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[PetGreySquirrel]

So, I have started playing again after a few years away from the game (and community), and have spent the last month or so playing trying to get use to the new stress system...
It's been extremely frustrating, and even as I've gotten better at managing it, it still has made the game less fun for me than the previous major versions.

My most recent fort illustrates the issues I've had with the system pretty well...
First, I decided before embark that I was not building near the surface. Rain killed two previous surface-level fort by driving all my woodcutters, herbalists, outside farmers,  hunters, etc to tantrums and depression. This is.... Honestly really not fun -- I get that rain is an unhappy thought, but being a little damp on a 'grumbles only mildly at inclament weather' dwarf shouldn't cause the same sort of emotional outbursts and depression that losing a child does. The sense of scale for bad thoughts seems severely lacking.
So, I decided to cavern dive early and exist entirely underground. No rain, no nauseated by the sun, no tantrums due to bad weather.

This worked fine, once it was all set up by winter of the 1st year -- even had a trade depot 40 Z-levels deep with a ramp-road so no one ever had to go to the surface for any reason.

This, plus setting up temples, taverns, etc. Meant the first 3 years or so went by fine: no red arrows at all in that time, and population rapidly rose to over 100. 3 forgotten beasts, and a lot of cave crocodiles, so about 7 dead in that time, but the bad thoughts from the bodies were limited to only a handful of dwarves.
Around mid year 3, i got my first red arrows. I went through individually checking off all the needs for those 3 sad dwarves, reassigned labours for them to craft, let them have time with no labours enabled to socialize, pray.... And none of it made them less miserable. One died in a cave toad related drowning later that year, one i just expeled because nothing would get her to stop tantruming. And every tantrum meant injuries, more bad thoughts, another dwarf with a recurring trauma thought. She herself felt guilty about all of it, making her more stressed. Being more stressed, she threw more tantrums, and felt more guilt. I could not outpace the stress buildup. Even taking advice of locking her in a room full of happy thought generating things, she became more miserable faster than anything I could do. So I kicked her out.

The other problem dwarf at this time I couldn't exile, because his wife was our champion (and hammerer), and he had the same issue - upset, tantrum, get more upset from guilt, repeat. Same deal -- once he had the red arrow nothing could make it go away and every tantrum made it worse, including traumatizing him with new injuries and him freaking out about the body of a dwarf he had just killed.

So, there seems to be no way to destress a stressed out dwarf. I started forcing them to meet needs and have happy thoughts months before their tantrums started. Once the red arrow started it would not go away for any dwarf, in any fort for the last month or so of play, even if I went out of my way to micromanage the unhappy dwarves and make them do things that makes them happy. If I don't micromanage it, they get sad thoughts because many of them won't go pray on their own even with no labours enabled, and removed from military if they were enlisted so they don't do individual drills instead.

But -- 3 red arrows in over 100 dwarves by end of year 3... That's not too bad -- it sucks that they are incurable because it makes me reluctant to value any individual dwarf, but 3% stressed is managable and the fort continued to thrive around them.

Until I got a goblin siege. Over 100 goblins dead, and about 5 dwarves dead, and another 4 injured.
Most of my fort is overwhelmed. Suddenly, of 181 dwarves left Alive after the siege, about 30 are red arrows. Most of which got caught in the miasma from the bodies when they were collecting them and from seeing the bodies at all.
They keep dwelling on the miasma, and thus stress out faster than pampering them can hope to fix. About a sixth of my fort is basically doomed, from one siege. Maybe I can pull some of them back from this by going through a lot of effort to make sure they're pampered for a few months, but, honestly it just makes me want to retire the fort and not bother -- it's not fun to try to drag then back from red arrow status.
But if I do, they might migrate to a new fort, and throw tantrums there because of their memories of miasma and goblin bodies... maybe I should just generate another world entirely.
Increasingly, though, I've been thinking of rolling back to a version before this system until it's been rebalanced. I've read threads here, pages on the wiki, etc. about how to manage it and it's just not fun to try, it's at best a frustrating system right now, even when everything seems to be running smoothly.
Stressed out dwarves are expected -- but, because of how rare it is for a dwarf to calm back down, a major disaster like a large siege or even something as trivial as *some rain* often leads to significant chunks of my population being basically useless within 5-10 years of embark, seemingly no matter what I do to make sure the dwarves needs are met.

