I found that if you dump 200 or so booze and food into a small room and then trap all your dwarfs in there then they will quickly form friend/lover/marriage relationships.
I was doing a 7 dwarfs only embark and no children were born in the first 13 years because I had all the dwarfs working very efficiently in different areas with separate break rooms.
Within 1 year of trapping everyone all together for 2-3 months we had 3 babies.
- a dwarf can be heterosexual, homosexual, or asexualDwarves have a chance of being disinterested, interested in lovers, or interested in marriage with each gender. The probabilities are different for own-gender and opposite-gender, but the rolls are independent of one another.
- dwarves can be uninterested in marriage, but still form "lover" relationships
- homosexual dwarves can be involved in heterosexual relationships
Sadly, this did not work for me, how can i check my dwarfes preferences without using DFHack? I have small rooms, like 5x5 well room, dinning hall 5x10, statue room with only 10 wallkable tiles (one statue on middle, and all around walls). At the moment i have 20 dwarves, only one courple of migrants is married (they came maried), no babies, only one child (he migrated here).
I found that if you dump 200 or so booze and food into a small room and then trap all your dwarfs in there then they will quickly form friend/lover/marriage relationships.Works for humans, too.
Bay12, where we do research on how babby is formed with dwarves by locking them in rooms and doing god-knows what else.
I'd like to see same-sex couples adopt orphaned children. I don't think Urist McDeadParents is going to mind having two daddies as long as he is taken care of.
This may be a daft question, but why do you want lots of babies? Migrants, though many are unfairly cruel to them, largely arrive ready to work. The only time I can imagine taking a Ceausescu-style approach to dwarf breeding is if all other dwarves are dead and there are no migrants.
This may be a daft question, but why do you want lots of babies? Migrants, though many are unfairly cruel to them, largely arrive ready to work. The only time I can imagine taking a Ceausescu-style approach to dwarf breeding is if all other dwarves are dead and there are no migrants.You just answered the question. A Fort under continuous siege, a Fort so renown for its death that migrants bypass it, a Fort that has exhausted its supplies of migrants or whose civilization is dead and a Fort that is in to survive for the longterm must secure a future for Dwarf children to grow up into healthy kidney wrecking Dorf adults. Of particular relevance is the Fort which has lost a large proportion of its adult population in some terrible calamity that it must maximize the number of viable offspring it gets from what available couples it can form.
If a fort gets migrants, those will usually have married couples which produce babies.Yeah, if it gets migrants. As said before, there are many situations where a Fort will not get migrants or it will have had a large number of its couples widowed or its adult population decimated.
Would fps grind a fort to a standstill if population was capped and animal numbers were kept at sensible levels?If you kept item production to a minimum, probably no.
Item numbers can usually be kept down by trading and atom smashing. However, old clothes tend to pile up and I can rarely find them to dump or trade them. How do you usually deal with this?In the depot search for items that start with 'x' and 'xX.' You'll end up with a list of all tattered clothing, mangled furniture and ibex leather clothing.
If the fort gets even a few married couples of dwarves in a migrant wave, they will produce enough offspring to ensure the survival of the next generation.You need to keep at least around 20 couples alive to sustain a Fort's generation in the high-100s, especially taking into account Dwarf mortality rates and Dwarf child mortality rates (naturally, many will not make it past the 12 year mark). You also have to take into account Dwarf couples separated by death and insanity, of which a Dwarf Fortress will never be in short supply. There also comes the issue of making a 3rd generation when the time comes and the 1st gen is all dead and migrants are nonexistent. This is especially prudent after great calamity has wiped out much of the Fort's population. Flooding the Fort and finding an angry metal FB comes to mind.
I always design sustainable forts, but a fort can easily become sustainable after receiving good breeders in a migrant wave.
The only time I can imagine trying to get marriages being worthwhile is if the fort has received no married migrants.
I locked two lovers and all their pets in the same room with a table, a chair, a bed, a barrel of wine, a barrel of roasts and some furnitures.There's something like a 20% chance that a dwarf will go to lover but won't marry.
All they did were admiring all the furnitures and the door and the owner of the room felt proud of having his own fine bed.
::)
Maybe I should raise my child cap a little. Still, I never had many problems making a huge population bulge in forts, though that world had dwarf civilisations still alive so it is not really the same, and it was in a past version where breeding may have been faster. Casualties among children were actually quite low since they did not do dangerous jobs - they only really died in tantrum spirals, and even then tended to disproportionately survive since the fortress guard could stop them more easily.It's less about making huge population booms, it's more about making a sustainable population. This is very much a focus for a long lasting Fort as this is the kind of Fort in which high casualty rates will dissuade migrants from entering your hellhole (if you haven't had this happen yet, they literally refuse to go your outpost if too many Dwarves have died) or in which children are already the mainstay of your Fort and you're thinking 12 years ahead. The Fort in which children are the mainstay of mine is one in which there has been continuous siege for over 2 decades so replenishment by migrants is physically impossible, it's on the extreme end of reasons why to have children - necessity. As the smallest around, being the first to rush to deconstruction jobs (and any subsequent accidents from cave ins) and the only Dwarves that cannot wear armour or receive formal military training can mean they end up in serious trouble, especially if they follow their parents around to potentially dangerous places.
Counter to the experiences expressed above, I found marriage arranging relatively quick, though complicated.
First, a little backstory: I unknowingly embarked from an entirely extinct civilization. Once I realized that no more migrants would be arriving (ever!), I started looking at ways to sustain my fortress long-term. Unfortunately my two hard-coded migrant waves had only delivered one married couple. While they reliably pumped out kids, there would be no dwarves for those children to marry.
...
I examined my dwarves using Therapist to identify age ranges; a full third of my population were "old maids" (old women with no prospect for a mate). Of the remaining dwarves, I examined their "orientation" in dfhack to exclude the three who weren't interested in marriage.
I tried creating a single, small meeting area and suspending most fortress operations. After years of leisure most of my dwarves had formed many friendships, but only one couple had entered a romantic relationship. Clearly it was time for a more direct approach.
I created "pre-honeymoon suites"; specially modified bedrooms for my chosen dwarves:
(http://dwarffortresswiki.org/images/3/31/Honeymoon.png)
Of note, the rooms contain two beds (each defining a bedroom), enough fancy furniture to make the rooms high-quality, and impassible furniture (statues) to prevent the owners from avoiding each other. (Designate the rooms *before* adding the statues, since you can't designate a room through them.)
...
This detail might be key since it keeps the dwarves happy (good dining facilities, decorations, etc.) while allowing them to enter each other's presence repeatedly. Returning dwarves would often stop in the doorway, presumably to "talk" with their arranged partner (if they never left sight of each other the talking might occur much less frequently).
@loci: Congratulations, which version is this in? If arranged marriages work well this way, a small mixed dormitory for bachelors (w/ free partner choice) would probably be a good idea for the next family friendly fortress? Does "old maids" represent anything in the game? (The two couples I finally got feat. females well in the 100s. A few years later they have happy families and a bunch of kids.)
@loci: Congratulations, which version is this in?v0.40.24
Does "old maids" represent anything in the game?No. Only that the RNG gave me six old females without any old males. If the genders had been better balanced I could have arranged a few more marriages. As far as I know female dwarves remain capable of reproduction until they die from old age.