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[Witty]

As someone who has played DF on and off for at least 9 years now... I have only just learnt this from reading this thread right now.
I never knew that complaint was for the food pref.

I'm fairly certain this was a relatively recent change (possibly corresponding with the personality rewrite). In 34.11 at least I know dwarves would receive hefty happy thoughts from masterful lavish meals, regardless of components.

[ZM5]

Would anyone not be confused by this?

As someone who has played DF on and off for at least 9 years now... I have only just learnt this from reading this thread right now.
I never knew that complaint was for the food pref.

I honestly didn't even think of that either, yeah. Played the game for around 5 years now and the decent meals thing seemed more than a bit unclear to me. The game kinda has that issue with unclear nomenclature in other places too - I still, as one example, don't actually know what the "uphold tradition" need entails, or if it can even be completed.

[recon1o6]

My experience with stressed dwarves causing game ending frustration usually boiled down to one of several things in addition to what's been said above

Firstly, dwarves remembering and being changed by singular events without a cap causing personality changes to pile up and overload the dwarf (and my screen with descriptions)
I see it most often with members of the military or medical dwarves after a particularly bloody battle or mining accident.
Case in point I had one poor sod with 31 different bad memories and he threw tantrums repeatedly before suddenly going catatonic after a few personality changes. Despite the fact some of these were several years old from the start of the game he still kept stress rising until he accidently killed his cat and had no less than 3 changes that caused catatonia. First from well..killing the cat, second was seeing the dead body, then again for it leaking miasma. All in the space of a day.

Second is what seems to be a lack of removal of bad thoughts even after rectifying them causing the dwaves to still be stressed. Case in point is the meals in previous post. Another example I'd like to give is lack of chairs for eating- my dwarves hadn't even made an entrance to the fort and one of my dwarves started stumbling obliviously over this and continued to do so for the rest of his life even after giving her a personal dining room as mayor.

It appears that even after fixing stress causes, the dwarves will still remain stressed years later without cease. Religion is a particular offender for this.

Another awkward stress factor is not being able to talk to friends/family but the relations aren't at the fort. I can't do anything for them so the poor dwarf gets stressed.

[Splint]

Would anyone not be confused by this?

As someone who has played DF on and off for at least 9 years now... I have only just learnt this from reading this thread right now.
I never knew that complaint was for the food pref.

Honestly I hadn't even thought of it because I had automatically assumed it meant their preferred stuff. But MarcusCarab made an excellent point on it not being communicated well at all, made worse by the lying preferences not tell you specifically what your dudes want, and them not seeming to grasp you may simply not be able to get it from any of your trade partners.

[scourge728]

Honestly, why do things like rain and lack of chairs cause long term stress at all, even less likely to cause personality changes, think about it, how often do you remember every time you've been rained on, or even the most recent time?

[armads]

Imo, the stress system is something I'd sooner like to see disabled than continued. But there's a lot of reasons for that.

Primarily, the entire thing is way, way too opaque and convoluted to be at all workable. There is way too much complexity in the implementation, but there's no real way to actually manage all the things that have been implemented. I once took the painstaking task of making all 100+ dwarves in my fort have their own bedrooms, dining rooms, and offices, all made out of their own favorite materials, all masterworks, and made sure to have a wide variety of food and drink on hand. The dwarves were all still miserable because three years earlier I had asked them to go outside and gather items after a dwarven siege in the rain. apparently, rain is such a terrible, awful thing, that living in a royal throne room and dining in a personal royal dining room isn't enough.

And that's pretty much the main problem: no one actually knows what dwarves want/need.

A dwarf is sad. Okay, why is he sad? What needs aren't being met and how do you fix them? There's no answer. You can give them what you think they want, but it won't do much good. They'll just keep getting sad.

It used to be that a dwarf had a handful of needs: food, drink, sleep. Those are pretty easy to cater too, and you can easily give a dwarf those things. Add to it a need to socialize, maybe a need for religion, and these too can be met.

