1
DF General Discussion / Re: PeridexisErrant's DF Starter Pack
« on: April 15, 2021, 08:43:09 pm »
omg thank you i was trying to type it on textpad and copy over
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DF General Discussion / Re: PeridexisErrant's DF Starter Pack
« on: April 15, 2021, 08:21:23 pm »
Hey guys just a heads up/ bug report/ bug fix. My Streaming PC updated and LNP stopped working.
It experienced a permission denied error similar to an older post
https://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=7622&page=10#c_1507
My error called out a lot more instructions but the fix was the same.
Clinodev directed me towards that fix because he remembered it from way back when.
fix:
I transferred my folder from desktop to users\username\ and it immediately worked again.
Thought i would point out that the error still exists with the latest version and/or a windows update could be causing this error.
It was windows update 20H2 which initially dropped end of 2020 around when the original post experienced an issue.
It experienced a permission denied error similar to an older post
https://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=7622&page=10#c_1507
My error called out a lot more instructions but the fix was the same.
Clinodev directed me towards that fix because he remembered it from way back when.
fix:
I transferred my folder from desktop to users\username\ and it immediately worked again.
Thought i would point out that the error still exists with the latest version and/or a windows update could be causing this error.
It was windows update 20H2 which initially dropped end of 2020 around when the original post experienced an issue.
3
DF General Discussion / Re: *We need your help to save the noobs!*
« on: November 05, 2019, 01:37:55 am »
So like the previous thread I will go a bit into this. In my streams I am constantly letting people know to ask questions about ANYTHING and i will teach them the mechanic if they don't understand how or why i did something. Some of the points will be *features* that make the game less intuitive and others might just be bugs in disguise. That being said though i do not agree with some previous points/requests. Some previously mentioned fixes would require a major revamp to how the game actually works behind the scenes and i fear would be to difficult to fix without introducing new issues. Secondly the Raw difficulty. IF the devs are to make game mechanics just easier please do so on a toggle or slider if at all possible. Dwarf Fortress' main draw is it's complicated yet detailed ways. There have been far too many clones on steam through the years that tried to be Dwarf Fortress but easier. Too easy or simple and there wont be a defining feature.
Mechanics that are working as intended but haven't been experienced in quantity by developers
Werebeasts:
There are way too many of these. On stream alone i have been hit with low to mid hundreds of werewolves over hundreds of hours of play. In the same time i have been hit with 10-18 titans/legendary beasts, 0 vampires, and only tens of forgotten beasts. the were beast mechanic is annoying but makes sense. The only real problem is that you get sent were-beasts like it was a low level scrub. Due to their mechanics they can be more dangerous than rocs, dragons, etc. I get the need to make the game less monotonous but they happen way too much. I think in one of my streams i was in an evil biome next to a Necro tower with goblin neighbors. The elven blood rain made undead camels and i eventually got through. It was the were-(chameleon?,lizard?) that did my base in. I would legit happily stream a fort over a full map aquifer with evil biome rain and effects with nothing but goblins and necromancer to keep me company if it would mean i could get 1 base that didn't deal with were creatures. I am just so burnt out on them. maybe take some of their numbers and throw them at vampires or something. I've only ever seen 2 vampires in my ENTIRE time with dwarf fortress. Again it isn't necessarily a difficulty thing with were creatures but they shouldn't show up as often as my trade caravans do.
Loyalty Cascades:
Like were creatures this happens way too many times. These can happen with no input on your part and you have no recourse to fix them. best case scenario you have this situation where all your dwarves are just terrified of each other and will eventually starve to death running around your stockpile of food but somehow unable to grab any. This i feel is more a bug or symptom, of a different mechanic that is working right. just tone it down. There needs to be a global flag for enemy of the civilization when the dwarf goes crazy or is receiving justice, however temporary.
