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[Heliomance]

I had a massive tantrum spiral that took the population of my fort from around 170 to around 12. It's now almost a year later, and I'm stil getting the "No one even considered making the journey to such a cursed death-trap this season." message. How long before that wears off and I get migrants again? or should I just abandon and reclaim?

[Jacob/Lee]

It could be decades, I lost my COTG before and nobody came for 7 years, and then it was the baron and his normal group, no useable dwarves.

[NW_Kohaku]

A long time. 

On the plus side, with only 12 dwarves, you shouldn't have much lag, so it should go by fairly quickly, and you will have little to micromanage, at that.  It doesn't take much to keep a fort self-sustaining at such a low level, just a farmer (who can have other jobs), a cook, and a brewer. 

By the time you get more dwarves coming in, you should probably be able to get everyone legendary, and marry some of them off, and get children.

You might want to seal off the aboveground behind a field of traps, and only go woodcutting if you wall in an area to be a protected greenhouse, though, unless you want to use some of those 12 as champions.  A half dozen champions in a fort of 12 is totally doable, however.

Recovering from the disaster is often more Fun than the disaster itself... just ask my year-long cleanup duty after my tradesplosion tsunami failed experiment.

[MoonLightBird]

What are the job titles of the dwarfs you have left? If they are all useless then it will give you a chance to train them if they can be trained.

[lastofthelight]

One problem I've always had with recovering....

Unless you have the manpower to defend the caravans from seiges, they'll all die.
Which means you'll end up at war with the humans and the elves.

[Heliomance]

Four of them are legendary wrestler/hammer/shield/armour Champions
One (currently the mayor) is a mason primarily, I think.
One is a legendary glassmaker (I think)/pump operator who is on hauling duty - I train all my haulers as legendary pump operators to serve the dual purpose of making them strong enough to haul effectively and making them all the same colour for ease of reference.
The rest are children and nobles. All the dwarves apart from some of the nobles (newly arrived to replace the ones I lost in the tantrum spiral) are legendary socialites, as I spent a long time with a 1-tile meeting area defined.

I have a ridiculous excess of food and booze as for quite a long time i had two kitchens and two stills manned by legendary cooks/brewers respectively set to Brew drink/R and Cook lavish meal/R, not to mention a vast farming industry. You know how a 5x5 plot is enough to sustain almost any fortress? I had a 5x5 plot for every crop. When I say a ridiculous excess, I mean 6-8k of each. Not worried about dwarves starving to death.

[NW_Kohaku]

Ouch, if six of them aren't labor-enabled without cheating, and four of them are locked into the military (well, at least you have seiges covered...), then you're going to have a rough time of it trying to recover... But that also sounds like the sort of challenge I'd like to take.

Fortunately, all you REALLY need to sustain a fortress for a while is food and booze once you have enough rooms and furniture for everyone.

I'd set one of those two remaining labor dwarves to be an all-purpose farmer/cook/brewer and maybe a carpenter or mason, as well.  Just in case you have to live on these stocks for a while, you should keep up the food production... I reccomend cutting down to five (maybe if you want to push it, ten) seperate 1x5 farm plots, however.  The rest can fallow.  No sense running your only farmer ragged planting seeds that he can't even cook.  (At least the children will grow up good at farming, too, since they will likely get harvest labors.)

The other one gets to be miner/mechanic/mason/armorsmith/weaponsmith/architect.  You might want to get a little "cheap", and set up trap halls, elevated marksdwarf bunkers, and generally trim down ramps or build walls or dig channels until you can mess with enemy approaches with drawbridges closing off entrances or funneling enemies into long hallways full of cage traps, so that you can mitigate the risk to your champions.

Odds are, you might have children that grow up before you have new migrants, so keep in mind what you'll want to do with them, as well.

[immibis]

Four of them are legendary wrestler/hammer/shield/armour Champions
One (currently the mayor) is a mason primarily, I think.
One is a legendary glassmaker (I think)/pump operator who is on hauling duty - I train all my haulers as legendary pump operators to serve the dual purpose of making them strong enough to haul effectively and making them all the same colour for ease of reference.
The rest are children and nobles. All the dwarves apart from some of the nobles (newly arrived to replace the ones I lost in the tantrum spiral) are legendary socialites, as I spent a long time with a 1-tile meeting area defined.

I have a ridiculous excess of food and booze as for quite a long time i had two kitchens and two stills manned by legendary cooks/brewers respectively set to Brew drink/R and Cook lavish meal/R, not to mention a vast farming industry. You know how a 5x5 plot is enough to sustain almost any fortress? I had a 5x5 plot for every crop. When I say a ridiculous excess, I mean 6-8k of each. Not worried about dwarves starving to death.

Dwarves will cancel Brew drink/R as soon as there aren't any more empty barrels. It's really annoying. And I'm also surprised your legendary socialites didn't die from tantruming.

[Heliomance]

I have a lot of barrels. I have no idea how many times I clearcut the map. And the thing is, every single dwarf in my fortress was a legendary socialite. That's probably why the tantrum spiral was quite so devastating. Seriously, I have enough stocks to last me a long time, even without making any more. Survival is not at this point a problem. The problem is that I'm getting bored just watching them sit there. My military are good enough to take any goblin siege that's turned up so far, and the only entrance to my fortress is a long tunnel with a raiseable drawbridge across a river. If needs be, I can turtle and be completely immune to anything that doesn't fly. But with two useful dwarves, progress on the megaproject I was part way through is non-existant.

[NW_Kohaku]

I have a lot of barrels. I have no idea how many times I clearcut the map. And the thing is, every single dwarf in my fortress was a legendary socialite. That's probably why the tantrum spiral was quite so devastating. Seriously, I have enough stocks to last me a long time, even without making any more. Survival is not at this point a problem. The problem is that I'm getting bored just watching them sit there. My military are good enough to take any goblin siege that's turned up so far, and the only entrance to my fortress is a long tunnel with a raiseable drawbridge across a river. If needs be, I can turtle and be completely immune to anything that doesn't fly. But with two useful dwarves, progress on the megaproject I was part way through is non-existant.

Honestly, I like to just leave the game running while doing other things, like reading or answering the forum.

The game pauses for anything really important, anyway.  The only problem is that two dwarves implies a bit of a need for micromanagement.

[Hyndis]

A single engineer can, by himself, slaughter the world.

You don't need an army of dwarves to destroy sieges.

Just 1 lever.   

[Gergination]

You kill one or two nobles by means of an elaborate trap and suddenly your fort is a "death trap."

I'll tell you one thing, it sure as hell doesn't stop the nobles from coming back.