But unfortunately the need for socialization and religion is killing everything dead on top of the outsized importance of negative thoughts. you can create a dozen temples, all of which are dedicated to different gods so that you make sure that all of them are covered, and dwarves will still go to the wrong temples and pray to gods they don't worship, and thus not get their religion focus. The same can be said of taverns. Dwarves will go to taverns, move around a bit, but they won't make friends, so their social needs aren't being met.

What's worse is that over time, your dwarves needs get so low that all they do is pray and sit around in a tavern. I've had forts of 150 dwarves, and nearly all of them are sitting in the tavern or temple or library doing absolutely nothing because they can't figure out how to be social to the point of developing friendships or how to pray to the right god. So none of the hauling jobs get done, because the dwarves are too busy failing to meet their own needs.

Again, it feels like complexity is the problem here. You've made the needs system complex, but you've not updated the dwarves to keep up. It would be one thing if ANY temple could fill their religion need, or perhaps the need for socialization was toned down so that dwarves made friends easier or at least filled that need quicker.

Because right now, Dwarves will sit around pouting that they don't have friends and are unfocused after not praying when all they do is sit in the temple praying or sit in the tavern listening to people talk. It's maddening. When you add onto this the fact that every negative experience is a mind-shattering event, with dwarves considering seeing the sun or a dead body to be something to focus on for years to the point of driving themselves to depression, you end up with a really not fun experience. Your dwarves just sort of decay into husks from having been rained on, and with their other needs impossible to meet, they end up being impossible to satisfy.

Don't add into the fact that dwarves are too stupid to eat or drink things they like. Sure, I'm making masterwork roasts, but they can get depressed from not having satisfying food. Sure, I can brew masterwork booze, but they're not happy that they've not drank the right thing. Because they can't pick out things they actually enjoy, it's random whether they sate their own needs.

Look, I get that dwarf fortress likes to be complicated. But complexity for the sake of complexity isn't a good thing. It makes no sense for there to be this much micromanagement for so many dwarves, to the point where dwarves feel impossible to please. It would be easier to fix their stress if you just made it simpler.

For example, masterwork food of any kind makes them feel like they have decent meals. Being in a tavern automatically increases their social need. Praying to any good or meditating on any topic raises their need for religion. It just feels like dwarves have too many esoteric needs and it's impossible to figure out how to deal with them. I've lost more games to the frustration of trying to figure out why dwarves are too stupid to be happy than I have to goblin sieges at this point. it's more a chore than fun.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Honestly, why do things like rain and lack of chairs cause long term stress at all, even less likely to cause personality changes, think about it, how often do you remember every time you've been rained on, or even the most recent time?

Yeah, this.
Stress at having to work outside all year might be reasonable. Or frustration with a lack of chairs, after being forced to sit on the floor for the past 10 meals while other dwarves get to sit down on golden thrones.

Also, please can we start to take into account the backgrounds of our migrants, and adjust their stress resistance accordingly? I have historical figures who have lived through wars all their lives getting stressed at seeing a dwarf drink themselves to death.

And babies. Sure mum or dad getting killed is traumatic, but in the current situation that's a death sentence for their 3 week old baby. They'll be insane from stress by the time they turn 2 years old from reliving the event constantly. Kids in general need to be more resilient and forget about long-term worries quicker. Hit them with serious personality changes, sure. Lots of "felt nothing after talking with family" types. But insanity and death for everyone for events they don't (consciously) recall, maybe not.

[green_meklar]

Like Patrick pointed out, dwarves do commit suicide already

Yes, but only after they go insane ('stricken by melancholy'), at which point they are completely beyond recovery. In that sense it doesn't serve as a substitute for tantrums, which happen to dwarves who are not yet insane and can still (theoretically) be turned around with the right help. It's also not very realistic, since plenty of people in real life attempt suicide and then later turn their life around.

