I've noticed one huge thing. Namely, that dwarves naturally make friends, and friends naturally die, leading to very natural tantrum spirals. To combat that, you need your guys separated. Namely, with bedrooms. Build a dining hall, an amazing one at that, waterfall included, but don't designate it as a dining hall or meeting area. If your dwarves have individual bedrooms, they'll stay in them when they're idle, and sit alone in their rooms until a job appears. Having idle dwarves near each other seems to be the key to disaster, and this can be averted by making idle dwarves separate. Just make a lot of bedrooms, like 1x1 rooms with a bed and a door, and designate the bed as a room, but don't assign it to anyone. They'll naturally claim a bedroom when they sleep in it, so you never have to worry about who owns what bed. Just spam out a bunch and they'll sort it out. Then, they just huddle in their room and wait. If someone in the fort dies, no one cares because no one is friends with anyone.
Alternatively, if you have a good dog population, you can train a lot of war dogs, and give every dwarf their own doggy! This helps with animals, since the dog will kill or chase off those groundhogs that keep interrupting your woodcutter, and it also means that if that dwarf ever goes berserk or kills anyone, the dog will then kill that dwarf. Assigning a war dog to a dwarf in a strange mood that you know you can't satisfy, is also an easy-fix for the eventual insanity.
The featherwood mace is also a good idea. I think I'm gonna have to break down and change my raws though. My sheriff-type people keep bashing in skulls, so I need dwarves with thicker skulls.
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Topic: dealing with tantrum spirals (Read 1966 times)