Edit: to clarify, I do like the idea of this system, and some of the consequences (like being in prison making it worse), and I don't want *all* my dwarves to be happy -- it would be boring if none of them ever got stressed out or threw tantrums; my main issue with it is that it seems there is no *fun* way to prevent, or recover from, stress over the long term. Solutions feel more like working around a bug than like a strategic aspect to the game, or like something that can be mitigated without tedious managing of individual dwarves' labours, burrow assignments, military enlistment status, and so on to *force* them to do happy-thought generating tasks.
The more I play the versions since this system, the less I feel like I *can* get a handle on stress and the more it starts to feel like an inevitability that I will need to constantly expel sad dwarves and replace them with new migrants if I ever want to have a fort last long-term -- which means instead of getting to know or care about the dwarves, and having some I want to keep or get attached too, I feel like I need to be ready to expel any red arrow, no matter who they are.

[Dwarf_Fever]

What if being unhappy caused dwarves to slowly leave the fortress? Perhaps with the exception of dwarves that have too many ties to the fortress. Other personality traits might impact their likelihood to emigrate sooner or later, too.

You might still be able to request them back from other holdings after a period. It would be nice if they de-stressed over time while being away, as well. Then you could actively send them off to other holdings to vacation, so to speak, as a method of dealing with them.

This makes stress have a negative impact on fortresses in a way that's not as destructive as tantrums, but still powerful.

[Bumber]

What if being unhappy caused dwarves to slowly leave the fortress? Perhaps with the exception of dwarves that have too many ties to the fortress. Other personality traits might impact their likelihood to emigrate sooner or later, too.

You might still be able to request them back from other holdings after a period. It would be nice if they de-stressed over time while being away, as well. Then you could actively send them off to other holdings to vacation, so to speak, as a method of dealing with them.

This makes stress have a negative impact on fortresses in a way that's not as destructive as tantrums, but still powerful.

You can already do that manually. I question why the other holdings should be less stressful than a well-run player fort.

[adseaghtrnjty]

Hello Hello. I've wanted to say something about this, but I've had to compose myself. I've not been thinking too much of the problem much though. I don't play much, and I don't play much because of the stress thing. I'm waiting maybe 10 years so the game is somewhat better before playing fortress mode without all of the micromanaging and unfun stuff.

>I have a fort that is 3 years old and has every possible stress reliever

This is what I was thinking about. I have about a 5 year old fort with some stress relievers, but not all stress relievers. I have a goal for my fortress, and it's not to make a permanent home for my dwarves. I really don't want to have to have all the stress relievers or really focus on stress relief for my fortress or any fortress. Why should I have to prioritize stress relief in the first place? It can be really unfun to have to have to always make legendary furniture, rooms, meals (which I've heard doesn't even contribute much to happiness since ingredient preferences matter more), etc. Why do dwarves have this weird living standard when humans, goblins, and elves seem to live much less lavishly? I must baby my dwarves when they're in a time where violence is rampant, there is no running water, and going to the doctor is usually painful - especially if you broke an arm or something. How come when we look back at people from an earlier period of history, they seemed to be happier with less luxury? Honestly, if there's anything that would make dwarves happy, it should be family, friends, work, and their own accomplishments. They don't seem very "human" per se when they get (overwhelming) happy thoughts from legendary furniture and rooms.

I'm trying to think of another race like the dwarves in this game. Humans, my first thought, have small houses with multiple people in them. They're not luxurious at all, honestly, but the closest I've seen to legendary craftsmanship are the castles / forts. Castles and forts are usually just for soldiers though. All other people mostly in one room houses. I see multiple room houses, so that could be of a higher quality. I have rooms with more and higher quality furniture still being at "decent" though, so I doubt most humans are in rooms past decent.

Elves live in trees and I've only seen their inns to be of higher quality. Because of the amount of space, it's possible their inns are of "legendary" quality with most likely, just standard quality furniture and ale.

Goblins. Pfffffttttt

Kobolds. Pffffttt.