I think the main problem with tantrums is that apparantly their fistfight's escalation level are no-quarter/lethal instead of brawl

Yeah, that's a big part of it. Like I said, the building demolition is also really annoying and seems to go beyond what is realistic- considering the extended time required for a dwarf to carefully dismantle a stone drawbridge, a tantruming dwarf doing the same thing to multiple buildings in a very short span of time just seems unreasonable. Something like breaking a goblet or kicking over a chair I would understand, but the level of physical destruction caused by tantrums is pretty excessive right now.

@MarcusCarab regarding the counterintuitive 'decent meals' mechanic: That reminds me of another problem I discovered fairly recently. For almost as long as I've been playing the game, I was seeing dwarves complaining about a lack of dining tables. Even after setting up multiple dining rooms full of chairs and tables, with food stockpiles nearby, the same complaint kept appearing. I just assumed it was a bug and ignored it. Just a few months ago I was reading through the wiki and saw a brief section talking about the 'lack of dining tables' problem; apparently that bad thought appears when a dwarf eats a meal sitting on a chair that is not next to a table. All this time I was putting chairs (but not tables) in dwarves' bedrooms, so they'd go to their bedrooms to eat, and then get this bad thought, regardless of how many dining tables were actually in the fort. Obviously I now know what to do next time (avoid building chairs without tables next to them), but the description of the bad thought ('lack of dining tables') is highly misleading with respect to the underlying mechanics. The average new player who doesn't read the wiki closely is going to take forever to figure this sort of thing out.

[RNGstrategist]

I've streamed forts that have lasted over 120 hours in real time, years upon years in game time, and Ive accrued a few thoughts on this.
The stress system as it stands is based upon a foundation that just isn't in the game yet. It requires a a massive amount of calculations and tweaks that would take an entire major update to implement as i believe it is intended.
There isn't a smoking gun to point to where anyone can say "fix that" and the system will begin to work correctly. There is however a series of tiny cat corpses on the sides of the halls strewn about at maximum distance to make sure the entire area is covered in miasma. Thematically though i can sum up why the stress system as it stands really annoys a ton of people.

Dwarves no longer feel like dwarves, they feel like humans.

Everything that someone can complain about boils down to a Fantasy vs Simulation issue. Up to this point we've been playing a game that has simulated a fantasy as realistically as possible. This stress system makes the dwarves act less like the fantasy dwarves we've come to love and more like mercantile humans who love to live underground. Ill try to cover all the issues in detail to explain my premise.

War.
It makes sense for a dwarf to get stressed if a loved one dies, however why do dwarves get stressed at all if a goblin or a wild animal dies? It would be reasonable for a human to get stressed upon discovering a dead body, however these dwarves live in little fortresses all around the world. They don't live in towns, they live in fortresses. It is in their very being that they are militaristic. A standard militaristic response would be to get stressed while sieged, you can't trade or communicate with the mountain home, but when you win you should get a massive stress relief to all dwarves, because after all they've won. What happens is, nothing. the dwarves who were in their burrows just did their normal day to day lives blissfully. Once you've won the fight and collect the Goblinite however, all of the sudden every dwarf and their beardling realizes that death happens and just start racking up negative thoughts. their entire existence is as a fort dwelling race fond of drink and industry, why oh why are they all sad that their enemy died? It makes sense for most real life humans, but these aren't humans.

Booze.
Booze was nerfed and nerfed hard. This made a lot of preexisting problems come back into the light. I don't mean the actual consumption of alcohol but the concept of drinking your troubles away. In the old happiness system, the player could drag a dwarf kicking and screaming through until they became an emotionless husk that lived to drink their troubles away. a dwarf that had seen to much combat or death would eventually just not care. All the player had to do was hold them from the edge and eventually like any other skill the dwarf would just get it on their own. Now every Dwarf gets PTSD about everything. If a dwarf is in the rain a bit they can get major negative personality traits and be stuck in a downward spiral that they will never get out of. Essentially they can no longer drink their problems away. A dwarf could get a negative personality shift at the beginning of your game due to some minor event that you didn't notice. The dwarf might not even seem to be that bad off. Your game may be going perfectly for 6 or more years until something triggers this dwarf. (generally something else that's slightly off with the stress system) and he just snaps. Once one thing tips a dwarf over to slight tantrum town everything that was held at bay keeps triggering the dwarf over and over again. Generally these tip off another dwarf and so on. I realize I'm just describing a tantrum spiral but its the insidious nature of it. Before it would be "you killed my son now ill kill this cat" style of tantrums. but now its, "I saw you hit a table, so now i too will destroy furniture and workshops for the next 5 years." A booze is something that a dwarf learns to live with in a symbiotic relationship, The dwarf makes the booze and the booze saves the dwarf. In this stress system you don't get the metaphorical emotionless dwarves dependent on alcohol anymore, you get alcoholic humans that cant control themselves when drunk and wont stop brawling.