Mechanics that are not going to be understood by a new player
pathing restrictions:
The high/normal/low/restricted traffic designation. This works if you know what it is doing but does not work how someone new might take it. Currently Restricted only makes a square count as 25 squares for the purposes of path finding. It does not actually restrict travel to that area. If restricted were to be set to an unnecessarily high number by default it would work how new people would assume it works on early game. This would also solve a fair number of Ice complaints as you could now designate an area to avoid properly. If the coding doesnt allow this then a default map wide burrow should handle the same issue where the burrow could have the forbidden areas removed. This can be done in game right now manually but it would be meticulous every time especially for new players.
item claiming:
Correct me if I'm wrong but the entire game does everything backwards. A stockpile for seeds "looks" around for a seed and then requests a dwarf to pick it up and bring it to the dwarf. rather like a cat claiming a dwarf. I say this because if this isn't how it works then I personally don't understand the mechanics for claiming barrels. for example: I have 1 seed barrel and there is a loose seed on a dwarf's plate somewhere. A dwarf gets the command to put the seed in the barrel. Oh no! the dwarf chosen is across the map and 20 z levels down. Until that Dwarf grabs that seed and puts it in the barrel, the farm will not see the barrel when it does its request for a seed to be planted. Assuming i am right about how the mechanic works behind the scenes. The Barrel/bins/containers need to do 2 requests. a soft and a Hard. The soft request would be that the seed is brought to the barrels square like creating a temporary virtual stockpile. Since this is attributed to the temporary stockpile it doesn't lock out the barrel. Meanwhile the barrel is sending out its hard request for that stockpile, like a stockpile link. Once that temp stockpile shows the seed it puts out the hard request locking down the barrel. I know this would require an extra cleanup step to remove the stockpile and might create a situation where a dwarf carries the barrel away while the soft request is happening, but this is just a rough idea.
burrows:
Annoyingly pointless in emergencies. A burrow only determines where a dwarf can stand not where it can path. depending on how you set it up a dwarf can leave a burrow if its destination is also within the burrow. this happens mostly with disconnected burrows. A new player doing a civilian alert burrow will not know to make one core burrow as opposed to multiple regional areas for the burrow.
saving:
Admittedly this "complaint" is completely counter to what got me into the game to begin with. but saving and exiting need to possibly be separate. The game operates as if it were a iron man with the current manual save option, but the ability to have backups every month or season go counter to this. There should be 2 save options. One where backups are allowed and you can save whenever you want. or you are stuck to when the game saves and it tries to prevent save scumming. My friend introduced the game to me back in the day by loading it up and asking me to merely exit the game. i took me a non zero amount of time to figure out that save was also exit. (maybe just make save say save and exit)
Mechanics that need to just be modified for everyone's sanity
Civilian alert:
Doubling back on civilian alert mechanics. Civilian Dwarves should drop non owned held items immediately. Dwarves just dump whatever they are holding for a multitude of situations, but the moment you sound the alarm they decide that they really love that 30 ton boulder and wont let go. Its the civilian alert and the civilians are never alerted to their danger or act in anyway to not die.
Climbing Marksdwarves:
This is a combination of a multitude of issues.
1. Dwarves climb way too often. Whenever i do a "turtle" build like when i was attacked by the undead i routinely have to build and internal part of the wall to prevent my dwarves climbing out as well.
2. Marksdwarves have no ability to say do ranged and don't attempt melee. Like the uniform settings their should be one to tell ranged dwarves to not attempt melee unless already in melee range. Too often the dwarves will decide to melee and will climb over the wall to reach their enemies. One of my earlier bases on stream had my marksdwarves climb over my wall, hop off into my moat, and swim across. Once across 3 of them starting shooting their crossbows.
3. Fortification classification. Constructed fortifications act completely differently to carved fortifications, and this is not very clear. The carved one being called arrows slits or something would make this easier to identify. as it stands a new player could design around their dwarves ability or lack there of to get through a fortification only to discover that not all fortifications are the same.
The Menu dock on the right:
There are a fair number of players right now that play off of DF hack with TWBT. Even i had played with this for so long i forgot that vanilla DF scales the menu with the map. Even long time players may get surprised if this isn't fixed for steam. I zoom out to do a mini-map/full picture thing and zoom way in to see individual dwarves performing tasks like fighting the latest were-creature. The menu resizing with my play area drives me up a wall. please render the game separate from the menu so they scale differently. The way TWBT does this is actually pretty nice though it might need to be improved upon. With TWBT if i scroll my mouse in the play area the play area zooms in and out. If i go into a full screen menu like creature status and then scroll the wheel i resize the words, and thus the menu. Slightly unintuitive but preferred above the menu taking half my screen when i want to watch the combat up close.
