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[muldrake]

You can pretty easily set up squad schedules to have a good chunk of your dwarves training at all times, which helps with stress a lot. "Minimum dwarves training" is actually... "maximum dwarves training". They automatically shuffle out of the squad if they have other needs.

Is there a coinstar room style method of getting them the "doesn't really care about anything any more" trait and would this actually help?

[FantasticDorf]

You can pretty easily set up squad schedules to have a good chunk of your dwarves training at all times, which helps with stress a lot. "Minimum dwarves training" is actually... "maximum dwarves training". They automatically shuffle out of the squad if they have other needs.

Or just disable the monthly schedule altogether (by going to schedule and clearing train to leave them empty, 12 months named in installments of 3 a season for easy optimization) and the 47.03/47.04 self need fufillment AI will have them train anything related when they need to but mostly ignore consistent training. In a weird way its sort of a pseudo guildhall like location.

I wish barracks were really actually I zone locations for this purpose, it'd make life a lot easier and probably free up players from the bugs surrounding furniture and to do much more with barracks zones administratively beyond that point, like a place to marshal & rally up your troops to gather before a big raid or to join a response army in devgoals.

[Putnam]

You can pretty easily set up squad schedules to have a good chunk of your dwarves training at all times, which helps with stress a lot. "Minimum dwarves training" is actually... "maximum dwarves training". They automatically shuffle out of the squad if they have other needs.

Is there a coinstar room style method of getting them the "doesn't really care about anything any more" trait and would this actually help?

Combat hardness only affects the "saw a dead body" and "got into conflict" thoughts AFAIK, not stress in general.

[FantasticDorf]

You can pretty easily set up squad schedules to have a good chunk of your dwarves training at all times, which helps with stress a lot. "Minimum dwarves training" is actually... "maximum dwarves training". They automatically shuffle out of the squad if they have other needs.

Is there a coinstar room style method of getting them the "doesn't really care about anything any more" trait and would this actually help?

Combat hardness only affects the "saw a dead body" and "got into conflict" thoughts AFAIK, not stress in general.

If you follow online reviews, Ssethtzentch puts out a deconstructed but detailed psyche report into DF in general, but with special mention to coinstars have become significantly more deadly because armor can be properly damaged & penetrated now in themselves, the coins becoming a 200 stack of metal blowdart like high velocity projectiles slung from the bridge in the original design, or modified to be very-very fast with a minecart ejection.

In arena mode same is true if you spawn in adamatine blowdarts to use as ammunition. Uhhhhh maybe imported wooden elf spear traps would be better, better to have bruises than to have cuts.

Back onto stress, i haven't seen jaded dwarves (as per just a means of behaviour) for a long time, but the memorization of bad events is normally helped by alcohol and personality balance shifts through memories into just not caring.

[Alatun]

I'm a "medium experienced" player that started with DF about 3 years ago. I'm usually playing a few weeks after a new release until I'm running into a problem (maybe a bug or otherwise game breaking situation). Maybe I start a second fort. If I encounter the same bug/situation, I usually stop playing and wait hoping the next release will be better and fixes the problems.

I did only read about two pages from this 20 page thread and there are a lot of things, I would agree. My point of view:

There first major issue with the game: the lack of managing tools
Someone wrote, DF is a "city builder" in the beginning and a "city manager" later on. I think this is true.
If you need to "manage a city" you need tools to get an overview how certain parts of the city are developing (economical/social which includes the stress aspect). The game itself has little to none tools to achieve this. The only thing you get, is a very basic information about drinks/food. If you are using DwarfTherapist its getting better to "manage jobs", to get an overview about happiness and other needs, but I consider even this too less information, because you need "information over time" to detect trends. If a dwarfs happyness starts declining and I have a way to detect this early, I might be able to take countermeasures. If a dwarf is falling into depression, it's usually too late.
I've started to write myself some dfhack scripts to get more information (mostly for certain economic areas), but I also started to export happiness/stress data on a regular basis, but I did not have the time so far to write a tool to convert this data into a graphical form that lets you detect trends earlier.