Anger Management problems.
The default ways that the dwarves do respond once they've hit that critically low stress point seems needlessly cruel and difficult. Once a dwarf has hit the critical point they will be stuck there, I'd almost say forever. they end up in a cycle where their smashing and fighting prevents them from seeking treatment options and prevents others from doing the same. What they will do is go find one dwarf and try to kill him, over and over again. Yes they only do one punch or two, but they keep doing it and they keep hunting down the same dwarf, until that dwarf is dead. Ive had the enraged dwarf in question "chase" down a crippled dwarf who couldn't stand and just keep laying into him over and over until he died. No one nearby attempts to calm him down, they just get their own thoughts because they saw someone murdered before their very eyes. The angry dwarves in question have no relief valves before this murderous nature. No "Yelled at the air" that would trigger someone to attempt a console action. they just bottle it all in until they decide to go punch someone. then they feel bad that they punched someone so very soon after they go punch the same dwarf again to relieve their stress of punching that very dwarf. Every other dwarf just watches this happen until the victim dies then 20+ of them all have the i saw someone get beat to death negative thought. Now i have 20+ dwarves who are bottling it up. It is a very delayed time bomb that you can do nothing about.

Loyalty cascades and revenge.
Maybe this is just me, but ive had this issue a ton of times on stream. It wouldn't even be that bad on its own except for how it ties into the stress system. The way it is now all it takes is one dwarf to ever throw the smallest of tantrums to infect an entire base with a rot that will never leave. It doesn't happen all the time but it does happen in a statistically significant number of my bases/streams. Eventually a dwarf who is suffering from the aforementioned anger management problems will do so enough times that they will go full crazy and try to actively kill anyone they can. Whomever attacks this dwarf is an enemy, and whomever sees this is an enemy of the enemy. This leads to hundreds of can't do this job alerts, scared of other dwarf. this will eventually lead to every starving to death and the keep scaring each other away from food, and occasionally if one is backed into a corner they will swing. now anyone who sees this swing will treat that new dwarf as an enemy. The problem here is that they will all die and the remaining dwarves will all significantly be down the stress pole. I only really bring this up because it's such a 180 from how they react when the one dwarf keeps beating another dwarf to death. they go from ill just mindlessly watch this dwarf kill a man that wont defend himself to my very life is in danger from the sight of my friend.

You killed it though!
Between the dwarves that all have the empathy of the greatest pacifists and the anger problem there is this comical point where no dwarf understands what death is. The Dwarf who has killed something will get the same negative thought about discovering a dead body as everyone else. There is no cause-effect process here. A dwarf can kill a man slowly over years, just constantly beating him till he dies, and the moment he dies the aggressor will get a massive negative thought "Saw a dead body" or something similar. same can be said for members in the military. It's amazing how putting your axe through someone's head killed them Urist, you are truly the philosopher of our time. Either in fort defense with the Military or in cold blood with the enraged. Dwarves act like they don't understand that they are attempting to kill people. Maybe this makes sense for a human, but these are dwarves. There are epic stories of female dwarves giving birth, and then wielding the newborns as weapons. How does this race no longer understand what happens when you attack your enemy. Again they live in massive forts, not towns, they shouldn't be surprised by violence.