Mechanic that works completely fine
fishing:
you don't fish 1 fish, clean it, and then fish the second fish in real life. This is an unrealistic method. In terms of pure game mechanics this would make fishing be utterly pointless. It would take far too long to collect any amount of fish, and the restriction of 1 dwarf to a workshop prevents you from having multiple fisher dwarves going at once as they would all wait for one at a time. The only 2 changes to the fishing industry would be: 1. don't have the 'play now' dwarf list have 1 dwarf who does both fishing and fish cleaning split those 2 up somehow and new players wont get confused. 2. make shells stack better. A legendary fisher dwarf left to his own devices will generate more shells than anything short of a quantum stockpile could handle.
Mechanics that are working as intended but haven't been experienced in quantity by developers
Werebeasts:
There are way too many of these. On stream alone i have been hit with low to mid hundreds of werewolves over hundreds of hours of play. In the same time i have been hit with 10-18 titans/legendary beasts, 0 vampires, and only tens of forgotten beasts. the were beast mechanic is annoying but makes sense. The only real problem is that you get sent were-beasts like it was a low level scrub. Due to their mechanics they can be more dangerous than rocs, dragons, etc. I get the need to make the game less monotonous but they happen way too much. I think in one of my streams i was in an evil biome next to a Necro tower with goblin neighbors. The elven blood rain made undead camels and i eventually got through. It was the were-(chameleon?,lizard?) that did my base in. I would legit happily stream a fort over a full map aquifer with evil biome rain and effects with nothing but goblins and necromancer to keep me company if it would mean i could get 1 base that didn't deal with were creatures. I am just so burnt out on them. maybe take some of their numbers and throw them at vampires or something. I've only ever seen 2 vampires in my ENTIRE time with dwarf fortress. Again it isn't necessarily a difficulty thing with were creatures but they shouldn't show up as often as my trade caravans do.
Loyalty Cascades:
Like were creatures this happens way too many times. These can happen with no input on your part and you have no recourse to fix them. best case scenario you have this situation where all your dwarves are just terrified of each other and will eventually starve to death running around your stockpile of food but somehow unable to grab any. This i feel is more a bug or symptom, of a different mechanic that is working right. just tone it down. There needs to be a global flag for enemy of the civilization when the dwarf goes crazy or is receiving justice, however temporary.
Mechanics that are not going to be understood by a new player
pathing restrictions:
The high/normal/low/restricted traffic designation. This works if you know what it is doing but does not work how someone new might take it. Currently Restricted only makes a square count as 25 squares for the purposes of path finding. It does not actually restrict travel to that area. If restricted were to be set to an unnecessarily high number by default it would work how new people would assume it works on early game. This would also solve a fair number of Ice complaints as you could now designate an area to avoid properly. If the coding doesnt allow this then a default map wide burrow should handle the same issue where the burrow could have the forbidden areas removed. This can be done in game right now manually but it would be meticulous every time especially for new players.
item claiming:
Correct me if I'm wrong but the entire game does everything backwards. A stockpile for seeds "looks" around for a seed and then requests a dwarf to pick it up and bring it to the dwarf. rather like a cat claiming a dwarf. I say this because if this isn't how it works then I personally don't understand the mechanics for claiming barrels. for example: I have 1 seed barrel and there is a loose seed on a dwarf's plate somewhere. A dwarf gets the command to put the seed in the barrel. Oh no! the dwarf chosen is across the map and 20 z levels down. Until that Dwarf grabs that seed and puts it in the barrel, the farm will not see the barrel when it does its request for a seed to be planted. Assuming i am right about how the mechanic works behind the scenes. The Barrel/bins/containers need to do 2 requests. a soft and a Hard. The soft request would be that the seed is brought to the barrels square like creating a temporary virtual stockpile. Since this is attributed to the temporary stockpile it doesn't lock out the barrel. Meanwhile the barrel is sending out its hard request for that stockpile, like a stockpile link. Once that temp stockpile shows the seed it puts out the hard request locking down the barrel. I know this would require an extra cleanup step to remove the stockpile and might create a situation where a dwarf carries the barrel away while the soft request is happening, but this is just a rough idea.
burrows:
Annoyingly pointless in emergencies. A burrow only determines where a dwarf can stand not where it can path. depending on how you set it up a dwarf can leave a burrow if its destination is also within the burrow. this happens mostly with disconnected burrows. A new player doing a civilian alert burrow will not know to make one core burrow as opposed to multiple regional areas for the burrow.