So yea, dwarves make the highest quality things and expect the highest quality items and that's kind of what I think makes their happiness the worst. While the other races aren't as picky and make lower-quality things, dwarves are masters of craftmanship but are absolutely bonkers compared to other races. They're go crazy a lot easier because they're less emotionally stable, so we really get the "cancer of red arrows" as described.

On the playstyle, it's quite obvious most people play way differently than you, the creator of the game, and I think most people agree it's not a playstyle thing it's a game thing. I have a fort that's crumbling because of animal corpses that honestly, a regular person wouldn't even blink an eye at. I think it's just part of the fragile emotional state of the common dwarf that sets them off. I'd rather just not have them freak out about seeing an animal corpse. I've had so many dwarves mentally destroyed because of animals. They come and wander in here and maybe attack to be brutally killed (good) and then they keep on causing trouble in death. It's the same thing for all corpses honestly. I have a stockpile of corpses that keeps on getting larger and it annihilates the mind of whoever goes in it. It's absolutely huge and the only solution to it is either burning the corpses in lava or leaving them outside. I could use glitches too, but that's not intended game design.


So, in short, dwarves need more mental fortitude and dwarven living standards are insane for the times. They should definitely not require all of these stress relivers and should be able to feel content with their basic existence of fulfilling dreams and socializing and connecting with friends and family. Right now, they’re quite materialistic and mentally fragile. They live in their own bubble where death doesn’t exist and animals “go to the farm” when they’re old.

By the way, isn’t it weird to have a butcher (supposedly) not have bad thoughts when killing an animal for food, but the same butcher would get depressed after seeing a corpse on the ground / in a stockpile?

[PetGreySquirrel]

So, I've played a few more forts, and a few more approaches to handling stress, since my last post, and even with unavoidable temples, legendary dining halls, smoothed, engraved, furnished private bedrooms with chests and cabinets, a seemingly infinite pile of trinkets, baubles, and clothes of every type and material I could get (including many imported ones) for them to collect, luxury prisons complete with 1x1 temple, 1x2 library, and booze supply around the chain, masterwork lavish meals of every ingredient I could get my hands on, a "Vacation" burrow that restricted busy/overworked dwarves to ONLY being able to access the stress relievers, social spaces, libraries, etc and not work until they had a bunch of happy thoughts and their non-work needs were met.
All of this helped reduce stress, and some recovered from red arrow status, but even then less than half of all dwarves who ever got a red arrow after a siege cleanup died or got caught in a spiral of tantrums and guilt, and never recovered from it. Managing the accumulated stress in a mature fort of 200 dwarves is honestly a miserable experience. The last 9 months of my most recent fort was JUST trying to do damage control after a big goblin siege, and I retired the fort because it was the most frustrating and least fun experience I've had playing Dwarf Fortress since before Z levels were introduced.
Even a fairly trivial siege, the one I mentioned was about 100 goblins and trolls + some beak dogs, all of which died to the meatgrinder that was a squad of legendary sword dwarves. One dwarf injured, no dead. But within the 9 months after it, I lost 6 to tantrum-induced violence, 35 to a Tavern Keeper punching one of the legendary sword dwarves (which then lead to their squad slaughtering civilians for a while, for whatever reason), and another dozen who were either in the tantrum -> jail -> guilt -> tantrum more spiral, or who got depressed and stopped working.
Looking into their brains, my efforts to give them happy thoughts were working, they had happy thoughts from mist, socializing, praying, satisfied at work, inebriation, but nothing seems to be able to calm a lot of them down after they walk through the battlefield for a log, or worse after they have to help clean up the battlefield. I set up the bodies to be dumped on a hatch, which dropped them into an garbage chute so that as bodies were piled on, dwarves no longer had to see them while dumping more bodies, and they still ended up with full pages of "horrified" thoughts from seeing the bodies.
The post-siege stress lead to more stress because of dead dwarves, fights, tantrums, etc. and by the time I retired, the tantrums had stopped (mostly because everyone throwing tantrums was in jail or dead), my population had dropped by about 40, more than half of the survivors were still red arrows, and every single longer term project I had going on had to be stopped for months (in-game) to deal with this mess, even after all the bodied had been cleaned up.

