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[DrCyano]

Hi y'all!

In my DF v0.47 fortress, it's been about 6 years, and I have 119 happy dwarves, despite annual invasions, the occasional dead body in the fortress, briefly running out of booze twice, and an insane bridge-building project that regularly puts cave-adapted dwarves outside!

I'm only using vanilla DF (no DFHack), so I can't say if they're all in positive or negative stress, but there are no down-arrows on any of them. I've never achieved such harmony before in Dwarf Fortress, so I thought I'd share my observations and compare notes to other overseers.

What I did:
- Redundant hallways and lots and lots of doors! Double-doors at every level of every stairwell and every room entrance, so when there's an invader or rotten wheel of cheese in the fortress, I can lock doors to re-route civilians around the threat until it is dealt with

- 3x3 bedrooms for everyone! The bedrooms just have a bed and a door (a few have a cabinet too), but that's enough to generate lots of happy thoughts about sleeping in a nice bedroom

- One single generic temple. I suffered from the polytheism prayer bug when I had god-specific temples, but all that cleared up when I switched to a single universal temple, even for dwarves with 12+ deities

- Granting every guild hall petition, putting 2 tables, 2 chairs, and a display case with an artifact in each (and setting them to allow all citizens, not just members)

- Not obsessing over labors (I'm playing vanilla, so labor optimization is annoying anyways), giving dwarves some down-time as a result. When I do spot Ann unhappy dwarf, I disable all of their craft labors to give them a holiday.

That's about it. What are your strategies for happy dwarves? Which of the above do you think is unnecessary or ineffective?

Cheers!

[Shonai_Dweller]

Most of the above. Plus I shut down the fortress for a couple of months at the end of the year for some intensive social time.
Close the gate, turn off the workshops, pasture the cats in the tavern (keeps dorfs from chasing them all over).

Also, I've started building guildhalls early, an "everyone welcome" guildhall starts being used right away for socializing and useful gelding lessons.

[Immortal-D]

Good stuff.  Do you have dedicated corpse haulers?  I recall that sentient body parts produced a stacking negative effect.  Also a single drop of rain could turn Dorfs into a fruit loop

[KevinM]

I have a fortress in it's 6th year that is doing somewhat well and I've been doing the same as you have with a few more additions:

After a lot of reading, I just learned that the meals will give a happiness boost if one of the ingredients is in the meal, except when it lists an animal which means one of the possible body parts.  So I'm learning to focus growing and brewing those items and buying them from traders.  (I've played vanilla for the last 10 years but just tried DwarfTherapist which I rather like since I'm not altering anything with it. (except being able to see a better overview of who has what duties active and being able to reconfigure them).  It gave me a preferences list so I could identify the number of dwarves that had a particular food & drink preference and I've been adding those into meals. So I'm not quite vanilla but don't want to go so far as using DFHack.)  But just making sure I have kitchens adding booze to the food was the important thing anyway.  DT was just so I didn't have to send any random booze in that direction.

I have not dug very far but I've set up burrows.  One for All areas including outdoors and one for under roofs. Plus a few other ones for generic purposes or for forced socializing.  My dwarves who like or don't mind the outdoors are in the all areas, the rest are in the under roofs. When it's sunny, I force an alert for the "all areas" so my plant gatherers (who are dwarves who like wandering) get to go wander and get some food fillers.

I've been obsessing over one of the depressed dwarves for a while and couldn't find a way before she decided to end it all, causing some other dwarves to have their own states but up until that point, only two had red arrows.  I now have a third that I've just taken labors off of (stressed due to being to being forced as mayor to listen to the two angry dwarves complain.

I'm planning on setting up a pumpstack waterfall as a mood booster and considering if I want to set up an outdoor dining room as my next projects.

[muldrake]

Hi y'all!

In my DF v0.47 fortress, it's been about 6 years, and I have 119 happy dwarves, despite annual invasions, the occasional dead body in the fortress, briefly running out of booze twice, and an insane bridge-building project that regularly puts cave-adapted dwarves outside!

This is a nice list.  I'll be trying some of this.  I have some pretty borderline dwarves even after curing the worst with a round of magma therapy.

[DrCyano]

Good stuff.  Do you have dedicated corpse haulers?  I recall that sentient body parts produced a stacking negative effect.  Also a single drop of rain could turn Dorfs into a fruit loop

At first, I did, but have up after hitting the 50 Dwarf mark.

I did add a trap hall entry and both locked the doors and forbid everything in the hall after an invasion fills it with corpses. I engrave slabs instead of trying to bury the dead before they rot.

[Urist9876]

Use nice doors for bedrooms. Set as internal and expand the room to add the door to the bedroom.

How polytheism is working out for you? I still have dwarves that only pray to the first deities on their list, ignoring the red colored needs. Often those are immigrant poets with very little to do until granted citizenship so they have all the time to pray. Anything special you did there?

Something like rain or seeing a dead body shouldn't stress a happy dwarf out in the new stress system. Very possible the personality changes. As long as most needs were fulfilled they should pull through. This depends on personality, so there might be exceptions.

Many dwarves want to do something creative. Disabling jobs doesn't always help. For really happy dwarves you have to inspect them and look what they want. Some people even make dedicated workshops for each dwarf and use the workshop orders to schedule a few creative jobs there each year.

I have not tried public accessible guildhalls. With the default settings they are good for filling the needs to help someone and be with friends (socialize too, but that's not too hard in an inn either). It took some years before dwarves actually started to use the guildhalls in my fortress to teach each other. That still works in a guildhall where everyone comes?