saving:
Admittedly this "complaint" is completely counter to what got me into the game to begin with. but saving and exiting need to possibly be separate. The game operates as if it were a iron man with the current manual save option, but the ability to have backups every month or season go counter to this. There should be 2 save options. One where backups are allowed and you can save whenever you want. or you are stuck to when the game saves and it tries to prevent save scumming. My friend introduced the game to me back in the day by loading it up and asking me to merely exit the game. i took me a non zero amount of time to figure out that save was also exit. (maybe just make save say save and exit)
Mechanics that need to just be modified for everyone's sanity
Civilian alert:
Doubling back on civilian alert mechanics. Civilian Dwarves should drop non owned held items immediately. Dwarves just dump whatever they are holding for a multitude of situations, but the moment you sound the alarm they decide that they really love that 30 ton boulder and wont let go. Its the civilian alert and the civilians are never alerted to their danger or act in anyway to not die.
Climbing Marksdwarves:
This is a combination of a multitude of issues.
1. Dwarves climb way too often. Whenever i do a "turtle" build like when i was attacked by the undead i routinely have to build and internal part of the wall to prevent my dwarves climbing out as well.
2. Marksdwarves have no ability to say do ranged and don't attempt melee. Like the uniform settings their should be one to tell ranged dwarves to not attempt melee unless already in melee range. Too often the dwarves will decide to melee and will climb over the wall to reach their enemies. One of my earlier bases on stream had my marksdwarves climb over my wall, hop off into my moat, and swim across. Once across 3 of them starting shooting their crossbows.
3. Fortification classification. Constructed fortifications act completely differently to carved fortifications, and this is not very clear. The carved one being called arrows slits or something would make this easier to identify. as it stands a new player could design around their dwarves ability or lack there of to get through a fortification only to discover that not all fortifications are the same.
The Menu dock on the right:
There are a fair number of players right now that play off of DF hack with TWBT. Even i had played with this for so long i forgot that vanilla DF scales the menu with the map. Even long time players may get surprised if this isn't fixed for steam. I zoom out to do a mini-map/full picture thing and zoom way in to see individual dwarves performing tasks like fighting the latest were-creature. The menu resizing with my play area drives me up a wall. please render the game separate from the menu so they scale differently. The way TWBT does this is actually pretty nice though it might need to be improved upon. With TWBT if i scroll my mouse in the play area the play area zooms in and out. If i go into a full screen menu like creature status and then scroll the wheel i resize the words, and thus the menu. Slightly unintuitive but preferred above the menu taking half my screen when i want to watch the combat up close.
Mechanic that works completely fine
fishing:
you don't fish 1 fish, clean it, and then fish the second fish in real life. This is an unrealistic method. In terms of pure game mechanics this would make fishing be utterly pointless. It would take far too long to collect any amount of fish, and the restriction of 1 dwarf to a workshop prevents you from having multiple fisher dwarves going at once as they would all wait for one at a time. The only 2 changes to the fishing industry would be: 1. don't have the 'play now' dwarf list have 1 dwarf who does both fishing and fish cleaning split those 2 up somehow and new players wont get confused. 2. make shells stack better. A legendary fisher dwarf left to his own devices will generate more shells than anything short of a quantum stockpile could handle.
4
DF General Discussion / Re: *We need your help with game ending stress*
« on: October 30, 2019, 03:32:25 pm »
I've streamed forts that have lasted over 120 hours in real time, years upon years in game time, and Ive accrued a few thoughts on this.
The stress system as it stands is based upon a foundation that just isn't in the game yet. It requires a a massive amount of calculations and tweaks that would take an entire major update to implement as i believe it is intended.
There isn't a smoking gun to point to where anyone can say "fix that" and the system will begin to work correctly. There is however a series of tiny cat corpses on the sides of the halls strewn about at maximum distance to make sure the entire area is covered in miasma. Thematically though i can sum up why the stress system as it stands really annoys a ton of people.
Dwarves no longer feel like dwarves, they feel like humans.
Everything that someone can complain about boils down to a Fantasy vs Simulation issue. Up to this point we've been playing a game that has simulated a fantasy as realistically as possible. This stress system makes the dwarves act less like the fantasy dwarves we've come to love and more like mercantile humans who love to live underground. Ill try to cover all the issues in detail to explain my premise.