This was the 2nd large siege this fort survived. The first was a bit over half the size, and cost about 5 dwarves of 160 population to stress-related death or exile (which isn't too bad, though the amount of micromanaging it took to keep it this low was a terrible gameplay experience), but that siege traumatized several dwarves, and left a couple with recurring "Remembering someone's death" sorts of things, and made the residents who were present for both extremely vulnerable to the stress of the 2nd siege, most of the dwarves who became useless or threw tantrums initially were long-time residents who never recovered from the first one, though by the end of the 35-dwarf slaughter even new residents who had made friends or were bad with stress were now useless.

Preventing stress after a siege seems basically impossible without some complicated automated water or magma-based body removal, and recovering from stress is even harder than preventing it.

I've been trying a lot of approaches to adapt to it, but, ultimately this system is miserable as-is, and this is the first time I have ever considered modding the game just to make it playable.
In the meantime, I have rolled back to an older version for a while because I needed a break from this. I've been a long-time player and dealing with unbalanced features and bugs is something I expect from Dwarf fortress, and usually can find some joy in, but... this is incredibly frustrating and it's neither fun nor Fun. It's just a miserable, tedious thing to try to manage.
I really hope there is a re-balance, or even removal coming soon, because as-is in the current vanilla version of the game, I have abandoned all my mature forts due to frustration trying to manage this.

Edit: I didn't mention, but for Successful ways to deal with stress the only options I've found without cheating are to exile any red arrow, no matter who it is(even the legendary armourer), and just have migrants replace them. and if they're a non-exilable noble, arrange for an "accident" to deal with the problem, then exile anyone who cared about them.
also, using some high walls and a "F*** the world" lever and magma pump stack to conveniently deal with sieges and the resulting bodies went a long way.
Both work, but they dramatically limit options for playstyle and the self-cleaning goblin oven approach takes (in-game) years to set up, during which a lot of resources are focused on making it work

[delphonso]

It's nuts this thread is still going.

[Uthimienure]

Yep.  It's nuts talking about dwarfs going nuts!

I bet if all the DF players in the world were magically transported INTO the game and became dwarfs,
there would be more red arrows among us than the game's dwarfs have, lol.

[clinodev]

I'm really glad it is still ongoing.

If you look back over the messages in this thread, you'll find a great number of them, with quite strong opinions, come from a very small number of posters.

The more new people posting, the better the representation of other viewpoints will be, and the better the idea of the state of the community Tarn and Zach will see from it.

After all, we already know all the "Stress is fine, git gud newbs!" people are going to buy the game, right? There's hardly any point in listening to them repeat their opinion that DF should remain only for the inner elite twice per page, but when long-time players like PetGreySquirrel opine that, yes, they can make it work with effort, but it's so unfun as to make them revert to more functional releases with fewer features, that's a useful data point. 

I see it expressed on reddit all the time, especially in the "Look I tried this game, and I could make a fort, but 20 goblins attacked, and we killed them, but moving their corpses ruined my fort! I'll wait for Premium to try again." form. It is also far more likely to reflect the experience of those without years and hundreds of hours of playtime and esoteric forum reading, i.e. those who will inevitably make up most of the market.

[AnotherL2]

I've been playing on and off for the last five years, but have recently jumped back in to teach a new friend to play DF. I don't have a lot to add about my experience with the stress system since my forts rarely last longer than 3 years before I get bored and embark again, but I will add that I think it's a little silly for dwarves to be affected so heavily by weather.

Really? You're traumatized about being in the sun? You've travelled for miles in the sun to get to some outpost in the middle of the desert, and you even worship the sun god. How should any of that even be possible?

Same goes for dwarves having insatiable bloodlust for the goblin that killed their family member, but then having an existential crisis after trying to move the corpse.

Obviously my examples are pretty hyperbolic, but it does happen.

My more serious point now. It gets frustrating when your dwarves are miserable, know they are miserable, and won't do anything about it by themselves. Additionally, I feel like I get nowhere when trying to help out my dwarves. One says he feels overworked, but when I disable his labour all of a sudden he is unfocoused for not being able to practice a skill for too long. I question whether or not to reenable his labours because I don't know if the cycle will continue. Stress is a challenge that the game presents, like sieges or FB's, but the answers to this challenge feel vague and ineffective.