Military can be the worst thing to have now.
The anger management issue with the loyalty issues and the inability to understand death culminate in a new symptom. You do not want military dwarves anymore. Since any dwarf can be susceptible to these uncontrollable circumstances the better they are in combat the worse it is for your fort. You end up with a play-style where you turtle your fort and try to keep all of your dwarves from exposure to anything stressful. All it takes is one dwarf to rot your fort from the inside out, and the military is the most susceptible to both start and spread said rot. Traps are emotionless and dependable. Yes you still get the negative thought from the hauler cleaning the area but at least its just Hauler McBeardface and not Urist son of Armok who wields the Artifact Adamantine Spear of base slaughter.(menaces with spikes of turkey bone)

No reactive countermeasures or camaraderie.
The math for the stress system just doesn't really work to simulate what is essentially emotion. All you have is a tally sheet. Positive vs Negative. Some people respond to different positives and negatives but its still a tally sheet. What this means is that while things can be done in a reactive fashion everything you do is essentially a proactive measure. If the negatives outweigh the positives you are screwed, so you always have to tag up as many positives as possible while the game is constantly adding negatives. Its like a game of Jenga. Eventually no matter how many blocks i put on top the game will remove enough from the bottom to topple the tower, and all of the towers are set right next to each other. There kind of needs something in place to harness the negatives. If a dwarf is going the route of homicidal maniac, why does he only go for dwarves? If somehow i could use these dwarves better in combat id put them in a separate burrow and have them train up for war. I cant do this though because the dwarves don't have a "I fight and live with this fellow dwarf" filter. I could slowly take these succumbing to rage dwarves and put them in the military where their rage fueled their discipline and endurance barbarian style. I'm not asking for barbarians I'm pointing out that that right now the military is likely to kill itself in times of peace and once a dwarf is enraged i can't even use him for stereo typically enraged tropes. Higher level military dwarves already don't care if they are stationed forever so this isn't a completely new thought, but what if a dwarf of high enough military skill no longer threw minor temper tantrums, they just needed to train more to work out their stress, or craftdwarfshops had a make pointless art reaction. Something that doesn't physically make anything in the game but adds raw numbers to the good side or a temporary surge to resist the negative thoughts. Stress relief is a thing and creatures that live underground just doing industry and booze all day should have a mechanic to replicate this.

There are a few other things as well but I've already gone on long enough.

TL;DR Ask yourself, does it make sense for (part of stress system) to apply to fortress dwelling dwarves not town dwelling humans. sort that out and the stress system will work fine

[slade991]

Hello,

some little background info here to put things in perspective. I've been looking at DF for many years but never really dove into it to do the steep learning curve.
I then started this genre by sinking thousands of hours into Rimworld and finally started to play dwarf fortress seriously around 6 months ago or so.
I love this game, i'm still very new but i believe i have a pretty decent understanding of the game mechanics (at least most of them), so i'll try to give my noob advice here.

Lots of stress related things are unbalanced as it have already been stated many times: rain, miasma, personality changes, stacks etc... But i believe the main problem responsible
for it is that the stress system highlighted a lot of core problems within the game. The biggest one of them being: The inability to properly micro-manage anything.

Lots of people circumvent that by "hacking" around the problem, such as burrow (avoid seeing stressful stuff), outdoor butcher (avoid miasma), military squad (move) etc...

I believe one easy way to fix that would just be to add some sort of "do" submenu in unit profile menu (the one with thoughts, relationship etc...), we could then select a tile
somewhere and depending on what is there it would propose stuff this dwarf can do:

If it's a workshop -> select order to fulfill
If it's a designation -> dig / cut tree etc..
If it's a temple area -> pray
If it's a meeting area -> socialize
etc...
and if there is nothing there, the dwarf could just move there.

Those would be considered high priority task which does not end until the "job" is done, or unless the dwarf is tired / thirsty / hungry.
I believe the codebase of dwarf fortress is probably much more complicated that i imagine, but such a system seems super easy to implement to me, just a bunch of condition resulting on cancelling this dwarf's other jobs and adding this one.

If the dwarf become insane being overworked by this task then the fault is entirely on the player who forgot him. But in a case of a regular job/task, the dwarf should be able to cater to his need by himself as it have been stated by many others.

