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[jc6036]

About how many idlers do you guys have at any given time? My fortress has 83 dwarves, but nearly always 30 to 40 idlers until I have my miners mine out a new area and they have a bunch of stone to haul. Sometimes I get worried about the booze to work ratio.

[Angel Of Death]

I once had 101 idlers... It was quickly reduced to about 3 after a forgotten beast came in.

[thatkid]

In a fort of 93, about 31 are idle. That's exactly 1/3, if I'm not mistaken.

This is because I currently don't have a whole lot of use for most of my industries, so a lot of people are just standing around doing nothing. The rest are haulers, who have nothing to haul because, once again, we're not producing much. The first few harvests went fallow because my starting farmer decided it would be a good idea to go on break and play with his pet cats by the wagon, so we've been struggling to keep everybody hydrated and migrants show up before I even have the new bedrooms done so I've been stuck doing nothing but mining out new rooms, making barrels/beds/doors, and brewing drinks for the past three game years.
Even my first fort did not go this poorly. Stupid farmer...

[jc6036]

Rock pots will save your ass in a barrel crisis, once you have a stonecrafter that can make them fairly quickly.

[thatkid]

Rock pots will save your ass in a barrel crisis, once you have a stonecrafter that can make them fairly quickly.

I know that. It hasn't been an issue of barrels, but of plants to brew. As I said, the first few harvests failed because my farmers decided to go on a year long break and nobody else felt like harvesting even though they should have been. I have plenty of barrels and pots

[The Dog Delusion]

Do rock pots still hold a stupidly huge amount of material?

[NecroRebel]

It depends on how many dwarves I have. I usually occupy about 30-50 dwarves at any one time, so with forts with fewer people than that I can run at or near 100% occupation, while as I reach 100 or more dwarves, I can have half my fort idling. At that point, I usually start putting people into the military en masse; that tends to keep idler numbers down, and on a Fort Defense fort, they're certainly useful.

[SirAaronIII]

Do rock pots still hold a stupidly huge amount of material?

No, but they're still a fine alternative to barrels.

BACK ON TOPIC The most I've ever had is in the high 70s. Every time I ordered a newly carved-out room for dumping, the job would get done almost immediately as all 70ish had refuse hauling enabled. It was just kind of a funny sight to see.

[Aachen]

During standard alerts, I'll have a variable five-fifteen percent of the population at idle. I mass-designate items to be dumped, though, to keep a lot of inconsistently-busy dwarves moving. It's usually easy to find a lot of something that needs to go somewhere, in my experience.

A great way to generate hauling jobs, at least, is to narrow stockpiles from general to more specific. I am very stringent with population limits — I prefer to have some infrastructure in place before the waves of unemployed arrive.

It probably depends a lot on how one prefers to allocate labors, though. I have few dedicated haulers; instead, I tend to assign a few (three-five) of the hauling categories to a dwarf, which are generally related to the field it works in. "Item" usually means less otherwise, as it is a broad category. Food, too, since I want food to get where it's going before it spoils. Burial is left for the some of the medics. Refuse is for the chronically idle. Idling becomes more of an issue when an alert is triggered, as the restriction usually means whole industries are outside the permitted burrow.

Masonry. If nothing else, block fabrication can keep quite a few of the rotters busy.

[jc6036]

This was just to check to make sure my number of idlers isnt unusually large. I have every industry except glass making, clay pottery, and bee (?) keeping set up and running smoothly. My stockpile for food stretches across my 4 by 4 embark and my idlers are all ecstatic from lazing about in my legendary dining room. I suppose that it doesnt matter that I have many idlers as long as I have several industries running smoothly.

[simonthedwarf]

Is there any trick to stop happiness from decreasing while still being idle?

[Kay12]

I have a bit under 100 dwarves (I think) and at tops 40 or so idlers. I hate idlers while I really don't need that much labor. I have invented a few nice jobs for them though. At first I produced some extra axes and harvested huge piles of wood. Then I constructed some furnaces and created vast amounts of fuel (I feel like Saruman) while also making lots of spikes, bins, beds and barrels. Then I realized that constructions work equally well despite the builder's skill (perhaps it affects value, but I tend to make decorations for that), so I put lots of idlers into masonry and am building a huge stone dome to ensure flying enemies can't enter.

[Carpman]

Is there any trick to stop happiness from decreasing while still being idle?

I don't think happiness goes down while being idle... what do you mean by this?

[NecroRebel]

Dwarves can get a small happiness bump from being employed, but don't otherwise lose happiness due to idleness. In fact, idle dwarves tend to socialize more, which makes them happier. Of course, that makes them vulnerable to happiness loss due to dead friends, which is the prime cause of tantrum spirals, but that's not directly due to idleness.

Of course, if they're sitting in the meeting hall all day long, they aren't going by any statues, waterfalls, or the like that you may have situated in active areas, so that, presumably, could result in happiness dropping.

[Kay12]

Of course, if they're sitting in the meeting hall all day long, they aren't going by any statues, waterfalls, or the like that you may have situated in active areas, so that, presumably, could result in happiness dropping.

On the bright side, at least my meeting hall is an epic dining room.