Janxious, earlier in the thread linked to an idea that dwarves should petition to join the military or be assigned a craft labour when they feel that those needs are being unfulfilled by the player, and I think that's a fantastic idea if used sparingly and in severe situations. Dwarves, when threatened by goblins and monsters, will generally try to save themselves by at least running or fighting. Why can't they do the same when it comes to stress?

[PetGreySquirrel]

After all, we already know all the "Stress is fine, git gud newbs!" people are going to buy the game, right? There's hardly any point in listening to them repeat their opinion that DF should remain only for the inner elite twice per page, but when long-time players like PetGreySquirrel opine that, yes, they can make it work with effort, but it's so unfun as to make them revert to more functional releases with fewer features, that's a useful data point. 

Yeah, I've played on and off (mostly on) since 2007 or so when I heard about boatmurdered (which was still a recent thing, at the time), and I do want to be clear that I still love the game, and most of the changes over the years I've liked -- even the ones that had horrible bugs and flaws when they first dropped, and this is more or less how I see the stress system. It's a neat new approach to dwarf happiness and well-being, and through much effort and compromising my ability to have fun I can *manage* this system, but it still needs a lot of work before I'd really consider it ready to upgrade to the newest version as my primary way to play dwarf fortress. There's a lot of new features in he recent releases, and I feel like I spend so much time and effort dealing with stress that I haven't gotten to really enjoy any of them, so I'm just playing older versions mainly, and occasionally trying a new approach to see if I can make this system work AND have an enjoyable time playing the game. So far, the answer seems to be no for any fort that gets over 5 years old. Maybe 6 if I'm lucky. I did have one make it to 8 with only a few red arrows, but that was on a glacier embark, so, there were no invaders and thus no piles of bodies, on a pocket world (no visitors, no villains, and nearly no mega or forgotten beasts even existed anymore, no towers, no undead -- a map specifically chosen to see how manageable stress was in the absence of any real threat or cause of horror/trauma.)
EDIT: to be clear, I have had other forts last this long woth various tricks, things like making one dwarf or one squad  clean up an entire siege alone (then exiling them if they're traumatized/stressed after they pull the lever for the atom smasher) while everyone else was locked inside for the duration of cleanup, or using magma/flood traps so they dwarves never even see a goblin (alive or dead) before the body disappears out of their accessable area, etc.

I don't provide this feedback about my experiences with this system just to whine, I want this to be improved, I'm interested to see what this system working well looks like! It has potential, but, as-is, it's just not fun (or Fun) for me, and a lot of other people (ranging from new players to long-time players) I know. Among local people I know who play DF it's been the main source of frustration and "I'll just wait for the next release..." attitudes I've seen lately, even though we all have different approaches to the game, and different degrees of familiarity with it, and different degrees of patience for it.

[muldrake]

I don't provide this feedback about my experiences with this system just to whine, I want this to be improved, I'm interested to see what this system working well looks like! It has potential, but, as-is, it's just not fun (or Fun) for me, and a lot of other people (ranging from new players to long-time players) I know. Among local people I know who play DF it's been the main source of frustration and "I'll just wait for the next release..." attitudes I've seen lately, even though we all have different approaches to the game, and different degrees of familiarity with it, and different degrees of patience for it.

I'd like to see the differences between corpse-induced stress be a lot more marked.  I don't see why it would be traumatic at all to see a goblin toe when you literally enjoyed killing that bastard.  If anything you should get a good thought from that, "yep that s.o.b.'s still dead."  However, it's entirely reasonable someone would be traumatized by, for instance, having their spouse and children rotting in their own bedroom.

[PetGreySquirrel]

I'd like to see the differences between corpse-induced stress be a lot more marked.  I don't see why it would be traumatic at all to see a goblin toe when you literally enjoyed killing that bastard.  If anything you should get a good thought from that, "yep that s.o.b.'s still dead."  However, it's entirely reasonable someone would be traumatized by, for instance, having their spouse and children rotting in their own bedroom.

