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[mikekchar]

Wow.  I haven't posted here in a long time :-)  I *have* been playing a fair amount of DF lately.  In many ways I'm with muldrake.  I *like* figuring out how to make the fortress a utopia.  I just realised today that I actually play DF like it's a puzzle game.  For example, I'm still obsessed with making meals and having absolute control over it.  So I have 1 kitchen per recipe.  Seriously.  1 booze (or anything in a container, really), and 3 solid non-container items (there is a bug where they will always take things out of the same container once they choose it, so you can't normally use containers for kitchen stockpiles).  I link all of them to the kitchen.  Then I have a manager job to make the meal once all of the ingredients are available (working out how to specify that in the manager, exploring all of the possible ways to specify "at least one pond turtle", for example -- it's not how you would think it works -- took me ages).  But like I said -- bug where it just keeps taking the same thing out of the damn container, so I get a meal with 4 finely minced pond turtle instead of pond turtle roast basted in peach cider with red spinach leaves (which you can't grow, btw!) and fisher berries.  Also there is a design flaw where once something is in a container, it can *never* be moved out of that container while it remains in a stockpile.  The upshot of all of that is that all of my food stockpiles can't have containers.  But I'm drowning in fisher berries... What to do?  Ah ha!  I can make a still that makes fisher berry wine (and a fruit -- if you want to control it exactly, the still can make exactly one plant and one fruit.... and why aren't fisher berries fruits???  Because all non-real fruits are plants, silly!)  So what I can do is make a stockpile that contains a single barrel for fisher berries.  It gives it to the still and I have a condition that I make it if I have more than one fisher berries (which is a plant, remember -- important for specifying the condition in the manager) and at most 60 fisher berries (the amount that fit in a barrel) and less than 2 seeds.  Then I have a single tile (non-container) next to the kitchen.  So what this does is make fisher berry wine if I need seeds.  Otherwise it waits until I grow enough fisher berries that it doesn't fit in the barrel -- which means that it goes into the kitchen stockpile.  Then I keep making meals with it.  This basically regulates the number of seeds that I can have and acts as a regulator so that I always have enough fisher berries that I can get seeds, but only have a few extra (basically what will grow on my one tile of farm in a stack) that will end up in the meal.  And if you think *that's* fun, you have to see how I regulate cooking liked foods that must be in bags (like seeds)!

I can honestly get the vast majority of my dwarfs eating amazing meals that they prefer and get great happy memories.  Such a fun game!

Um... well.... it is for me.  I suspect this is not the kind of thing that most people enjoy doing when they play the game.  Obviously, what I'm doing is downright crazy even if I think it is fun.  You don't have to be this obsessive and you can do a lot with the game more casually.  But my point (finally) is that many people don't want to play the game as a work flow simulation/sandbox building game.  Older versions of the game supported different gaming styles and I think it's fair that those people are unhappy that their favourite gaming style isn't as easy to play any more (in some cases it may actually be impossible).  On the other hand, I *love* the direction the game is going (well, you could make my puzzles a bit easier and I wouldn't mind), so it's a delicate balancing act.

P.S. Selling the fisher berry wine (that nobody likes) in claystone rock pots to the Elves.  "Trust me!  It's a slice of Dwarven tradition handed down from our forefathers... Oh... you don't need those stupid sun berries do you?  We can take them off your hands in exchange".  Trying to make sure your claystone rock pots don't end up holding fisher berries and breaking your automation math is also a fun puzzle...

[scriver]

I wonder if the happiness count in the new UI is just like the one on the bottom right in DFHack: where it just gives you total counts, but doesn't directly point out which dwarves are at what level of stress?  To save a dwarf, it can take several other dwarves and a focused effort to arrange the right conditions for them.  So not knowing which dwarves of the fort need special attention, it would be a much grander undertaking to apply the same level of coddling to every dwarf in the fort.  Other than Dwarf Therapist, what other utilities allow the player to see stress levels of individual dwarves?

Is it actually wrong for dwarves to expect to live in conditions befitting their status as elite crafts-sapients and so on?  Why shouldn't dwarves live in living quarters that are absolutely lavish, filled with objects creates by expert craftsdwarfship, made out of substances entirely to their liking?  If you mistreat and neglect dwarves, why shouldn't they be unhappy with their conditions?

Because dwarves don't pick out their furnishings themselves. Because dwarves don't put in orders at the mason's or carpenter's saying "I want a cabinet made of Sandstone" or "a bed made from Fungiwood". Because there's no way to see how much individual dwarves would like a room from the room-appointment screen. Because dwarves don't evaluate themselves which room would make them happiest when you leave a bed-/-room open to be claimed and don't move around once they claimed one.

[muldrake]

It's not that they should be happy with neglected conditions, but that to truly bring a dwarf out of the pits of despair, it takes way more work than just nice conditions.  Crafting, praying, socializing, sparring, avoiding corpse handling, and more.  To do that for every single dwarf in a good sized fort would require all other projects to essentially stop.

