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[Sunkwell]

This time, before the end of the year, I was swarmed with migrants for whom I can't:
make work what helps the fortress
make bedrooms
make food and booze
My question is how do you expand the fortress faster than the migrants arrive?
I tried the army, but I'm disturbed by the fact that 80% of the people are warriors.

[TantrumTime]

If you have more migrants than jobs, assign hordes of them to tasks like wood burning and furnace operating, anything where skill doesn't affect the final product's quality. if you still have too many, give them all masonry and start building something huge.

Personal bedrooms shouldn't be a high priority. As long there is a free bed in a dormitory, they'll be fine.

Don't let any migrants work on your farms unless they have high grower skill, unskilled growers will cause crops to produce less. Brewing however, can be done by a team of unskilled workers, as booze never has a quality level.

Too many migrants is a common complaint about the current version. There is a large thread in the suggestions forum about the issue, hopefully there will be an option for less migrants in the upcoming release.

[Sunkwell]

I was also considering less rock mugs, here hoping the lower results in less migrants. I'll try these tips ASAP

[proxn_punkd]

Don't let any migrants work on your farms unless they have high grower skill, unskilled growers will cause crops to produce less. Brewing however, can be done by a team of unskilled workers, as booze never has a quality level.

Your play style may vary. I don't have unskilled dwarves planting things, but I did issue an "all dwarves harvest" order, because while my useful dwarves are off doing useful things, my more useless dwarves and kiddies are picking plants and slowly gaining farming skill until they are good enough to plant things.

I agree that booze and masonry are good ways to distract plentiful dwarves-- and masonry's a nice skill to have if one of your grunt labor force gets a strange mood.

@ OP:

If embarking in low-wood areas, I tend to bring lots of wood on embark so my carpenter can build ten, twenty beds for a dormitory and some cages for cage traps.

You can fiddle with the d_init file; there's a population cap in there somewhere. Won't do anything about migrants en route, but if your fort hits or surpasses the cap you won't get more. Not generating tons of wealth also tends to mean your fort doesn't attract more migrants.

[King DZA]

I've never had any real problems with having my dwarves sleep on the floor until I get a nice bedroom carved out for them. I have always seen it as something that they like to have, but isn't really necessary, even in the early stages.

Idlers aren't too big of a problem, either. If nothing else, you have a nice squad of haulers when the need arises. Also, like others have stated, just give your unneeded ones basic jobs like masonry, furnace op., farming, and the like.

As for food and drink, trust me, with a good farm operation going, you'll soon be hoping that the caravan comes soon just so you can get rid of some of it, even with a workforce of dabbling/novice growers(they level up quickly pretty anyway).

[knutor]

Use Dwarf Therapist?  If ya do, make them fishermen, farmers, cooks, and brewers.  The skills they show up with are usually lousy and opposite to their desired attributes.  Reset their trades with Dwarf Therapist.  Carpenters and Masons are also great to have.  So are Miners.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Fishing can get ya thru the first winter.  Just don't forget to channel down access out of all the ponds.  Or setup restricted zones.  Or ya might lose some of the bad swimmers.

 

Sincerely,
Knutor

[Iton Ibrukrithzam]

Try setting a pop cap.  I keep mine at 20-40.  This will greatly limit the amount you can get(though it isn't as concrete as it sounds). 

I'm not sure if you can expand the cap later to let more in.

[Sunkwell]

The thing is, I get these numbers in the first wave, which at that time overwhelms me

[TeleDwarf]

why bother? get jobs for whom you need, put on training whom you want, let the rest of them loiter.
They eat and drink - yes, but actually it is good thing - I have no idea how to scale my food/booze production down and always have ever growing stockpiles of prepared meals and alcohol.
And if you ever decide to re-build your fort or move some stokpiles to the new werehouse - it will be done in no time.

[Tirion]

Strange, I never had any issue with  not enough booze or food- taking egg-layer animals with me at embark takes care of all the food I need, leaving enough for trade. I even considered using cooking as a cross-training skill once happiness is stabilized by walling up and having a nice dining room and sleeping quarters.