The second issue is balancing the stress system. There are a lot of situations, where it is unavoidable that dwarfs are confronted with stressful situations (siege, trauma, dead body, missing family). So the game must also offer enough working options to get stress fixed (maybe let the impact of a bad thought decline, if a good thought is experienced). Some examples: If a dwarf needs "decent meals" and my fort offers "decent meals", the dwarf should go and eat a lavish meal instead of taking plump helmets (probably a bug). It's ridiculous, that a dwarf feels stressed about miasma that happened several years ago. There are too many events triggering "strong negative thoughts" and too less events with "strong positive thoughts" to balance (which is probably needed to fix the stress for certain personalities). Some good ideas to balance the stress system have been written (e.g. contextual impact - seeing a dead body of an enemy that was defeated by dwarfs should be evaluated differently than the mangled dead body of a close relative). As some people already wrote: there should be ways to fix stress from a "managers perspective" (without doing tons a micro management).

One idea, that came into my mind: let dwarfs craft "minor artifacts" that will be gifted to another dwarf. This should create a positive feeling for both parties and should strengthen the social bonds (maybe leading to marriage or other kinds of strong social bonds like "blood brotherhood" or similar).

[muldrake]

You can pretty easily set up squad schedules to have a good chunk of your dwarves training at all times, which helps with stress a lot. "Minimum dwarves training" is actually... "maximum dwarves training". They automatically shuffle out of the squad if they have other needs.

Is there a coinstar room style method of getting them the "doesn't really care about anything any more" trait and would this actually help?

Combat hardness only affects the "saw a dead body" and "got into conflict" thoughts AFAIK, not stress in general.

This is a LOT of the stress I get, particularly after bloody fights in the early game.  The fight itself causes practically nothing compared to the months of the bodies laying around especially if they absolutely refuse to clear them or, worse, cancel jobs to bury the bodies because they're upset by the bodies, then get assigned the task again and. . .you get the idea.  It can take an unreasonable amount of time to clear up the carnage, and meanwhile, sensitive dwarves are walking past this stuff and freaking out over and over.

[Maltavius]

I think 3 years is kind of a good length, that's about where I quit.

I think after 3 years my fort is too big and there is too much data to process. I have what 20-40 dwarves and they all like and hate something different. There is no way I'm going to read 40 walls of texts about my dwarves to find out I need 60+ different stones and food types.

I'm all for a summary screen, but I'd also like the game to point out that "Hey this job order has been canceled 200 times now, it's causing people to be angry" or "Half of your dwarves haven't had a proper drink this season", "5/20 dwarves are sad about their clothing."

Maybe it could be a seasonal or yearly status-screen that shows if you have a Mayor and a manager and a Therapist.


I used to play a lot when there was a mod with Simplified leather, meat etc.
There was leather, fine leather, great leather I think, that way people that wanted leather clothes where easily satisfied, instead of someone only wanting giraffe leather clothes. It also helped with my inventory clutter.

[PatrikLundell]

You don't need to satisfy every need for every dorf for a fortress to run properly. Sure, you can go the extra lap around the Earth to try to cater to every dorf's preferences, but you don't HAVE to. While some dorf may like capybara leather, the need that needs to be fulfilled is to have clothes and occasionally get new ones. Only an exceedingly picky dorf would refuse to grab clothes not made out of a favorite material (and I don't know if such a dorf is even possible).
I've had one case of a dorf that refused to pick up trinkets despite being ordered to haul them to get him to grab one, and getting a very unfulfilled need from it until I managed to get the bugger to haul a trinket of a favorite stone, but that's a rare exception (I was actually on the way to bring the bugger back from the [mood blocked] brink of insanity when my fortress was killed by raid equipment corruption).

Thus, simplification may help with clutter, but would probably have no effect on required need fulfillment.

[chips]