[Shonai_Dweller]

I have not tried public accessible guildhalls. With the default settings they are good for filling the needs to help someone and be with friends (socialize too, but that's not too hard in an inn either). It took some years before dwarves actually started to use the guildhalls in my fortress to teach each other. That still works in a guildhall where everyone comes?

Yeah, open access guildhalls let anyone teach right away. Even visitors.

[DrCyano]

How polytheism is working out for you? I still have dwarves that only pray to the first deities on their list, ignoring the red colored needs. Often those are immigrant poets with very little to do until granted citizenship so they have all the time to pray. Anything special you did there?

I had that problem at first, and thought what I needed was more temples, but that made it even worse. The problem went away when I deleted all temples and then created a single temple not dedicated to any god. The generic temple is fairly large (8x8), allowing Dwarves to congregate there even when not praying. Maybe that helps too.

Something like rain or seeing a dead body shouldn't stress a happy dwarf out in the new stress system. Very possible the personality changes. As long as most needs were fulfilled they should pull through. This depends on personality, so there might be exceptions.

I observe that they certainly do get stressed by these things. The change from 0.44 appears to be that Dwarves spend more time remembering happy thoughts, which greatly lessens the impact of such trauma.

I have not tried public accessible guildhalls. With the default settings they are good for filling the needs to help someone and be with friends (socialize too, but that's not too hard in an inn either). It took some years before dwarves actually started to use the guildhalls in my fortress to teach each other. That still works in a guildhall where everyone comes?

When I created a guild hall for the first time, I saw an unhappy Dwarf with Socialize! as his greatest need walk into the guild hall and wait there, alone. That was my que to open it to all citizens to avoid an anti-social mood spiral.

[Oafsalot]

Using Therapist I put any dwarf who's 10k or more in a Therapy profession which just has levers and clean turned on.

If they recover I retask them with normal jobs. If they don't I expel them. If I can't expel them then they have an accident.

I've tried a few times now with just one temple. Never works out, once I have made 30 small temples to popular gods then I see a marked improvement in mood.

I only use 2x3 bedrooms with shared internal doors. In my next fort I'm going to try 3x3.

I have no messed with guild halls much though I susect it will help a lot.

[AnarchCassius]

Lots of good ideas and stuff I've found useful in this thread.

I found just putting a paved floor in a guild hall goes a huge way towards the value requirements.

Also, not sure how long term effective it actually is but I totally decked out my jail cells with fancy ropes, statues, display stands, etc. They usually notice them all upon being locked away which gives good thoughts to balance the bad ones and hopefully increases the odds they'll stay sane enough to be released.

Something like rain or seeing a dead body shouldn't stress a happy dwarf out in the new stress system. Very possible the personality changes. As long as most needs were fulfilled they should pull through. This depends on personality, so there might be exceptions.

Seeing a dead body is no big deal. Seeing several dozen dead bodies is the issue. It's easily the single biggest mood issue in my fort. Mostly they do pull through but it's enough to send a few out of a hundred into permanent insanity or on murder sprees.

I did add a trap hall entry and both locked the doors and forbid everything in the hall after an invasion fills it with corpses. I engrave slabs instead of trying to bury the dead before they rot.

So the hall just stays full of corpses and the dwarves just avoid it?

[DrCyano]

I did add a trap hall entry and both locked the doors and forbid everything in the hall after an invasion fills it with corpses. I engrave slabs instead of trying to bury the dead before they rot.

So the hall just stays full of corpses and the dwarves just avoid it?

Yep! Parts of my fortress are permanently abandoned horror tombs. Would be fun to visit in Adventure Mode.

Urist McMigrant: Overseer, what's behind the locked doors? And why are there so many free bedrooms?

Overseer: We don't talk about the locked doors. Go to your room.

[muldrake]

Yep! Parts of my fortress are permanently abandoned horror tombs. Would be fun to visit in Adventure Mode.

Or let a necromancer at them.

[DwarfDwarf]

- One single generic temple. I suffered from the polytheism prayer bug when I had god-specific temples, but all that cleared up when I switched to a single universal temple, even for dwarves with 12+ deities

I didn't know about this, so helpful, thank you! Now I know why my broker would never stop worshipping in my last fort.

One other thing I'd throw out there, my riff on exile for unhappy dwarves, has been to put them in a squad called conquering heroes and send them to conquer a nearby site that I've raided down to 10-20 pop. So far, my depressed conquering hero or two has won every time and become administrator of the new small site, and also now out of my hair.

[Blomquistador]

I make a ton of random statues and try to stud them with all the gems I can find on the map. I then place these statues along the main corridors.
Many dwarves have preferences for specific gems, and doing this allows them to gain "exposure" to the gems they like several times per day. (Thus having the potential for gaining happy thoughts often)

This saves the hassle of looking at each dwarf's individual preferences in trying to match bedrooms/furniture etc.

I also try to gather plants from outside and forbid all but 5 of every kind of ingredient for a while so that I can get a variety of meals and booze. You could have legendary roasts made from plump helmet, but dwarves will still say they didn't have any proper meals lately because what they specifically prefer wasn't on the menu... Overall, variety is best.

You can also experiment with mist generators. Being "next to a waterfall recently" is a good thought that can happen. Try to hook it up to floodgates though so that it isn't always running because it can cause lag. You can also drain the water off the edge of the map via fortifications. This prevents caverns from filling up if you are just draining water into the caverns.