War.
It makes sense for a dwarf to get stressed if a loved one dies, however why do dwarves get stressed at all if a goblin or a wild animal dies? It would be reasonable for a human to get stressed upon discovering a dead body, however these dwarves live in little fortresses all around the world. They don't live in towns, they live in fortresses. It is in their very being that they are militaristic. A standard militaristic response would be to get stressed while sieged, you can't trade or communicate with the mountain home, but when you win you should get a massive stress relief to all dwarves, because after all they've won. What happens is, nothing. the dwarves who were in their burrows just did their normal day to day lives blissfully. Once you've won the fight and collect the Goblinite however, all of the sudden every dwarf and their beardling realizes that death happens and just start racking up negative thoughts. their entire existence is as a fort dwelling race fond of drink and industry, why oh why are they all sad that their enemy died? It makes sense for most real life humans, but these aren't humans.
Booze.
Booze was nerfed and nerfed hard. This made a lot of preexisting problems come back into the light. I don't mean the actual consumption of alcohol but the concept of drinking your troubles away. In the old happiness system, the player could drag a dwarf kicking and screaming through until they became an emotionless husk that lived to drink their troubles away. a dwarf that had seen to much combat or death would eventually just not care. All the player had to do was hold them from the edge and eventually like any other skill the dwarf would just get it on their own. Now every Dwarf gets PTSD about everything. If a dwarf is in the rain a bit they can get major negative personality traits and be stuck in a downward spiral that they will never get out of. Essentially they can no longer drink their problems away. A dwarf could get a negative personality shift at the beginning of your game due to some minor event that you didn't notice. The dwarf might not even seem to be that bad off. Your game may be going perfectly for 6 or more years until something triggers this dwarf. (generally something else that's slightly off with the stress system) and he just snaps. Once one thing tips a dwarf over to slight tantrum town everything that was held at bay keeps triggering the dwarf over and over again. Generally these tip off another dwarf and so on. I realize I'm just describing a tantrum spiral but its the insidious nature of it. Before it would be "you killed my son now ill kill this cat" style of tantrums. but now its, "I saw you hit a table, so now i too will destroy furniture and workshops for the next 5 years." A booze is something that a dwarf learns to live with in a symbiotic relationship, The dwarf makes the booze and the booze saves the dwarf. In this stress system you don't get the metaphorical emotionless dwarves dependent on alcohol anymore, you get alcoholic humans that cant control themselves when drunk and wont stop brawling.
Anger Management problems.
The default ways that the dwarves do respond once they've hit that critically low stress point seems needlessly cruel and difficult. Once a dwarf has hit the critical point they will be stuck there, I'd almost say forever. they end up in a cycle where their smashing and fighting prevents them from seeking treatment options and prevents others from doing the same. What they will do is go find one dwarf and try to kill him, over and over again. Yes they only do one punch or two, but they keep doing it and they keep hunting down the same dwarf, until that dwarf is dead. Ive had the enraged dwarf in question "chase" down a crippled dwarf who couldn't stand and just keep laying into him over and over until he died. No one nearby attempts to calm him down, they just get their own thoughts because they saw someone murdered before their very eyes. The angry dwarves in question have no relief valves before this murderous nature. No "Yelled at the air" that would trigger someone to attempt a console action. they just bottle it all in until they decide to go punch someone. then they feel bad that they punched someone so very soon after they go punch the same dwarf again to relieve their stress of punching that very dwarf. Every other dwarf just watches this happen until the victim dies then 20+ of them all have the i saw someone get beat to death negative thought. Now i have 20+ dwarves who are bottling it up. It is a very delayed time bomb that you can do nothing about.
Loyalty cascades and revenge.
Maybe this is just me, but ive had this issue a ton of times on stream. It wouldn't even be that bad on its own except for how it ties into the stress system. The way it is now all it takes is one dwarf to ever throw the smallest of tantrums to infect an entire base with a rot that will never leave. It doesn't happen all the time but it does happen in a statistically significant number of my bases/streams. Eventually a dwarf who is suffering from the aforementioned anger management problems will do so enough times that they will go full crazy and try to actively kill anyone they can. Whomever attacks this dwarf is an enemy, and whomever sees this is an enemy of the enemy. This leads to hundreds of can't do this job alerts, scared of other dwarf. this will eventually lead to every starving to death and the keep scaring each other away from food, and occasionally if one is backed into a corner they will swing. now anyone who sees this swing will treat that new dwarf as an enemy. The problem here is that they will all die and the remaining dwarves will all significantly be down the stress pole. I only really bring this up because it's such a 180 from how they react when the one dwarf keeps beating another dwarf to death. they go from ill just mindlessly watch this dwarf kill a man that wont defend himself to my very life is in danger from the sight of my friend.