The biggest advantage of this system would be to be able to actually have something be done now, and not let this food generate miasma for 1 year because nobody care to pick it up. It would do wonder to help the player to force the dwarfs to cater to most of their need if somehow they can't fulfill them themselves. Some dwarf fortress adaptation of the "prioritize task" (right-clic) system of Rimworld. Bonus point if those tasks can be stacked!

Another important thing is the priority of jobs. We should be able to prioritize job for each dwarf. Something like a priority number from 1 to 9. Again, i think Rimworld does a nice job with that where you can set manual priorities.
I may want my cook to cook most of the time (1) but if he doesn't have anything to cook, i'd like him to brew (2) or take time off (3) for example. I could then have people having high priority on refuse/corpse hauling only when there is some, without having to manually switch labor on/off and keep track of every single dwarf.

And lastly i think a stockpile priority system would be neat as well, a dwarf would take from the relevant stockpile with the highest priority. Which would avoid them eating raw plump helmet when there is a ton of fine/lavish meal.

In addition i agree with pretty much what have been said before, i didn't elaborate on it as i have not much new to provide to the discussion. But i believe thoses mechanics i wrote would make wonders to make the stress system more manageable with the bonus effect to have improve a lot of other annoying areas of the game. And probably help new players to easily manage what's going on and correct mistakes.

Sorry for my english as it is not my first language. Thanks a lot for this amazing game an kuddos to you for asking your community for ways to help fixing broken stuff  

[PatrikLundell]

Again, as far as I know one of the few things that doesn't have issues is getting "decent" meals from stockpiles, but the lack of any "decent" meals in any stockpile anywhere. The issue is that from the perspective of the dorf, ALL of the meals are "don't care which one I get, meh" ones, so they just take the closest one. It's reasonable that if you don't care what you eat you get the one that's closest. The problem here is that it's incredibly hard to provide desired meals for more than a fraction of the population. This is compounded by the gutted remnants of the old meal quality/party system that fools players into believing laving meals are actually desirable meals rather than mere repackaging containers and extremely valuable trade goods, and a horde of bugs, apart from a lack of clear communication of how the mechanism works (or, rather, is supposed to work).

"Lack of tables": A gotcha there, apart from the need for a table beside the chair, is that it's a WHOLE table per dorf. Real world seating arrangements with a table with chairs around it are harmful. This is counter intuitive and as far as I know it's not communicated by the game (apart from unintelligible thoughts about lack of tables when a quick look shows that there are a lot of [useless] free seats available).

[PlumpHelmetMan]

I think RNG in particular has definitely hit on something. We need more diversity in the way different sapient races think (beyond their superficial cultural values and emotional triggers). It's not a problem exclusive to dwarves IMO. It'll only get more jarring as procgen civs enter the picture and we start getting races that are physically very alien and yet think more-or-less like us.

Probably an issue for a different thread, but there it is.

[EmperorJon]

Maybe, but I don't think RNG has exactly nailed the point. I really don't feel the Dwarves act "too realistically" or "like humans not Dwarves".
It seems to me the critical issues really are quite easy to pin down, being a combination of (and yes I know it's been mentioned by people dozens of times already)

- Critical needs the Dwarves refuse to/can't meet themselves, or are impossible/unclear for the player to even attempt to rectify
- Minor annoyances like rain which for some reason permanently change a Dwarf's personality and haunt them for the rest of their life
- Compounding and stacking effects of death/seeing corpses/etc. including of enemies they just killed in defence of the fort, and animals

[mightymushroom]

I believe I may consider myself a new player at least by comparison to many of the responders here. I remember the problems I had in adjusting to Dwarf Fortress coming from other games. Some of them were "within the last season."

My first problem with the stress system is not any of the tuning at all: it is the user interface. I find the wall of text on the thoughts screen to be simply too much. It is an avalanche of information. I can just about make it through one dwarf but my eyes completely glaze over by the second and third. Managing a fortress of dozens would be hopeless; I need Dwarf Therapist to break up the text into useful chunks.

