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[Odd!x]

Every time I exceed about 30-40 dorfs I end up with droves and droves of dwarves throwing parties and sitting around with their thumb up their ass, or lips glued to a barrel of dwarven ale.  How does the common DF player keep their residents occupied besides mass-quantum dumping?

[backflip]

I've been trying to make sure to have a task that everyone can perform.  Stonecrafters are churning out crafts & obsidian swords, bonecrafter is either making totems or bolts, bunch of dwarves in the supply chain are handling cloth & leather production 24/7, miners are either mining or smoothing/engraving (or making blocks).

Extras get to haul everything or get thrown in the army.

[caknuck]

Dump stone. Any time I get more than three or four idlers, I fire up the old quantum stockpile.

[Kanddak]

Don't make party rooms.

[Wraithsight]

Add more to your military.

Or if you think you have enough, try setting up really labor intensive work chains. For instance a couple of growers growing (ugh thats-a bad-a writing) Rope Reeds and Dimple Cups, two threshers turning it into thread, two weavers spinning it into cloth, 2 millers to make dye, 2 dyers to actually dye stuff and a clothier to make the finished product. That's like eleven Dwarfs kept busy right there. Bonus points if you can make it so it need no input on your part.

EDIT: Forgot: potash maker to increase yield on farms and if possible a woodcutter. Thirteen.

[SkyRender]

 Overpopulation versus work availability is how megaprojects were born.  Whenever I have a fort full of Dwarves that would have nothing to do otherwise, I make 'em masons and have 'em churn out blocks, then build improbably massive constructions out of said blocks.  I've also gone for the green glass route (only really viable if you have a magma pipe), and it's pretty effective too.  Or you can just make the biggest military in a fort ever, I suppose.  ProTip: if you do opt to make most of your fort into warriors, keep in mind that female Dwarves are a poor choice for soldiers since they both breed like crazy and use their babies as meatshields.

[NW_Kohaku]

I turn on more magma glass forges, set them to make raw green glass, then decorate every friggin' object in my entire fort with spikes of green glass.  If you have magma and sand, you have an infinitely extensible industrial base.

I can also reactivate some extra farm tiles, farmer's workshops, looms, dyer's workshops, and clothier's workshops (setting them to decorate and make bags, because I have too much crap in my warehouses, anyway).  If you have soil, you have unlimited access to expanding your textile production.

I can set a whole bunch of laborers to mechanics, create some mechanic workshops, and make them go to town on my rediculously overstocked stone warehouses.  I then have a collection of levers that I hook up to something like a cage, so that I can make the mechanisms dissapear into levers, and not take up any space.

I can set them all to mason, and just do something crazy/stupid, like walling in another large chunk of my nearby forested land so that I have a protected tree harvesting area, or for that matter, start work on some kind of megaproject like building a tower for an orbital magma launcher.

I can just set up some screw pumps connected to nothing, and make a gym.  (Made from green glass.)

When all else fails, I just put them in something really stupid, like the Royal Guard.

[Hyndis]

It is impossible to have too many idlers. If you are, your fortress is obivously not ambitious enough.

I will carve out entire mountains, sending 50-60 miners digging away furiously while I haul away EVERY. SINGLE. STONE.   

[Aachen]

Make the bleeders walk. Long distances. To get anywhere.

Efficiency? Pffffft.

[Sutremaine]

ProTip: if you do opt to make most of your fort into warriors, keep in mind that female Dwarves are a poor choice for soldiers since they both breed like crazy and use their babies as meatshields.

Married female dwarves are a poor choice of soldier. Once dwarves get past the Recruit stage they won't walk down the aisle, so a mixed-sex military is fine as long as you check your female recruits' relationship screens.

[UristMcGunsmith]

Be productive, silly billy. I designate all dorfs to Masonry with Dwarf Therapist and build castles/fortresswalls/illaboratemazes/marioshapedarenas/yourmom.

[Bishop36]

I always just dump all my extra dwarves, after I make them construct the 8z level tower over a lava pit with high quality rooms and a fully enclosed working food/booze/clothes industry that they will be dumped with.

[detinith]

use meeting zones rather than designating gardens or halls. put a 1x1 zone next to weapon traps made of artifacts for some happiness

[Jake]

Build a number of craftdwarf's, weaver's and mason's workshops and churn out trade goods, clothing and furniture. Also smelters and forges if you've got the resources; I'm sure you can always use more bins, barrels, and so forth.

[SquirrelWizard]

I'd suggest expanding your production base. Dont hesitate to have multiple dwarves doing the same job. Also, fill out your fortress guard and royal guard. Build something big. Build something excessive. Build something unnecessary. Build something excessively big and unnecessary. Pioneer dwarf science. Add to your military.

In my current fortress the pop cap is 100, I have 48 dwarves who are nonspecialist (meaning they just haul stuff around) of those 48, only 6 are adults who can be drafted into specalist jobs, I'm waiting on 42 kids to grow up because I've got a serious labor shortage.

With dwarf fortress the key is to be constantly building and expanding.