You killed it though!
Between the dwarves that all have the empathy of the greatest pacifists and the anger problem there is this comical point where no dwarf understands what death is. The Dwarf who has killed something will get the same negative thought about discovering a dead body as everyone else. There is no cause-effect process here. A dwarf can kill a man slowly over years, just constantly beating him till he dies, and the moment he dies the aggressor will get a massive negative thought "Saw a dead body" or something similar. same can be said for members in the military. It's amazing how putting your axe through someone's head killed them Urist, you are truly the philosopher of our time. Either in fort defense with the Military or in cold blood with the enraged. Dwarves act like they don't understand that they are attempting to kill people. Maybe this makes sense for a human, but these are dwarves. There are epic stories of female dwarves giving birth, and then wielding the newborns as weapons. How does this race no longer understand what happens when you attack your enemy. Again they live in massive forts, not towns, they shouldn't be surprised by violence.
Military can be the worst thing to have now.
The anger management issue with the loyalty issues and the inability to understand death culminate in a new symptom. You do not want military dwarves anymore. Since any dwarf can be susceptible to these uncontrollable circumstances the better they are in combat the worse it is for your fort. You end up with a play-style where you turtle your fort and try to keep all of your dwarves from exposure to anything stressful. All it takes is one dwarf to rot your fort from the inside out, and the military is the most susceptible to both start and spread said rot. Traps are emotionless and dependable. Yes you still get the negative thought from the hauler cleaning the area but at least its just Hauler McBeardface and not Urist son of Armok who wields the Artifact Adamantine Spear of base slaughter.(menaces with spikes of turkey bone)
No reactive countermeasures or camaraderie.
The math for the stress system just doesn't really work to simulate what is essentially emotion. All you have is a tally sheet. Positive vs Negative. Some people respond to different positives and negatives but its still a tally sheet. What this means is that while things can be done in a reactive fashion everything you do is essentially a proactive measure. If the negatives outweigh the positives you are screwed, so you always have to tag up as many positives as possible while the game is constantly adding negatives. Its like a game of Jenga. Eventually no matter how many blocks i put on top the game will remove enough from the bottom to topple the tower, and all of the towers are set right next to each other. There kind of needs something in place to harness the negatives. If a dwarf is going the route of homicidal maniac, why does he only go for dwarves? If somehow i could use these dwarves better in combat id put them in a separate burrow and have them train up for war. I cant do this though because the dwarves don't have a "I fight and live with this fellow dwarf" filter. I could slowly take these succumbing to rage dwarves and put them in the military where their rage fueled their discipline and endurance barbarian style. I'm not asking for barbarians I'm pointing out that that right now the military is likely to kill itself in times of peace and once a dwarf is enraged i can't even use him for stereo typically enraged tropes. Higher level military dwarves already don't care if they are stationed forever so this isn't a completely new thought, but what if a dwarf of high enough military skill no longer threw minor temper tantrums, they just needed to train more to work out their stress, or craftdwarfshops had a make pointless art reaction. Something that doesn't physically make anything in the game but adds raw numbers to the good side or a temporary surge to resist the negative thoughts. Stress relief is a thing and creatures that live underground just doing industry and booze all day should have a mechanic to replicate this.
There are a few other things as well but I've already gone on long enough.
TL;DR Ask yourself, does it make sense for (part of stress system) to apply to fortress dwelling dwarves not town dwelling humans. sort that out and the stress system will work fine
The stress system as it stands is based upon a foundation that just isn't in the game yet. It requires a a massive amount of calculations and tweaks that would take an entire major update to implement as i believe it is intended.
There isn't a smoking gun to point to where anyone can say "fix that" and the system will begin to work correctly. There is however a series of tiny cat corpses on the sides of the halls strewn about at maximum distance to make sure the entire area is covered in miasma. Thematically though i can sum up why the stress system as it stands really annoys a ton of people.