     I found the new stress system to be pretty frustrating, I'm glad to see you are receptive to feedback on this front. Most of my negative feelings are from the religious part of the stress system. I'll go into more detail on what exactly I mean and why I feel that way.
     The problem starts with temples. Temples where all deities are worshiped never seem to be able to keep up with my dwarfs needs, regardless of how big the temple is or how many statues i place in it. It should also be noted in-game that temples require statues to function. Maybe a count of religious statues within a location the same way instruments and boxes are counted?
     The next problem I encountered was when specifing a statue's specific image in the shape of a deity, I would often not receive a statue in the specific image of that deity; instead, it will be carved in the image of a historical figure embracing the god or some other crap, which makes creating multiple statues to multiple gods a real pain. In the end, I have resorted to specifying the material as well as the image so every god has a unique material for their statues and only carving out temples 2 or 3 at a time, or else the list quickly becomes an unreadable mess. Requiring THAT much micromanagement just to build the essential furniture for a essential location isn't fun.
     Next is the size of the pantheon. The longer world history goes and the larger the map, the more likely some dwarfs are to start worshiping deities from outside their civilization. It also means more items created to glorify the deities, which also in turn can be worshiped.  For one example, the fort I'm currently playing is in year 106, a small world. My 99 dwarves worship 33 different gods. I've seen dwarfs worship as many as 5 different gods. It's basically impossible for anyone but the most skilled players to keep up with the many deities and objects your dwarfs worship.
     For my final complaint about temples, lets say you make a few temples. The value of the temples seems to have no effect on the stress reduction or anything else, it produces no goods, trains no skills, and attracts no visitors. The only tangible benefit is fulfilling the prayer need. Compared to a libraries, guildhalls, or taverns, temples have the least amount of player interaction and almost no effect on the game; yet with every dwarf worshiping at least 1 deity, I still find myself making many temples. At a minimum temples should be comparable to the other locations. There should be a benefit to having a higher value temple to reward the players  who choose to go the extra mile and boost the shrines value up to a temple complex. Temples should also have unique visitors, like libraries have scholars or taverns with traveling bards, that can give you benefits.

[Shonai_Dweller]

No specific deity is working just fine for me. Doubt any "skilled player" ever makes a temple to every single god in the fortress (I make it a long, long term goal but it's not a necessity). Give them enough time to pray don't wait until they're in the purple. They won't deal with their needs themselves until they're desperate (which is one thing that needs improving).

Also ensure you're playing 47.04 of course. A lot less gods to deal with.

[delphonso]

Your dwarves are too busy to pray - not that the temple is full. Any meeting area can be made a temple, I believe. A statue isn't purely necessary. Sounds like you're having a labor management issue rather than a temple issue.

Though, again, the fact this mistake is a reasonable one to make is an issue with stress.

[FantasticDorf]

Priests are fast and apparently convert according to Toady's comments in the intelligent-gamer podcast (whether thats implemented or not or if he was jumping the gun and forgot what we currently had we'll have to see) as normally dwarves now will have least a majority religion.

Preists spot dwarves and gives them a sermon real nice and smooth-like.

[Stadfradt]

We have been going through some extensive testing to find the biggest problems for new (and old!) players that make them give up in frustration. ...I want to know what kind of play style is causing people to quit in frustration.

1. A prepare-carefully screen that learns my preferences.
2. A way to make small forts less boring/frustrating.*
3. I would say dwarves who aren't so incredibly stupid, but I work with a guy who thinks that self-employed people should get unemployment even though they don't pay unemployment insurance and the risk of fraud would be ridiculous, so, yeah, dwarves are no more stupid than half the people I work with.**

*Or a good wiki article explaining how to make small forts work and be fun.

**Seriously, I work with people who would knowingly let ten lavish meals rot and then spend the rest of their lives tormented from gagging on miasma. They would also throw up their hands and say, "I got no seeds!" because they're too lazy to look in a barrel. They would also drop their masterpiece steel crossbow in a puddle of mud and wander off because you told them to stop hunting.

[clinodev]

We have been going through some extensive testing to find the biggest problems for new (and old!) players that make them give up in frustration. ...I want to know what kind of play style is causing people to quit in frustration.

1. A prepare-carefully screen that learns my preferences.

The fact that it's not obvious to new players may well be a problem, but the base game does in fact include this. Spend your points as you prefer, then click 's', and you will be prompted to name your new embark profile, which then will be added to data/init/embark_profile.txt, and the next time you embark, you'll be offered that set of settings again with that name under "Prepare for the Journey Carefully."

There are many community embark profiles as well, incidentally. Here's a popular set. You can just copy and paste this text to the bottom of your embark_profiles.txt (you may need to create it,) and save, any they'll show up as well. https://pastebin.com/p0fzepqk

[delphonso]

I recommend saving your embark profile after the items are finished if you want to choose suitable skills to suitable dwarves - as they're randomized each time. This is, however, a level of micromanagement that isn't very necessary.