I toyed a little around with the advanced parameters of world creation yesterday, trying to make a drier, more evil world. The world I made (named Hellworld due to a misunderstanding on my part as to the difference between title and name) was set to have a maximum rainfall of 50, the number of titans was increased, and so was the amount of desired evil squares. The number of demon and night creature types was decreased somewhat (I don't remember why I did that). The world was based on SMALL ISLAND, and genned for 100 years.
In the list of available civilisations in Adventure Mode, two human and two elf civilisations were available, but no dwarven ones. The human civilisations were of expected sizes, but the elf ones were only one tile each. I decided to check Legends mode to find out what happened to the dwarfs and elves, thinking they'd been killed off by a titan or forgotten beast or something. However, the histories of all mountain halls in the world looked more or less like this:
The name Pluldis reappeared once or twice in the other mountain halls as well, so I decided to check out this "Ruledcave the Shadow of Lucidity". This is what its history looked like.
For some reason, all the dwarfs and kobolds in the world starved to death between autumn of year 4 and summer of year 5. Checking the elven civilisations revealed few differences; while many elves had starved to death during world gen, somehow some of them were still alive. A few humans starved to death as well, but only about 10-15 in total. The goblins seem to have escaped this fate entirely, as I couldn't find a single message about a goblin starving to death.
Any ideas as to what caused this famine? At first I thought it seemed likely that it was simply due to a lack of vegetation because of the low amount of rain, but then wouldn't the humans and goblins have starved as well? Judging by the maps, the humans and elves were pretty much in the same areas.