Dwarves no longer feel like dwarves, they feel like humans.
Everything that someone can complain about boils down to a Fantasy vs Simulation issue. Up to this point we've been playing a game that has simulated a fantasy as realistically as possible. This stress system makes the dwarves act less like the fantasy dwarves we've come to love and more like mercantile humans who love to live underground. Ill try to cover all the issues in detail to explain my premise.
War.
It makes sense for a dwarf to get stressed if a loved one dies, however why do dwarves get stressed at all if a goblin or a wild animal dies? It would be reasonable for a human to get stressed upon discovering a dead body, however these dwarves live in little fortresses all around the world. They don't live in towns, they live in fortresses. It is in their very being that they are militaristic. A standard militaristic response would be to get stressed while sieged, you can't trade or communicate with the mountain home, but when you win you should get a massive stress relief to all dwarves, because after all they've won. What happens is, nothing. the dwarves who were in their burrows just did their normal day to day lives blissfully. Once you've won the fight and collect the Goblinite however, all of the sudden every dwarf and their beardling realizes that death happens and just start racking up negative thoughts. their entire existence is as a fort dwelling race fond of drink and industry, why oh why are they all sad that their enemy died? It makes sense for most real life humans, but these aren't humans.
Booze.
Booze was nerfed and nerfed hard. This made a lot of preexisting problems come back into the light. I don't mean the actual consumption of alcohol but the concept of drinking your troubles away. In the old happiness system, the player could drag a dwarf kicking and screaming through until they became an emotionless husk that lived to drink their troubles away. a dwarf that had seen to much combat or death would eventually just not care. All the player had to do was hold them from the edge and eventually like any other skill the dwarf would just get it on their own. Now every Dwarf gets PTSD about everything. If a dwarf is in the rain a bit they can get major negative personality traits and be stuck in a downward spiral that they will never get out of. Essentially they can no longer drink their problems away. A dwarf could get a negative personality shift at the beginning of your game due to some minor event that you didn't notice. The dwarf might not even seem to be that bad off. Your game may be going perfectly for 6 or more years until something triggers this dwarf. (generally something else that's slightly off with the stress system) and he just snaps. Once one thing tips a dwarf over to slight tantrum town everything that was held at bay keeps triggering the dwarf over and over again. Generally these tip off another dwarf and so on. I realize I'm just describing a tantrum spiral but its the insidious nature of it. Before it would be "you killed my son now ill kill this cat" style of tantrums. but now its, "I saw you hit a table, so now i too will destroy furniture and workshops for the next 5 years." A booze is something that a dwarf learns to live with in a symbiotic relationship, The dwarf makes the booze and the booze saves the dwarf. In this stress system you don't get the metaphorical emotionless dwarves dependent on alcohol anymore, you get alcoholic humans that cant control themselves when drunk and wont stop brawling.
Anger Management problems.
The default ways that the dwarves do respond once they've hit that critically low stress point seems needlessly cruel and difficult. Once a dwarf has hit the critical point they will be stuck there, I'd almost say forever. they end up in a cycle where their smashing and fighting prevents them from seeking treatment options and prevents others from doing the same. What they will do is go find one dwarf and try to kill him, over and over again. Yes they only do one punch or two, but they keep doing it and they keep hunting down the same dwarf, until that dwarf is dead. Ive had the enraged dwarf in question "chase" down a crippled dwarf who couldn't stand and just keep laying into him over and over until he died. No one nearby attempts to calm him down, they just get their own thoughts because they saw someone murdered before their very eyes. The angry dwarves in question have no relief valves before this murderous nature. No "Yelled at the air" that would trigger someone to attempt a console action. they just bottle it all in until they decide to go punch someone. then they feel bad that they punched someone so very soon after they go punch the same dwarf again to relieve their stress of punching that very dwarf. Every other dwarf just watches this happen until the victim dies then 20+ of them all have the i saw someone get beat to death negative thought. Now i have 20+ dwarves who are bottling it up. It is a very delayed time bomb that you can do nothing about.
Loyalty cascades and revenge.