Threetoe and Toady, I think it is time to split that screen into more digestible pieces. Currently it is an information overload; nor is it sorted by any kind of severity or scale but rather color coded in, I think, four different schemes depending on which part I'm reading. It is not a screen that I consider friendly to new users. I respect that you don't want a numbers game with percentage bars everywhere: neither do I. But there needs to be separation and possibly simplification so that it is easier to discern patterns in the data. Without Dwarf Therapist I would have quit right there because of the seeming impossibilty to pick out what is of enduring importance versus the quotidian observations in a dwarf's life.

And it is the enduring versus the quotidian that is, for my playing, the heart of stress frustration. It feels – I know intellectually there are exceptions – it strongly feels as if every single dwarf has every single need: to craft AND to be in an active military unit AND to haul otherwise useless trinkets because they inexplicably need to shoplift acquire despite lacking any sort of trade, barter, or shopping* AND time off to socialize and pray and read books and whatnot. The first three and portions of the last must be arranged per dwarf. Too often taking care of this everyday stuff becomes a chore for the overseer trying to juggle job orders and shopping lists, rather than an emergent chance to study individual dwarves and to cater to their profiles.

I would dearly love to see a greater amount of variation in dwarves' personalities and desires, rather than being clones brainwashed into the All-Dwarf by their civilization definitition. As a player I could solve (or weather) these "lifestyle" stressors far more easily if it were a case of one or two personality elements to a dwarf that I can key onto and adjust as necessary – perhaps by making needs and related thoughts to be strongly inflected by personal Goals. Then the now-everyday matters that currently leave dwarves restless or depressed could be made to be enduring narratives for each dwarf, and so would their solutions. A lowly shearer who dreams of military glory but is overlooked by military recruiters for being too wimpy is a problem I can fix (at least until the first battle, then it's in the goblins' hands). A finicky gourmet slowly going mad from lack of diversity in a bunker that has been cut off from the world by undead thralls is a good story even if it does not end well. Half the population complaining about food "quality" in a multi crop fort with lavish meals and regular trade is not a good story.



(*Regarding acquisition: experience and skill levels, quality products, job speed, all these systems reward me for getting specialized dwarves to do one labor and do it really well. Without the wiki and forum, why would I ever set my legendary+2 wood carver to perform menial hauling that any of fifty peasants could do?? Can we please find a more intuitive resolution, or just disable this in fortress mode until individual economy appears?)

[MarcusCarab]

Strong agree on the point about acquiring items and indeed all the other areas where Dwarves don't make much effort to fulfill their own needs, and only do it under very specific circumstances that are never communicated.

Communication is so important for the question of frustration. Look - anyone who is going to become a true DF fan is going to be the sort of person who can accept that not everything in the game is perfectly balanced nor will it be for a long time. They need to be the sort of person who can get frustrated but also get a kick out of seeing wacky and weird things happen, and who is excited about following along with updates as these things are tweaked and modified. But what they shouldn't have to be is someone who can power through things that seem utterly nonsensical or contradictory - and when they spot both a problem and a seemingly obvious solution, enacting the solution should either fix the problem or give them an indication of why it doesn't.

My dwarves say they want to acquire items, so I make lots of items and put them near my dwarves. My dwarves still walk around saying they wish they could acquire something.

My dwarves say they want to pray, so I make a really nice temple. Half of them still walk around saying they wish they could pray.

My dwarves say they want nice food, so I make nice food. None of them care.

My dwarves say they want to socialize, so I make a tavern. They stand around in it saying they want to socialize.

Now I'm the kind of player who will *really* power through confusing stuff like this when a game appeals to me as much as DF does, and so over time I've come to understand the non-obvious reasons and/or minor bugs that cause these things, and I more or less figure out ways to deal with them. I think that's the case for most DF players. But I can really see how a lot of new players would quickly find themselves saying "I am doing everything the game seems to be asking me to, and none of it is having an effect, or at least not an effect I understand" and thus just giving up.