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[The Architect]

I honestly think every single person missed the real problem here: The death of a couple of dwarves is causing tantrum spirals! That is insane. You need to keep your dwarves busy so that they don't all become best friends, and you need to implement some features to keep them happy like a legendary dining hall and possibly a waterfall if you can't keep them too busy to socialize.

You should be able to lose dwarves without your whole world coming down around your ears. Just don't let them sit around with nothing to do but become best friends for seasons on end.

[Ubiq]

I'm trying to imagine a goblin thief looking at the entrance of a fortress, seeing two massive, chained guard-spiders with venom and bits of kittens dripping down their fangs and thinking, "Psh. Easy mark."

...it's just not happening...

They try though. Oh, Armok, they do try. What's great is when their appearances results in one of the Guard Spiders firing off a stream of webs; with a good clothier, you can easily pay off the cost of both GCS when the first thief shows up with three pairs of Giant Cave Spider silk socks.

As a bonus, if you set up cage traps before them, you can also occasionally snare a Kobold thief in the process. Nothing livens up a dining hall more than a Kobold Cage that your dwarves can point to and laugh about.

[darkflagrance]

I honestly think every single person missed the real problem here: The death of a couple of dwarves is causing tantrum spirals! That is insane. You need to keep your dwarves busy so that they don't all become best friends, and you need to implement some features to keep them happy like a legendary dining hall and possibly a waterfall if you can't keep them too busy to socialize.

You should be able to lose dwarves without your whole world coming down around your ears. Just don't let them sit around with nothing to do but become best friends for seasons on end.

Consider that this makes it very difficult for one to run forts where every dwarf can get married AND dwarves are capable of dying of old age so that the population gets completely replaced every ten years.

In order to set up the marriages, you need to allow dwarves to socialize, but whenever dwarves die of old age, you get hit with a massive fortress destroying tantrum spiral.

[GrafZeppelin]

I stopped major treecutting after my industry used more than I could cut. Despite the fact that wood is near infinite, the fact that it takes several years for more trees to show up is really hard on my alcohol industry.

Strangely, even though I embarked in a jungle with lots of trees, then cut them all down, the elves said "Keep up the good work, maybe we finally found some nature conscious dwarves!" Even stranger, I cut down a tree right in front of them as they walked in.

[bluea]

Consider that this makes it very difficult for one to run forts where every dwarf can get married AND dwarves are capable of dying of old age so that the population gets completely replaced every ten years.

Sure.
But none of that has to happen in the first couple years. And by the end of that time you can have a moat surrounding a huge swath of trees. "Ok, we can socialize a bit now, there's only one way in and we've got a drawbridge." Or you can spend the next couple of years extending the moat to five-squares-from-the-edge-so-the-caravan-can-still-appear.

That is: you can get to "safe" well before you're in any danger of having the fort's population die off from old age.

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

I have 10 legendary woodcutters, all with a load of dogs. They normally mince the goblins.

[Hyndis]

Are all of your dwarves friends with each other?

If you have just a single tiny meeting zone everyone will socialize with each other. If a few dwarves die their friends (which will be everyone) will all become extremely unhappy.

If you have a very large meeting zone where dwarves don't often bump into each other then this is much less of an issue. In that case a dwarf may only have a few friends, or even none at all so long as you're keeping everyone busy.

And if you're not keeping everyone busy, then obviously your needlessly complex megaprojects are not complex enough!   

[Bryan Derksen]

I have never had a tantrum spiral. I attribute it to a combination of almost always having lots of stuff for my dwarves to do (I _find_ something for them to do if there are lots of idlers) and providing my dwarves with very nice living accommodations and other architectural luxuries.

I've got a fort where I'm planning to try inducing a tantrum spiral soon, I guess I'll see just how much of my luck so far has been attributable to which causes.

[Hyndis]

Inducing a tantrum spiral should be very easy.

1) Assign all dwarves to be miners or woodcutters, so they're all carrying either a mining pick or axe.

2) Make a tiny meeting zone. Just 1x1.

3) Give them lots of idle time.

4) After a year of partying, recruit a dozen dwarves or so, station them on a bridge and retract the bridge, dumping the dorfs into magma, chasm, or off a cliff.

5) FUN! 

[Bryan Derksen]

Since I want the tantrum to seem "natural", my plan was to wait until there were lots of export prohibitions and then have my dwarfs ship out a bunch of the nobles' favorite crap anyway. That way I can place the blame squarely on the nobles after the hammerer butchers a bunch of random people.

[Safe-Keeper]

I honestly think every single person missed the real problem here: The death of a couple of dwarves is causing tantrum spirals! That is insane. You need to keep your dwarves busy so that they don't all become best friends, and you need to implement some features to keep them happy like a legendary dining hall and possibly a waterfall if you can't keep them too busy to socialize.

You should be able to lose dwarves without your whole world coming down around your ears. Just don't let them sit around with nothing to do but become best friends for seasons on end.

Indeed. Psychology in the game is very rudimentary and unrealistic right now. Sure, there should be consequences for taking casualties. You can easily be put out of action for up to several years by experiencing traumatic things like natural disasters and warfare and whatnot. You should have a situation where a goblin siege killing 12 dwarves makes the rest of them traumatized and miserable, which in turn should impact the fortress' performance.

But drowning themselves, throwing things, going on killing sprees and running around babbling? It's such a bizarre and baseless approach that I feel like I'm reading The Dice Man here. Now, I wouldn't mind it if it was a really rare occurrence, but when it seems to be a common reaction to trauma, you have a gameplay situation that is unfavourable.

[Milkymalk]

Here is what happened:

I was SO close to just abandoning the fortress, when I read that a nice dining room with statues and so on gives them happy thoughts. So I built one, all while there was practically a civil war raging. After it was done, everything calmed down, and my fortress had about 25 survivors out of ~70 dwarves that populated it once. No immigrants for two years to my "deathtrap".

Now I'm back to ~50 dwarves. All entrances are guarded by roped dogs (though no wardogs are trained at my kennel, error message "need uncaged dog" although there are plenty - what am I doing wrong?) and four marksdwarves are patrolling the parapet at any given time. But before I got that set up, about ten goblins attacked my fort - and got slaughtered by the human traders that were visiting me 

Then: Big screwup!
There were two murky pools that provided me with fish, turtles and water. I wanted to bring the water a little closer to my fort, so I dug a channel, and soon after it was all dry. It hasn't rained for years, and when it did, it dried out pretty quickly. Now my map is entirely without water, so any wounded will die.

I had the idea that I could dig a funnel that leads to a small basin underground to collect rainwater, but I'm not sure if rainwater will flow at all.

[Ubiq]

Dwarves won't train roped animals; if you have any spare animals hanging around, put them in the dogs place and train them. After they're trained, then you can put them back in the guard position.

Far as the water goes... well, unless you have an untapped aquifer on the map somewhere, all you can do is wait for it to rain. If you don't mind cheating a bit, there's a way to make sure that it rains permanently if you want. After it starts, save the game, go into the Data folder, and open the init file. Go down to [WEATHER:YES] and switch that over to NO. When you load the game again, it should rain until you change the setting back over again.

[Hyndis]

Note that making it rain forever also can lead to the entire map flooding.

Build an ark! 

[Milkymalk]

Well it rained (only noticed when one of the pools was 4/7 full) and my rainwater collecting cistern doesn't work... nice construction that definitely taught me something about building, but not functional.

When I wanted to train the dogs, they weren't on a leash. What else could have been wrong?