Corpses and needs the dwarves will never take care of unless I make sure they can not possibly do anything else seem to be the main sticking points.
The bodies at least makes some sense -- seeing a pile of corpses, or a battlefield littered with bodies, even if they're "the enemy" being traumatizing makes sense from a realism perspective, though in terms of gameplay it's been really terrible mixed with the other issues with the stress and needs systems. This feels like one of those cases where things need to be less realistic/simulationist for the sake of the game overall.
I totally understand *why* dwarves who lived relatively peaceful lives with no military training would be horrified and traumatized from the aftermath of a siege, but as-is the way it's handled is making the game nearly unplayable for me.
When corpse stress is added to the slow buildup of stress from other sources after a few years of playing ((which seems inevitable because as-is some dwarves won't address their desperate need to do things like pray at all unless I burrow them in the temple with no access to a tavern, library, bed, workshop, random stone to haul somewhere, etc -- they will not handle this desperate need that is driving them to madness unless it's the only thing they can possibly do!)) you end up suddenly having a big chunk of the fort useless or tantruming. At that point, I'd rather flood the fort with magma than keep playing because I won't be able to do anything that's actually fun again in this fort unless I exile a bunch of dwarves (and their lovers, best friend, families) and then wait for enough migrnts to come back to replace the lost labour force.

[Loci]

Breaking News! Unmet needs confirmed as a major source of stress... for overseers who don't realize that their dwarves really, REALLY don't care.

Having every single need unmet for 50 years didn't cause my test dwarves to become stressed; a few unmet needs for a few years are highly unlikely to be causing any reasonable dwarves to stress out. The next time you have "mysteriously stressed" dwarves, take a few minutes to look up their personality facets on this page, paying particular attention to any extreme values. Some are obvious ("constant internal rage" sounds dire, and is); some are not ("frequently depressed" sounds mildly concerning, but it's roughly as stressful as constant rage). "Fatal personality flaws" like these cause your dwarves' stress to skyrocket, and there isn't anything you can do about it--even resetting their stress with DFHack only delays the inevitable for a few months. If your stressed dwarves don't have any "fatal personality flaws", they should respond well to standard "good-thought therapy" (which, for the record, is *not* equivalent to "needs-met therapy").

Here's a 16-year fortress where I have not micromanaged my dwarves' needs. Despite having multiple needs unmet for more than a decade, 102 of my dwarves are ecstatic and all but one are at least "fine". This is also an above-ground fortress that has relied solely on militia for defense, slaughtered more than 1000 invaders, and manually dumped thousands of bodyparts, all of which have been deemed "impossible" by various people. My "secret" for avoiding game-ending stress is preventing personality changes. Many of my dwarves have only a few personality changes after 15 years at the fortress, while a typical dwarf at a typical fortress might have accumulated a dozen in the same time frame. At this rate, I expect at least some of my dwarves will die of old age before suffering a "fatal personality change" and dying of stress. The results from my fortress support my statement back on page 1 of this thread: reducing the number of personality changes, particularly from common and non-traumatic events, will likely solve the problem of game-ending stress.

If you would like to try a less-stressed fortress, here are a few key strategies:

1. Embark in the desert to avoid rain. (Overseers who don't fancy a desert fortress can disable weather in the init files instead.)

2. Don't create a corpse stockpile. (Stockpiling corpses and bodyparts roughly *triples* the number of corpse-thoughts. Create a garbage chute and either manually dump-flag corpses or change standing orders to automatically dump them.)

3. Limit corpse-handling to dedicated dwarves. (Create a "no corpses" burrow and assign all your dwarves, then create a "corpses" burrow and assign a few select dwarves. Military dwarves who don't "care about anything anymore" are ideal since they are *immune* to corpse-thoughts, but disposable dwarves can be used in a pinch.)

4. Handle cave adaption. (Either keep your dwarves aboveground so they don't become cave adapted, or keep them out of the sun so they don't become ill. You can also just create a massive "umbrella" over the site with DFHack if you're feeling lazy.)

5. Avoid miasma. (Aboveground fortress are miasma-free. Belowground fortresses will require staying on top of food handling or creating "sunlit" indoor areas to prevent miasma.)

6. Proactively manage clothing. (Either supply ample replacements for all clothing types your dwarves can get their grubby hands on, or actively confiscate clothing you don't intend to replace (e.g. loincloths). DFHack's cleanowned command is the easiest way to take worn clothing away, though forbidding problem clothing, drafting the owner in a "replace clothing" squad, activating the squad, and then undrafting the owner will work in vanilla.)

