personality changes. You can avoid most of the common "personality altering events" by altering your playstyle. Things like not sending cave-adapted dwarves outside, avoiding inclement weather, assigning a dedicated "corpse cleanup" squad, and making sure you have clothing and goblets will significantly slow down the rate of "stress fatalities". My expedition leader has been with the fortress since it's founding (thanks to a good starting personality, protection from personality altering events, and some luck).

Option C: Cheating. You can mod dwarves to have higher stress-resistance, or just remove their stress with DFHack.


A few recommendations:

* Some personality altering events can be almost entirely avoided, like embarking in a desert to avoid rain, or building an above-ground fortress to avoid cave adaption.
* Stress is cumulative, but the chance of a personality change is not. Instead of spreading the stress widely (and risking many personality changes), assign problem tasks like corpse cleanup to a small, expendable squad.
* Some traits can mitigate certain bad thoughts and avoid any associated personality changes. A dwarf who "only grumbles mildly at inclement weather" is immune to rain and snow personality changes; a dwarf who "doesn't really care about anything anymore" can haul corpses without risk.
* Libraries can provide a barrage of happy thoughts (particularly if you have reserved books you can "release" when needed).
* Using the military equipment system to assign cloaks to stressed dwarves can grant several happy thoughts (one per quality-level). Enabling the mining or woodcutting labor will cause that dwarf to regularly re-acquire the cloaks for additional happiness boosts.

[Immortal-D]

In my experience, having a dedicated corpse team has only a partial success rate.  Simply viewing a sentient corpse can be enough to send Dwarves into irreversible depression.  Same thing with weather; you need to either forsake the surface entirely, or have a dedicated 'outdoors building team'.

So is it even possible right now to play a fortress with sieges and everything without an inevitable total collapse and without having to micromanage the absolute shit out of stress?  I just want to play dwarf fortress, but I've tried like a half dozen forts doing every old trick in the book to keep happiness high and they totally and utterly collapse the first time a few dwarves die.

I'm going to say the answer is definitely 'no'.  Even if you forsake the surface and build in such a way that siege fights are guaranteed to happen in the same place (boring, I feel), you still need to force socializing via Burrow once or twice per year.  Unfortunately, right now I'm forced to recommend anyone building a serious Fort use the DFHack command to remove Stress periodically.

[anewaname]

So is it even possible right now to play a fortress with sieges and everything without an inevitable total collapse and without having to micromanage the absolute shit out of stress?

I have expelled a few and do little micromanagement. I do examine each new migrant, ensuring they have a crafting skill enabled that produces items with a quality level (there needs to be workshops set up to queue a few jobs of this type of work each month), and ensuring they are added to a military squad that has an assigned barracks for individual combat drills (excepting miners/woodcutters/hunters). If you look at the average dwarf, they all respect crafting and military prowess. These two activities are as important to most dwarfs as praying, socializing, and reading, and you need to change each dwarf to allow them to do the activity. If they have no "work" of this sort over a couple of years, they will be much closer to cracking.