This is why you don't let them get there in the first place.  There are only a very few genuinely "doomed" dwarves who just start out inevitably going into a depression spiral.  Although it can be rather annoying when you start out with your original contingent of dwarves incredibly intolerant of weather conditions, and you embark and it's raining.  That's the main pre-embark thing I check is whether I at least have 2 or so dwarves who don't mind working outdoors and put plant gathering and woodcutting and similar outdoors skills on them so the automated labor things I use don't needlessly send dwarves out into bad weather.

I also use the "immediately underground" embark tactic I read in a thread here, in every embark no matter how benign, treating every embark as if death rains from the sky.  It's intended for terrifying biomes, but I treat them all as if they are, because early stress from weather, if it goes into recurrent mode, is one of those dwarf-killers.

The trick is just channel down one or two z-levels wherever you embark, immediately deconstruct the wagon, designate the channel as a dump square, turn on gathering refuse from outdoors in standing orders (otherwise they won't), designate every single item in your possession for dump, assign that one square as a food stockpile (so food doesn't rot), dig a new entry to the nice quantum stockpile you now have, cover up the top, turn off the gathering refuse from outdoors order (unless you actually want to continue doing that) and then ta-da within instants in game time, you are safely underground with all your stuff and nobody is getting rained on.  ETA:  and then unforbid everything again because dumping sets forbid and you don't want to be confused why nobody is using anything.  Also don't dump things like pickaxes or other tools you'll actually need during this process.

This may sound like a really paranoid strategy and it was originated for terrifying biomes, but they're all terrifying when you really think about it.  And it avoids the early game stress that turns into fort-killers.  The happier your dwarves start, the happier they'll stay.

[Schmaven]

That sounds like one way to mitigate the issue.  However, I stand by my assertion that being able to focus more on the stressed dwarves is more efficient than treating every dwarf as if they are a special case.  And the only way to do that is to be able to tell how stressed a particular dwarf is. 

Though I suppose if you limit your fort to a small number of dwarves, it's not a big deal to baby them all.  It seems to be a bigger concern for medium to large populations of dwarves. 

[Snow Gibbon]

I think I've just finished wrapping up with my longest fort I've had in the latest iteration, going on 12 years. Honestly even with a blood-raining evil biome start, and even being ill-prepared for sieges resulting in a good chunk of casualties it was tricky but not game-ending in the typical 3-4 year span being thrown around here. What eventually killed the game was the slow-burn of buggy behaviour and un-caterable needs.. Extremely specific meal requirements and desire to see family that was either off-site or entirely non-existent just built up until my best and oldest dwarves started offing themselves. If those issues are addressed, making dwarves have sensible, perhaps dynamic food preferences instead of craving exotic tiger flesh as soon as they crawl from the womb would be sensible, and either allowing dwarves to petition to travel to see family or making them arrive as tavern visitors would be handy. Dwarves created from thin air like your starting seven should either not care for family or have a heightened drive to start one so they don't lament what they don't have.

[Putnam]

I have played this save for a while. Stress was mostly a constant stream downwards into infinite happiness and joy, with the occasional dwarf who is never happy but also never stressed.

Until a siege, at which point most dwarves saw 30 goblin bodies at once and immediately went to positive-stress, one of them gaining over 15000 ("great deal of stress") upon the instant. Precisely one dwarf was already haggard and drawn before this, because he kept seeing a dead body I couldn't find (I had missed some teeth) that nobody else was bothered by.

From what I can tell, the entire reason for the stress issues is lack of dwarven scope insensitivity: in other words, dwarves see 20 dead bodies and are 20 times as bothered by it as if they see one. This is just not realistic behavior.

I should note that I play the game in a very lackadaisical way that, well, if you'll believe it, is far more efficient than the average player, by its very lackadaisical nature. I always approve petitions from entertainers, 100% of the time, because I think it's more interesting to have a lot of them around, and I kinda feel like that might be a reason for me having little-to-no stress before the siege, combined with my spending pretty much all of my labor on luxuries: drink variety, cooking lavish meals, keeping lots of mugs, making instruments, improving the temple and library.

So, my proposed solution is: easier way to dispose of bodies, less multiplication of dead body thoughts.

Needs are a problem, and a pretty big one, but as far as I can tell they're a mostly unrelated problem.

[Alastar]

Many things feel heavy-handed and deaf to scale/context. The result is that one is incentivised to avoid certain things entirely rather than deal with them.

If being caught in ordinary rain is too onerous, there is little functional difference to the extremes of evil weather. If the aftermath of a victorious battle is likely to result in a downward spiral, a defensive military is merely a failsafe to automated ways to break sieges out of sight with no player intervention. Also, seing mostly enemy corpses might be a source of grim satisfaction, and not only for hardened killers. The clothing situation encourages keeping normal clothing to a minimum and putting everyone in (light) armour.

And every misbehaving/fiddly feature that's "expected" to be used for a balanced stress system but impractical for some players encourages compensating with workarounds/exploits.