Some ideas for too many idlers:
-wall off a large surface area and/or dig out whole z-levels of soil then breach a cavern. Turn Plant Gathering on for all your idlers, the shrubs will still regrow faster than you pick them. Do the same with Wood cutting, to make beds and a massive...
-...glass industry: one or two high-level glassmakers will keep more than a dozen haulers busy. Gather sand (in mass-produced pig tail fiber bags, thus training up some weavers and clothesmakers), make green glass trap components, turn Mechanics labor on for idlers, spam the world with weapon traps and upright spikes. Once the glassmakers are high level, make pearlash (from potash, which is made of ash- Furnace operator, Potash Maker, Wood burner- 3 jobs uneffected by skill level and training good attributes, without destroying mood potential) and churn out clear glass stuff for trade and value.
- massive ceramics industry like above, but churning out clay bricks. Conserve kaolinite till the potters become legendary. Enable mason for idlers, build a castle!
-Turn Stone Detailing on, smooth all stone, engrave when they become legendary.

[BuGGaTon]

Booze DOES have quality levels but they're hidden.  The booze gains no craftdwarfship rating and no increase in wealth but it does hugely affect how much happiness a dwarf gets from consuming it!

[eggrock]

D-B-D and dump mass quantities of stone near your mason workshops (and stonecrafter's shop, if any). Start a select few in the masonry trade, making blocks.

Smith 2-4 picks and start 2-4 dorfs as miners. Turn OFF (or burrow) your high skill miners, then set the noobs to digging out soil levels (convenient for underground tree farming.)

Enabling masonry on all your useless migrants is great for building large walls and floors.

Glass industry as was noted above. Gather sand, gather more sand and then start gathering sand. It's easy to run out if you like 10x green glass serrated disk traps or need to ramp up a lot of glass pots and terrariums.

Enable farming if you have seeds and room to spare for more plots. It's less efficient in terms of space used, but early on your dedicated farmers probably aren't super high skill and can't keep up with demand.

OR

I used to drive myself nuts trying to keep the number of idlers at 0, mainly to try and keep everyone from forming attachments and later tantruming. It's not a huge deal.

Create some hunters - Free scouts!

Create a few catapults and get your siege operators training ASAP.

Long term--and I'm not sure if this will help AT ALL--train your idle haulers on screw pumps to increase endurance. I set up a line of 20-30 pumps that use the same reservoir to draw from and pump into, turn them on and let the little guys pump away. Before you know it, your fort is full of legendary pump operators.

[Sutremaine]

This time, before the end of the year, I was swarmed with migrants for whom I can't:
make work what helps the fortress
make bedrooms
make food and booze

Make them make their own stuff. If it was good enough for the founders, it's good enough for them. What I normally find with the hardcoded waves is that I have some core jobs that could do with two skilled dwarves or more, but skilled. And since all the available materials are reserved for the dwarf I brought myself, the second dwarf bounces around doing odd jobs that I can't spare a full-time dwarf for. The usual solution is mass masonry, so long as nothing's likely to come up before the current round of designations can be finished. Right now I have 16 dwarves, and while I could do with more so that I can start streamlining production I don't really want any more. Sure, it's not as though building even 20 more beds is a major drain on resources, but I'd like a little more infrastructure in place before I start accepting more bodies.

Long term--and I'm not sure if this will help AT ALL--train your idle haulers on screw pumps to increase endurance. I set up a line of 20-30 pumps that use the same reservoir to draw from and pump into, turn them on and let the little guys pump away. Before you know it, your fort is full of legendary pump operators.

Attribute gains from civilian work seem really low even with rust turned off. It's probably going to be more beneficial if you find an immigrant dwarf with decent military skills and give them a small squad to teach, though it's more of an investment since they'll be out of the workforce entirely while they're training.

You don't need any reservoirs to make a screw pump operable, or anything at all except a place to put it.

[WolfeyS]

Took me a long time to adjust to getting more migrants. Now I slap masonry and farming on every single useless one, tell them to make a large castle, and be done with it. Also making rooms for many dwarves is pretty simple actually, just hollow them out, door, bed, container and cabinet. I also throw a statue in and they are happy.

[Tirion]

Took me a long time to adjust to getting more migrants. Now I slap masonry and farming on every single useless one, tell them to make a large castle, and be done with it. Also making rooms for many dwarves is pretty simple actually, just hollow them out, door, bed, container and cabinet. I also throw a statue in and they are happy.

Actually, only cabinets are used by commoners at present, containers are for non-clothing stuff which they won't buy without economy. You're better off with 2 cabinets.