Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Riemann]

The most recent long-running fort of mine was running in 44_12. What finally made me abandon it and not start a new one (as I would have done if it had just been death to invasion or HSF or whatever) was the slow grinding death of distracted dwarves. And if I hadn't been using Dwarf Therapist I wouldn't have got anywhere near as far as I did as that gave at least some indication of what was wrong.

Note about the fort: it includes a 23x23 sized legendary dining room / inn, well room, library and temple. Every dwarf or couple has a 3x3 bedroom with bed, cabinet and chest. Every noble has a 11x11 dining room, throne room and 11x23 bedroom. There is a well equipped training room and hospital. There is a very large store of prepared lavish meals cooked by legendary cooks and a very large store of various kinds of booze. Every single tile of wall or floor is smoothed and in the Locations and Nobles rooms they are covered in engravings done by legendary skill engravers. There are lots of high value statues scattered around the place.

In my save I had recently forced a large number of dwarves, including some I would have liked to keep but were relatives of the doomed, to emigrate to other settlements. A lot of these were either in a constant spiral of meltdowns and tantrums or were close to it. Of the remaining 90:

63 were "distracted after being away from family." This includes quite a few who are married.
61 were "distracted after being away from friends."
36 were "distracted after being unable to practice a craft"
9 were "badly distracted after being unable to practice a craft"
41 were "distracted after being unable to practice a martial art"
1 were "badly distracted after being unable to acquire something"
20 were "distracted after being unable to acquire something"
32 were "unfocused after being unable to acquire something"
50 were "distracted after a lack of a decent meal"
34 were "unfocused after being unable to admire art"
30 were "unfocused after a lack of abstract thinking"
etc..

Every category of need has at least a few dwarves in the "distracted" or worse stage. Although "Learn Something" and "Hear Eloquence" seem unusually well off for some reason.

The 20 or so dwarves that got purged were just the ones (or their relatives) who had the most stacked "distracted" and "very distracted" modifiers causing them to start going nuts at the drop of a hat.

The frustrating thing here (and the reason I'm not going to play Dwarf Fortress any more until it is addressed) is that the only way to deal with most of these needs is tedious micromanagement which breaks the point of the game.

EG: I have read that the only way to deal with the need to acquire something is to have stockpiles of trinkets with endless jobs needlessly carrying goods back and forth between them. Eventually a dwarf might decide to claim a trinket they've been told to carry.

For the "craft something" need I started setting up a series of workshops pumping out rock crafts (perhaps to be used in the pointless stockpiles above) but it was such a pain to keep re-assigning the worst off dwarves to different workshops then checking up to see if they're better yet I just gave up.

Some of the other needs are literally impossible to deal with. Dwarves demanding time with family when they migrated here without any family members for example. Or needing food that can neither be grown, shot or bought in this part of the world.

Even worse are needs that they could in theory easily fulfill in the fort (given its supplies and rooms) but just don't bother to. Getting more and more crazy as they go. EG: just not picking at random the Legendary Lavish Meal that contains the ingredient they need even though its right there in the storeroom.

Has any of this been addressed in the recent release? If not can I just turn off the damn needs system?

[Shonai_Dweller]

Needs aren't directly related to stress, so distraction would have just slowed them down a bit.

Stress needs some rebalancing. Priests are helping and a more robust fix will be along sometime between now and Steam (sadly pressure to get out Steam means bug fixes, especially complex ones will likely come slower this time around as he's doing both at the same time).

[Riemann]

Needs aren't directly related to stress, so distraction would have just slowed them down a bit.

Stress needs some rebalancing. Priests are helping and a more robust fix will be along sometime between now and Steam (sadly pressure to get out Steam means bug fixes, especially complex ones will likely come slower this time around as he's doing both at the same time).

Are you sure of this? It was always exactly those dwarves with the most pressing needs issues that started breaking (tantrums, depression etc...). Not those on the front line getting rained on and seeing dead bodies and getting shot by goblins. But the guy down in the guts of the fort who is well fed and safe but just refuses to select a Lavish Roast containing the ingredient he wants and hasn't made some tinkets in a while.

[Riemann]

In case Toady or ThreeToe see this: a few other thoughts from the DF binge that ended with this fort (besides the needs system as noted above).

* First off, hi! Not played too much in recent years but did a TON in the 2d days and shortly after the 3d update. I was at that first meetup at Ivars in Seattle and still have the crayon art I received there. I grew up in North Kitsap so it was cool hearing how you guys were adapting to the place at the time.

* Even with DFHack and embark finder it is a lot of work to find a location I want to play. It is super hard to find a site that gives one a chance to explore most of the games features. I really miss the 2d map generation which was varied but infinitely easier for a new player given the general progression from left to right.

Perhaps shipping the game with a pregenned world with a few start points pre-selected to conform to a difficulty curve would help. EG: maybe start with one like the 2d maps that you have a stream, trees, a good selection of minerals (including iron and flux), an underground river, lava etc... Then harder ones that take those features away for more challenge.

I hate to think what this game would be like for someone starting today who just picked a start position given the information in the default UI and tried to make a go of it.