Many things would be expected to reach an equilibrium, but don't. Dwarves throw eventually murderous tantrums when they don't get  their favourite ice cream, that was discontinued years ago. Too many things scream "deal with me, play around me, or die!" when more subtle effects would be sufficient and more interesting: escapism cutting into productivity, reluctance to have kids, being more susceptible to outside influence etc.
Dwarves mostly need to get better at taking care of their own needs and shirking duties they have no stomach for,

[mathfreak2]

One of the things that gets me often, especially right after a siege during the process of cleaning up, is traumatized dwarves due to seeing dead bodies. I actually think this mechanic is really cool, but it needs some way to negate its effects over the long term.

My suggestion would be to add something like trauma centers, psychologists, and/or rehabilitation centers as locations/professions where dwarves could go to recover and talk about their issues to make themselves feel better.

[Bumber]

My suggestion would be to add something like trauma centers, psychologists, and/or rehabilitation centers as locations/professions where dwarves could go to recover and talk about their issues to make themselves feel better.

Priests and mayors are supposed to be able to help with that. I don't think it does enough to counter the effect.

[FantasticDorf]

My suggestion would be to add something like trauma centers, psychologists, and/or rehabilitation centers as locations/professions where dwarves could go to recover and talk about their issues to make themselves feel better.

Priests and mayors are supposed to be able to help with that. I don't think it does enough to counter the effect.

I take stock in that going to dwarves as the need it with the 'quasi-new' tavernkeep code with drink in hand to just fufill a need to drink works quite well at remedying a particular problem. There can be more priests at a time to deliver sermons (which is actually very useful once its up as zeal is positive and persuasive priests strengthen bonds to religion; if you overlook requirements for it that without editing disallow them at the start) than there can be mayors to recieve dwarves.

The middle ages in slight mysticism about the cause of illness were infatuated with 'humor medicine' as a primitive form of psychiatric treatment in that sin and pent up feelings attributed to ill health as well as expelled them through confession (they do in a way we know now); mayors and priests might be a little overworked if they have to path to anybody showing a particular ``need`` to express grief but i do think its one way forward for it all. At the moment they quietly keep a lid on some problems rather than try to root it out, as mayors often deal with the tail-end of a already stressed dwarf and priests simply round up the faithful in little routines than have heart to hearts.

[rico6822]

I actually thought all the time that stress system in Dwarf Fortress is a good one since the game is supposted to be "nintendo hard". All races in Dwarf Fortress have they're own psychology and the player's primary task is to oversee a bunch of mentals. Only they can suffer from insanities from which they never recover. You can always, however try to replace them with new ones. This gets harder after first 2 immigrant waves. You will either have to wait for a tragedy to strike Dwarfs somewhere far away for them to become your new residents or make Dwarfs reproduce.

[Bumber]

@rico6822
The thing is, the primary way to avoid over-stressing your dwarves is to avoid having them see a bunch of corpses. That basically means avoiding having your dwarves come in contact with enemies altogether. Far from "Nintendo hard", it's just boring.

[madpathmoth]

Not to mention this game has always been more of a "play your own way" game than a "beat this incredible challenge for bragging rights", as evidenced by there being no "win screen" or any kind.  The game provides challenges, and the community has people who pursue special challenges for their own enjoyment, but Dwarf Fortress is not a game made for people who want an old-school "can you get the new high score??" set of frustrations to deal with, it's supposed to be a fantasy story generation kind of deal, where the goal is to create an environment conducive to emergent storytelling, where interesting and dramatic things happen, not just whatever is more efficient and required to "win" (or to avoid your dwarves all killing eachother or commiting suicide).

Stress has been one of if not the biggest detractor from the very core of the game in my opinion.  It is a constant lurking punishment for anything dramatic or interesting that happens, both as it happens and forever after as your dwarves regularly relive everything bad that happened to them in their digital minds.  The fact that it is so hard to reverse, and so hard to isolate, as it naturally results in more and more stress, is toxic for this game.  I am trying to get into it, but I have enough trouble as-is getting a stable fort in the first three years or so, and then?  I don't do anything.  Why would I!?  The game is ready to ruin everything I build for the hubris of trying to have an interesting story happen because my dwarves are innocent precious babies that don't match the world they live in at all and if I am not playing DF to cater to the desires of these fake digital dwarves over what I'd like to actually do in the game then oh well, the game sure isn't going to comply and I better get ready for the slow burn of having to ignore whatever I wanted to do anyways as the fortress slowly dies.

I like combat in this game, but engaging in it is a purely negative experience for my fort and my dwarves, who have no concept of victory or scale.  I have still never reached even the first cavern layer because there's nothing there I need and many many things waiting to punish me for daring to explore.  Raiding may as well not exist.  The game basically puts it up to me to invite danger and drama but then also gets ready to strike me in the head with a stick for attempting anything but the most tepid, peaceful, and cautious approach and avoiding anything that might make one of these dysfunctional babies sad

Whatever these are, they aren't dwarves, so maybe I'll call them "frawd" from now on until they are capable of acting like things that actually exist in the world and setting generated for them and aren't too fragile to live with a total lack of self-preservation (when it comes to anything besides direct physical harm and needing to eat).

[Uthimienure]

madpathmoth, have you ever tried this little tweak to alter the stress vulnerability?  It might bring back the fun for you!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Bumber]

Can't the stress vulnerability of your dwarves still end up increased due to personality shifts? It's a significant part of the problem.