7. Catch problem thoughts early. (Regularly check your dwarves thoughts and fix any personality-change-causing problems as soon as possible. You'll still get a few personality changes, but the fewer the better.)



If all that sounds like too much work, you're in luck; here's a DFHack script that reverts personality changes:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]


-- Revert personality changes.
--[====[

fix/personality.lua
=========
Use with a unit selected to revert all personality changes on that unit.

Alternatively, use ``-unit #`` to select a unit numerically.

Use ``-all`` to revert personality changes on all units on the map.

]====]
local utils = require('utils')
local validArgs = utils.invert({'all', 'unit'})
local args = utils.processArgs({...}, validArgs)

function revertPersonalityChanges(unit)
    if not unit.status.current_soul then
        return
    end
    local personality = unit.status.current_soul.personality
    if not personality.memories or not personality.memories.reflected_on then
        return
    end
    local changes = personality.memories.reflected_on
    for k,v in ipairs(changes) do
if changes[k].changed_facet > -1 then  --personality change found
personality.traits[changes[k].changed_facet] = changes[k].anon_1  --set trait to old value
personality.stress_boost = 0 -- Reset stress_boost to default value until next recalculation
changes[k].changed_facet = -1 --unmark as personality change
end
    end
end

if args.all then
    for _, unit in ipairs(df.global.world.units.all) do
        revertPersonalityChanges(unit)
    end
else
    local unit = args.unit and df.unit.find(args.unit) or dfhack.gui.getSelectedUnit(true)
    if not unit then
        qerror('A unit must be selected.')
    end
    revertPersonalityChanges(unit)
end



Copy and paste it into hack/scripts/fix/personality.lua in your DF folder. You can then set DFHack to run it automatically every month like so:

Code: [Select]


repeat -time 1 -timeUnits months -command [ fix/personality -all ]



This won't remove stress entirely, and you can still "overwhelm" your dwarves (particularly if you insist on stockpiling corpses), but almost all of your dwarves should remain recoverable--no more inevitable personality-change-fueled stress-deaths. Give it a try; you might find needs are much less stressful than you assumed.

[comnom]

I've been playing since 34.11, with lots of breaks (months or years) and I play now with the new stress system much more. It's alot more interesting, I care about the little bastards now.

That said, I use dfhack's remove-stress whenever I see a red arrow, simply because now I do care, and don't want to lose dwarves. Micromanaging  dwarves gets boring when you've got say, 100 dwarves and maybe 5 or 6 special cases that take way more game time than building your stupid dwarf trick. I work, so game time is precious.

So for me, it could use some tweaks but I don't think it'll be a deal breaker for selling the game.


Some ideas (no I didn't read the thread, it's 30 pages):

Buff the stress relief of nobles. They seek them out when they're stressed, but that seems to hurt more than help since it just creates a cycle with the noble that interferes with other recovery methods. (ie, getting them better good thoughts)

Use a larger numerical range for different stressors so rain and a dead body can be much further apart severity-wise.

Have dwarves avoid things they don't like. I literally had a kid go play outside in a corpse pile post siege and sink into a depression.


That's it. Micromanaging will be better when the game gets a proper UI and people will tolerate other potential flaws because of it, so I wouldn't worry too much about it man. If all else fails and your community is still divided, just add a tag to the init. STRESS: [EASY/NORMAL/HARD], and get back to work on more interesting things

[muldrake]

Am I alone in this?  I am finding "game ending stress" just to be something I don't experience any more.  Now, I do a lot of micromanaging, starting out each fort with a list of preferences of every dwarf, and continue this practice well into the game, also routinely checking everyone for stress, moving everyone who seems bummed out into a room of their own, with every dedicated set of quarters smoothed, engraved, and if at all possible, I move every dwarf into a set of quarters personally designed for them out of materials they like.

And if someone seems to be losing their mind despite this I exile them, along with their entire dumb family.

And almost all my dwarves are in like the high 10K+ happiness levels.

I think guilds really help too, turn off all the restrictions on them and let everyone use them.