Bay 12 Games Forum

It occurred to me last night - I don't know how possible this is, but maybe the devs have tools - that it would be extremely helpful to collect some data on dwarf stress over time in a few long-term fortresses. Get a bit more info on what's really happening with the numbers. Maybe some of us could build a DFHack tool to do this while we play?

Because of course precise results and timelines will vary depending on playstyle, but the issue is it currently feels like no matter what stress continues to mount up over time and inevitably overwhelms the population. If you play very well, you can reduce it to a slow burn - but it seems impossible to achieve any kind of equilibrium.

Like I would be very interested to see a graph of dwarf stress levels in Threetoe's fort from, say, Year 3 through Year 10. Even if you successfully staved off any tantrum spirals during that time, I suspect the numbers would show that stress overall was on a slow but very steady rise the entire time and eventual breakdown was inevitable.

An exciting, balanced stress system should show lots of peaks and troughs and fluctuations in stress, but with a trendline that is pretty flat over the long term (assuming reasonably good play) or indeed slowly falling to represent an ever-improving fortress. But if the trendline on every fortress is reliably always going up at some pace or another, it would seem there is a real problem.

Long time player (well, medium-time in DF terms). Been meaning to join the forums for a while, this thread finally gave me the nudge. And yet it feels weird for my first post to be criticism of one of my favourite things, so let me preface by saying: I adore Dwarf Fortress, and I'm in awe of the work the creators do.

Most stuff has been said (including "most stuff has been said") but I do have a specific thought on the meal stress stuff that I don't think has been clearly addressed. I want to try to refocus on the question of new players and quitting in frustration, and to that end I want to talk about how the meal stuff is communicated before talking about how it actually works.

Clear your mind, put yourselves in the shoes of a newish player who has come to grips with the basics of the game and is now digging deeper:

You're finally comfortable with the first phase of building basic fortresses. Now you're taking a closer look at your dwarves and their personalities. You notice that almost all of them are complaining about a lack of decent meals.

"Oh!" you think, "I know what to do about that! I must not have been cooking enough nice meals!" Maybe you'd been toying around with the different meal options at the kitchen, or weren't sure how much to produce, or just hadn't put that much thought into it yet. But now you feel good - you've identified an obvious challenge by looking at your dwarves' needs, and now you're going to solve it.

So you head to your kitchen and queue up a bunch of jobs to produce LAVISH MEALS. You do this for a while then check your dwarves. Hmm... they are all still complaining about a lack of DECENT meals. That's weird. But then again, it does still say your chef is a "Novice" at his job, so maybe he just needs to get better. You keep at it.

Pretty soon you are getting regular notifications that your chef has cooked a MASTERPIECE. You look at a couple of the meals and see that every ingredient is EXCEPTIONAL or MASTERFUL. Maybe you take some to a trade depot, and discover that these meals you are making are apparently so goddamn amazing that the dwarves from the mountainhome will eagerly trade away half their caravan for a couple barrels of them. So you check out some of your dwarves again.

Still all complaining about a lack of "decent meals".

Would anyone not be confused by this? Honestly, it's so confusing that many people show up on Reddit asking about it just *assuming* it's a bug. After all, how could a MASTERWORK LAVISH meal not count as a DECENT meal? Even some more experienced players don't understand what's happening - there's at least one post in this thread assuming the problem is dwarves choosing not to eat prepared meals at all and going for raw food instead, which as far as I know is never the issue, but it's not a crazy assumption. In fact, how many people here figured out the food preferences thing by themselves? I sure didn't - I don't remember where I heard it, but it's just one of those bits of knowledge that has drifted out into the community and so you will be informed of it eventually.

Now, I do think the system itself could use tweaks, but I think the failed communication here is the factor most likely to lead a new player to quit in frustration. They see what appears to be a clearly-communicated problem, undertake what appears to be the clearly-communicated solution to that problem, and nothing changes at all, and the game gives them no indication of why. With or without changes to the system, the thought badly needs to read "frustrated by a lack of their favourite food" or something like that. Not "decent meals".

As for how the system might be changed, just one small suggestion I don't think I've seen here yet: what if every time a dwarf eats, there is like a 20-50% chance (depending on the dwarf) that they are "craving" their favourite food. Those times, they get a negative thought if they can't have it. Other times, they eat any nice meal and get a positive thought from it being a nice meal. Maybe a few rare dwarves are extra-picky eaters and the cravings are more than half the time - but for the majority of dwarves, having good food but not their favourite would at worst be a 50/50 wash on happiness, not a constant drain. Most people don't only enjoy meals that include their favourite food - and indeed most people wouldn't even want to eat their favourite food at every meal.