Bay 12 Games Forum

Hi everyone!

My fortress is facing a serious issue: Butchers going insane.
As there are plenty of cavern-animals spawning on my embark area, it'd be a shame not to use this free supply of meat. Strategically placed weapon traps ensure, that nearly every crundle, rutherer or cave crocodile unlucky enough to enter my embark will get a free ride to the refuse stockpile. And that's where the problem starts. Butchers sent out to prepare this raw meat into cookable portions quite often get negative thoughts from "watching a Crundle die", although said animal is a long-dead corpse on the refuse stockpile. Of course it's not only animals, there are a few rotting would-be invaders there as well, but the majority of negative thoughts is indeed caused by non-sentient corpses.
Probably the non-butcherable remains on the stockpile contribute to the issue, so I'm currently considering dropping them into magma or to use an atom smasher. Nevertheless, the butcherable remains will then still be an issue.
Also, I'm trying to counteract the negative thoughts by decorating the butcher shops and the nearby corridors, but a few "was interested near a fine statue" thoughts can hardly compete with twenty "horrified" thoughts popping up simultaneously...
I guess that this problem is known to every DF player who managed to keep a fort alive for a few years, and I'm wondering how you are keeping your butchers in sanity.

Edit: It's actually not the crundles or other animals, I've checked again, and the bad thoughts are coming mostly from sentient cavern creatures, like gorlaks, trolls and troglodytes.

It seems that one of the monsters to test the quality of my fortress defences was doomed to do this from birth.
The poor thing was called Stāsost Testmonster.

Thanks!
For my current fort this is bad news, as I've dug out a large area below the surface for iron mining... I might have to seal off these areas and build a solid floor above any rooms that are in use.

In my current (but soon to be retired - I cheated and now I don't want to continue...) save fisherdwarfs turned out to be useful, and I'm not talking about distracting attackers long enough to close the front drawbridge. My embark area has nautilus, and thanks to the fisherdwarfs I am swimming in shell. The sheer supply made shell crafts become my primary export industry, and indirectly my main source of iron.

I've created a bunch of worlds in DF 2014, and while I'm generally pleased with the results, I'm a little puzzled that none of the worlds left the Age of Myth, even if they had a history of more than 1000 years. Am I just unlucky, or is it now really much more difficult to get a world to progress to a "later" age?
I've tried several small worlds with default worldgen parameters, and a few parameter sets based on the small island preset in avanced worldgen.

When quickly checking my latest migrant wave for anything suspicious, I found the following guy. It's obvious that something is wrong with him, and I think he will have a very short life in my fortress. Nevertheless, I wanted to share his "carefully" crafted cover story, as it is quite entertaining:

If you have a linux box you could run it in the terminal over ssh. ;-)

I second this suggestion. It's working extremely well, even with low bandwith internet connections as long as there is a reasonably low package loss. I've been playing df using my 1 GHz Netbook with this solution. The only issue I encountered was that the [Shift]+[Something] keyboard combination doesn't work, so scrolling might be a bit annoying.
All you have to do to get this working, is to set up an ssh server on an OS X or Linux (or probably any other Unix-like OS that can run DF) computer, make sure that you can reach that server over the internet,  and to configure dwarf fortress to print directly on the text terminal, by setting PRINT_MODE:TEXT in init.txt.
Using a Windows client should work as well, but it needs a terminal emulator that supports ncurses, and probably it'll also need to support UTF-8 (I don't think putty does, but mobaxterm might work).

Before I forget: There might be an issue if you are using a very recent Linux version, due to incompatible changes in zlib (the usual workaround is to preload the system libpng, but for me that doesn't work with PRINT_MODE:TEXT...). In such a case you can configure dwarf fortress to use bitmap fonts instead of png, as on the terminal the fonts aren't used anyhow.

It seems that keeping them in traps is good enough.
While my trapped fluffy wambler and green tree frog were stored in the stockpile for years and nobody cared about them, my just freshly tamed creepy crawler got adopted from there nearly immediately, directly out of the trap. Regarding the wambler and the frog, I also tried to put them in a cage in the dining room for some months, without any effect.