Maybe this is just me, but ive had this issue a ton of times on stream. It wouldn't even be that bad on its own except for how it ties into the stress system. The way it is now all it takes is one dwarf to ever throw the smallest of tantrums to infect an entire base with a rot that will never leave. It doesn't happen all the time but it does happen in a statistically significant number of my bases/streams. Eventually a dwarf who is suffering from the aforementioned anger management problems will do so enough times that they will go full crazy and try to actively kill anyone they can. Whomever attacks this dwarf is an enemy, and whomever sees this is an enemy of the enemy. This leads to hundreds of can't do this job alerts, scared of other dwarf. this will eventually lead to every starving to death and the keep scaring each other away from food, and occasionally if one is backed into a corner they will swing. now anyone who sees this swing will treat that new dwarf as an enemy. The problem here is that they will all die and the remaining dwarves will all significantly be down the stress pole. I only really bring this up because it's such a 180 from how they react when the one dwarf keeps beating another dwarf to death. they go from ill just mindlessly watch this dwarf kill a man that wont defend himself to my very life is in danger from the sight of my friend.
You killed it though!
Between the dwarves that all have the empathy of the greatest pacifists and the anger problem there is this comical point where no dwarf understands what death is. The Dwarf who has killed something will get the same negative thought about discovering a dead body as everyone else. There is no cause-effect process here. A dwarf can kill a man slowly over years, just constantly beating him till he dies, and the moment he dies the aggressor will get a massive negative thought "Saw a dead body" or something similar. same can be said for members in the military. It's amazing how putting your axe through someone's head killed them Urist, you are truly the philosopher of our time. Either in fort defense with the Military or in cold blood with the enraged. Dwarves act like they don't understand that they are attempting to kill people. Maybe this makes sense for a human, but these are dwarves. There are epic stories of female dwarves giving birth, and then wielding the newborns as weapons. How does this race no longer understand what happens when you attack your enemy. Again they live in massive forts, not towns, they shouldn't be surprised by violence.
Military can be the worst thing to have now.
The anger management issue with the loyalty issues and the inability to understand death culminate in a new symptom. You do not want military dwarves anymore. Since any dwarf can be susceptible to these uncontrollable circumstances the better they are in combat the worse it is for your fort. You end up with a play-style where you turtle your fort and try to keep all of your dwarves from exposure to anything stressful. All it takes is one dwarf to rot your fort from the inside out, and the military is the most susceptible to both start and spread said rot. Traps are emotionless and dependable. Yes you still get the negative thought from the hauler cleaning the area but at least its just Hauler McBeardface and not Urist son of Armok who wields the Artifact Adamantine Spear of base slaughter.(menaces with spikes of turkey bone)
No reactive countermeasures or camaraderie.
The math for the stress system just doesn't really work to simulate what is essentially emotion. All you have is a tally sheet. Positive vs Negative. Some people respond to different positives and negatives but its still a tally sheet. What this means is that while things can be done in a reactive fashion everything you do is essentially a proactive measure. If the negatives outweigh the positives you are screwed, so you always have to tag up as many positives as possible while the game is constantly adding negatives. Its like a game of Jenga. Eventually no matter how many blocks i put on top the game will remove enough from the bottom to topple the tower, and all of the towers are set right next to each other. There kind of needs something in place to harness the negatives. If a dwarf is going the route of homicidal maniac, why does he only go for dwarves? If somehow i could use these dwarves better in combat id put them in a separate burrow and have them train up for war. I cant do this though because the dwarves don't have a "I fight and live with this fellow dwarf" filter. I could slowly take these succumbing to rage dwarves and put them in the military where their rage fueled their discipline and endurance barbarian style. I'm not asking for barbarians I'm pointing out that that right now the military is likely to kill itself in times of peace and once a dwarf is enraged i can't even use him for stereo typically enraged tropes. Higher level military dwarves already don't care if they are stationed forever so this isn't a completely new thought, but what if a dwarf of high enough military skill no longer threw minor temper tantrums, they just needed to train more to work out their stress, or craftdwarfshops had a make pointless art reaction. Something that doesn't physically make anything in the game but adds raw numbers to the good side or a temporary surge to resist the negative thoughts. Stress relief is a thing and creatures that live underground just doing industry and booze all day should have a mechanic to replicate this.
There are a few other things as well but I've already gone on long enough.
TL;DR Ask yourself, does it make sense for (part of stress system) to apply to fortress dwelling dwarves not town dwelling humans. sort that out and the stress system will work fine
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