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[Kanddak]

It seems like every time I read the forum, someone has a sob story about losing important dwarves to failed moods, and people reply with their clever techniques of locking them in their workshops, assigning dogs to them to take them out if they berserk, and other such silliness.

I've had two failed moods ever. One was in my first fort, and one was a glassmaker on a sandless map. What the hell is wrong with people?
I've had a couple of close calls, but the time you get is more than generous.

I present my quick guide to never, ever failing a mood, unless you have someone wanting glass on a sandless map:

Bring a couple turtles, or set a dwarf to fish just for five minutes (make a fishing zone on a safe pond if there are carpful places to fish), or buy a turtle or cave lobster from your first caravan. This way you won't be caught without shells. If you're in a desert you need to do your fishing right away before the ponds dry up. If you're on a glacier you might be screwed.

Plant pig tails in your first summer. This way you won't be caught without plant cloth, and if someone needs glass, you won't be caught without bags to gather sand in. I've tried playing with no farmer and without bringing any plants or seeds, but I started gathering plants and pulled some rope reed almost right away. If you're playing that way on a glacier you might be screwed.

Buy one or two pieces of giant cave spider silk cloth from your first caravan. This way you won't be caught without silk cloth. Even if you have a chasm, GCS cloth will make a better artifact, and in the beginning of the game when you're most vulnerable to failed moods your chasm is probably still full of nasty things.

Buy a leather bin from your first caravan, or butcher one of your initial pack animals. This way you won't be caught without leather. As long as you've got stuff for a butcher and tanner shop, you've always got those two starting pack animals, so there's almost no way to screw this up without going to great lengths to be stupid.

If you're building an aboveground fort, go dig enough to find at least one metal vein and gem cluster. This way you won't be caught without stone, metal or gems. If you have an aquifer, learn how to get through or around it; I recommend making a pump out of wood if you really have no stone at all (to make 3 mechanisms for the cave-in method) and can't use a map feature to get by.
If you brought neither a pick nor an anvil, or have an aquifer but no axe, then you might be screwed.

Have access to at least three logs. This way you won't be caught without wood, because you have logs; metal, because you can turn a log into charcoal and use it for smelting; green glass, because you can turn a log into charcoal and use it for glassmaking; or clear glass, because you can turn one log into charcoal for glassmaking, a second into ash and then potash, and the third to make pearlash. If you have a moody smith they might want several metal bars, in which case you turn all the logs into charcoal. I once had a smithing mood where I'm pretty sure the actual forging didn't use any fuel (just the burning passion of that dwarf's inspiration, I guess); if that's really how it works, you should be fine using all your logs for smelting.
If you embarked on a treeless map or without an axe, without bringing any logs, turned your wagon into beds, and are dropping caravans into magma or don't get any logs from your first, then you're probably screwed, but that's the kind of thing that happens when you live on the edge like that.
You can also buy a bar of something cheap like tin or copper from your first caravan to use in mood emergencies.

I do all these things just about automatically with every new fort. It only takes a tiny bit of planning to make sure you have every type of material around for moody dwarves.
Exercise a little foresight, and you too can move on from telling "my armorer failed a mood and died" stories to "I got this lovely artifact steel chain mail worth 384,000... but it was from a goddamn possession so I didn't get a legendary armorer."

[Mephansteras]

I also bring with me some silk thread with me, so that any moods that need silk instead of plant fiber cloth can be satisfied.

With decent planning, the only moods that should ever fail are the ones that require a specific material that you just can't get (glass, specific metal bars that the caravans haven't brought, and so on).

[Phazer]

biggest problem for me is that i dont have any pools (desert) and only an underground river which only give cave fish nothing else and almost 50% of my dwarfs want those damn shell, really need to decrease the amount of shells needed for moods as my only one i saved was that a human caravan with turtles came last minute.

[Kanddak]

I also bring with me some silk thread with me, so that any moods that need silk instead of plant fiber cloth can be satisfied.

Yeah, you could bring a lot of things on embark. I didn't mention any of them besides turtles, because you're probably embarking with some kind of food or another anyway, so you might want to bring a kind that yields shells. For cloth it's cheaper to bring a few pig tail seeds and make a few mugs later to trade for silk, and save the embark points for other things... like more turtles.

biggest problem for me is that i dont have any pools (desert) and only an underground river which only give cave fish nothing else and almost 50% of my dwarfs want those damn shell, really need to decrease the amount of shells needed for moods as my only one i saved was that a human caravan with turtles came last minute.

That's why when you embark on a biome like that you bring a lot of turtles with you.

[Grumblefish]

I set up a room with one square size storage areas, defined to hold the required amount of each of the needed materials for artefacts - and once it's full, lock the door until someone has a mood.

[Phazer]

That's why when you embark on a biome like that you bring a lot of turtles with you.


and they never run out ? 5 years later you dont really have those turtle shells left

[Mephansteras]

THey give you enough for a while. After that, you just have to request them from the caravans. Turtles are cheap, and if you pay max price for them you're pretty much guaranteed to get them.

[ZeroGravitas]

Wow, maybe you shouldn't be letting your dwarves eat the turtles when nobody needs the shells yet? Anyone ever think of that?

Someone needs a shell, then unforbid the turtles and forbid every other food. 2 minutes later, you'll have a turtle shell.

I lost a mood once when I only had magma forges built, but the magma hadn't yet arrived under the workshop - it was flowing from really, really far away. The dwarf went insane before the magma got there. After that I learned to find out where the magma was before building my entire fortress.

[Phazer]

ya micromanage because every single dwarf wants a damn turtle shell? will still deplete after some years and yes i can import from other civils, but i dont really care about those moods that much as i got 3 legendary woodcrafter and guess what i had no trees on the map, wasent that funny....

[azrael4h]

It usually doesn't take long before I'm buying every bit of cloth and leather (along with wood and other necessities) and cheap metal bars from every caravan. You might buy some gems too. As poor a DF player as I am, I rarely have issues with failed moods that weren't caused by me meddling (locking doors, and posting guards outside until the dwarf goes nuts).

[BirdoPrey]

On that note, I've got a question about artifacts. I know the max number of artifacts in a fortress is based on tiles mined out and good produced, but do only completed artifacts count toward that max number or does any strange mood count, even if it fails? If a peasant gets a fey mood and starts heading for the wood stockpile, if I lock him up and he goes nuts will that 'free up a space' for a different strange mood later?

[Phazer]

Probably not because the artifact was indeed never created and shouldnt affect the artifact limit, but im just guessing.

[Org]

hmmmm. it was okay. I now never fail a mood, unless not having a material ANYWHERE near me.(aka. sand). I just made an adamantine mace. Its name is like Boltdepressed the ...i cant remember the rest, but I assure you, it was long.

[Wolfius]

Wow, maybe you shouldn't be letting your dwarves eat the turtles when nobody needs the shells yet? Anyone ever think of that?

Someone needs a shell, then unforbid the turtles and forbid every other food. 2 minutes later, you'll have a turtle shell.

I just forbid a couple shell and bone in my indoor refuse stockpile. If they need it and there aren't any left for general use, I unforbid some of the reserve.

[LegacyCWAL]

Just have a shell-only refuse pile indoors and...you know...not use them?  Non-moody Dwarves won't go use up your shells unless you tell them to do so.  So you don't have to do all that micromanagement to make sure you have shells in stock: just refrain from spamming "decorate with shell" and they won't go anywhere.


Edit:  aaaaaand now I see that Wolfius said pretty much the same thing