* Cooked meals are worth way too much. A barrel of lavish meals, even with ingredients just scavenged off the surface with gather plants, is often worth more than 10,000. The entire dwarven and human caravans can be totally bought out with the produce of the labor of one dwarf.

* The justice system really stood out to be as being better (easier to use, clearer in intent, less buggy) than any previous time I've played. Bravo!

* It was really hard to get my marksdwarves to stand on a wall and shoot through Fortifications at attackers. And really unclear if doing so actually did anything useful. Even with microing and trying to individually assign where specific dwarves in a squad were to stand they would wander off and try and place themselves nearby but on the WRONG SIDE of the wall or otherwise get themselves killed. Or they'd stand a couple tiles back on the wall and not do anything as they no longer had line or sight or whatever.

* There were a couple times this happened: Attackers would show up and I'd order everyone to their burrows inside. A dwarf who was on a long-running hauling operation outside (eg: hauling a heavy corpse to a graveyard) would refuse to heed the order and have to finish their job. Nothing could make them cancel that hauling job (not drafting to the military or burrows or forbidding the item or anything else I could find).

* I still build huge elaborate death corridors to be able to use catapults despite their 2d only trajectories but it would be so nice if those were updated.

* Better info is needed on how to properly design a uniform and equip armor. The DFWiki page on this is incomprehensible.

* It would be really helpful to get some info added to the wiki from Toady himself about how to design big forts to play nice with the pathfinding. There's some good suggestions there derived from trial-and-error and guesses that the pathfinding is based on A* but more authoritative info would help.

[Loci]

Needs aren't directly related to stress...

Are you sure of this?

Fairly, yes. If 50 years with precisely zero met needs didn't cause my test dwarves significant stress then it seems unlikely that 5 years of partially-unmet needs are unduly stressing your dwarves.

...refuses to select a Lavish Roast containing the ingredient he wants...

This has also been debunked. Dwarves will select their preferred food, roasted or otherwise, when available*. The game, however, isn't displaying complete preference information. A dwarf who wants to consume leopard actually wants a specific type of leopard product, e.g. leopard brain. Leopard meat, leopard liver, leopard lungs, etc. are not sufficient.

*within reasonable proximity, not owned, not inside a task-locked barrel, etc.

[JesterHell696]

I'm probably wrong but I was under the impression that met needs act like a stress buffer of sorts, as in a dwarf with met needs will be more resistant to going crazy, whether it was because being focused reduces stress taken or increase the amount of stress needed to go over the edge I'm not sure, but based upon the other replies I'm guess that I was wrong.

[Shonai_Dweller]

I'm probably wrong but I was under the impression that met needs act like a stress buffer of sorts, as in a dwarf with met needs will be more resistant to going crazy, whether it was because being focused reduces stress taken or increase the amount of stress needed to go over the edge I'm not sure, but based upon the other replies I'm guess that I was wrong.

The needs system gives "focus" (buffs) and distraction (debuffs) to dwarves. Focussed dwarves are quicker, distracted dwarves are slower. Whether buffs included "resistance to craziness" is something I haven't heard before.
That's how the system was explained when it was first introduced and, as Loci's experiments seem to suggest, didn't get somehow connected to added/reduced stress.

Now, what you have to bear in mind is that Dwarves have needs based on culture and personality.
A dwarf that's likely to get stressed about being away from loved ones, is likely to be a dwarf with a need to spend time with family. In that way there's certain correlations. But it's not an exact indicator.

Top part of the thoughts screen shows stress. Bottom part shows focus/distraction.

[JesterHell696]

The needs system gives "focus" (buffs) and distraction (debuffs) to dwarves. Focussed dwarves are quicker, distracted dwarves are slower. Whether buffs included "resistance to craziness" is something I haven't heard before.
That's how the system was explained when it was first introduced and, as Loci's experiments seem to suggest, didn't get somehow connected to added/reduced stress.

Now, what you have to bear in mind is that Dwarves have needs based on culture and personality.
A dwarf that's likely to get stressed about being away from loved ones, is likely to be a dwarf with a need to spend time with family. In that way there's certain correlations. But it's not an exact indicator.

Top part of the thoughts screen shows stress. Bottom part shows focus/distraction.

It make sense, I'm not even sure what gave me the impression that it acts like a buffer, might be the correlation you mentioned.

[HisDFGF]

I can’t seem to properly meet the needs of many of my dwarves, but my current fort is the happiest one I’ve had yet.  It seems like the needs do occasionally translate into happy or unhappy thoughts, but their thoughts are what actually control their happiness.  There’s all kinds of things that give them happy or unhappy thoughts.

Is that the best way to say it?

My dwarves spent the better part of a year mostly hanging out in the tavern and they still never had their needs met when it came to friends and family.  Maybe they have no friends or family in my fort?  Who knows.  I’ve got most of them participating in the occasional wrestler training, and I just added a library that’s so popular I’m going to have to expand it.  They get loads of happy thoughts from learning and improving their skills.  Even with the unmet needs, they are almost all on the positive happiness scale, and it seems like if they’re busy enough they don’t even think about their unmet needs.