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[TheKaspa]

Which are the optimal methods to keep dorfs happy without too many parties?

I have plenty of booze and food (mostly fish, though) but they are still not happy

[Naryar]

Nice furniture.

Good bedrooms, a legendary dining room (generally it's just a matter of having an OK dining room), but also pleasing stuff around the fort.

Like if you have any build-able artifacts (doors, mechanisms, querns, etc) put them in your meeting room.

[Sadrice]

Furniture is good.  If you look at your dwarves thoughts, there will be a few good food thoughts, but they don't eat that often.  There are often (or there should be) much more "appreciated a fine ___" thoughts.  These add up, and can cancel out a lot of misery.

I like statues.  I always have a legendary mason on hand, have him crank out statues.  Up the value by making them from marble or metal.  Many fortresses have a lot of gold on hand, make snazzy furniture with it.  One advantage of gold (and other native metals) is that by allowing it for masonry use, you can use your mason to make almost exactly the same things out of gold as a metalsmith would, for the same value, but saving fuel, and not requiring a metals industry.

I prefer a vertical plan, based around a central staircase, 3x3 through the main part of the fortress (usually 25 z levels).  I always leave the center tile open, so I can put good statues, as I accumulate them.  Dwarves wandering around through your fortress, going to jobs and hauling things, will walk past these statues several times a day, potentially admiring it each time.

I also put an ass load of statues in my meeting room, and designate it as a statue garden to get the additional "tastefully arranged" thought, but I'm not sure it's worth allowing them to party.  Has partying gained any positive thoughts in recent releases?  It didn't use to help at all, and was a pure negative, so I usually don't allow it.

I also make rock coffers and cabinets for every dwarf, and give each a 3x3 room, with additional furniture (usually statues) added as needed to less happy dwarves.

It's amazing what dwarves will put up with when they're crawling over mountains of bling.

[TheKaspa]

I'm currently diggind the first residential area, 10 3x3 rooms, 5 on each size of a 3-tile wide corridor. To enter it, dorfs have to cross a (yet to build) statue garden.
Alas, in this fort I do not have gold, the only ore I found is Hematite.
I was thinking about glass statues, since I have sand, a lot of lignite and too much wood.

[Pirate Santa]

Clear glass is a good (and cheap if you have an abundance of wood) material for mass producing valuable stuff.

Always make sure your producing lavish meals for your dwarves to eat. 5x the ingredients means 5x the chance they'll eat something they like.

My usual setup is a legendary dining hall with 3x3 bedrooms with bed, chest, cabinet, door, smoothed and engraved, quality lavish meals and booze. This is usually a bullet proof setup, and its functioning well even in my current fort, a terrifying glacier that snows goblin blood.  Even with everyone freaking out every time they go outside in the weather and sun and see the corpses from the latest siege my most stressed dwarf is only 74k.

No wait one them is at 140k, but she "doesn't handle stress well".

[Max™]

Hmmm, I'm not sure if you folks saw the thread and stuff done some time ago about how room value is calculated, but one of my happiest forts had a single huge engraved room with tons of beds designated to fill up a huge chunk of it, statues here and there, armor stands/weapon racks mixed in, a couple hospital/wells on either side.

An almost empty but massive room can count as a royal bedroom, an engraved one with statues and weapon racks and armor stands can overcome any hit from overlapping rooms MANY times over, and generate happy thoughts from the various dorfs with fetishes for said furniture types, plus it makes it like impossible for vampires to feed on the dorfs. I know, I brought a dorf I turned into an adventurer back to the fort as a vampire and he just hangs around sitting on a coffin in the bedroom chillaxin' rather than feeding on folks.

I did learn something though, if you do this, do not, I repeat DO NOT put cabinets/coffers/bags in there because every dorf with a bedroom overlapping them will spend all their time swapping their stuff into one at random, which will then trigger the owner of the stuff they removed to put theirs in a different one, and on and on and on forever.

I gave them each personal dining room/offices with a cabinet/coffer to fix that problem.

[Sanctume]

Hmmm, I'm not sure if you folks saw the thread and stuff done some time ago about how room value is calculated, but one of my happiest forts had a single huge engraved room with tons of beds designated to fill up a huge chunk of it, statues here and there, armor stands/weapon racks mixed in, a couple hospital/wells on either side.

An almost empty but massive room can count as a royal bedroom, an engraved one with statues and weapon racks and armor stands can overcome any hit from overlapping rooms MANY times over, and generate happy thoughts from the various dorfs with fetishes for said furniture types, plus it makes it like impossible for vampires to feed on the dorfs. I know, I brought a dorf I turned into an adventurer back to the fort as a vampire and he just hangs around sitting on a coffin in the bedroom chillaxin' rather than feeding on folks.

I did learn something though, if you do this, do not, I repeat DO NOT put cabinets/coffers/bags in there because every dorf with a bedroom overlapping them will spend all their time swapping their stuff into one at random, which will then trigger the owner of the stuff they removed to put theirs in a different one, and on and on and on forever.

I gave them each personal dining room/offices with a cabinet/coffer to fix that problem.

There's a way to set shared bed area while having individual storage.  Toggle the door as internal, assign the bedroom to include what's beyond the door with coffers, then toggle off the door's internal. 

In this example, I have 6 beds in the same living area, while each door belongs to individuals.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

h h h
h h h
d d d
b.b.b
.....d
b.b.b
d d d
h h h
h h h

where h=coffer, b=bed, d=door, .=floor.


[Niddhoger]

Gold ore is wasteful in that in prevents you from getting 4 statues out of that one hunk of ore.  If wood is -very- tight (glacier, desert, wasteland) and gold abundant... I guess go for it.

As for clear glass? I dont tend to bother unless I already have magma smelters set up and not even low grade valuable metals.  1 unit of clear glass takes 2 units of fuel, 1 unit of wood, 4 jobs (make ash, bake ash, collect sand, make clear glass), and a spare bag (textile/leather industry set up) to make a single clear glass item.  Conversely, I can make 8 units of billion (value 6) or 8 units of brass (value 7) in one smelting job.  Electrum is always great to make with gold+tetrahedrite/galena.  You could even just melt the galena/tetra for a chance at silver (value 10) and use the copper for shields, crossbows, and bolts.  You can also use the "junk" metal to stud (doesn't use fuel!) furniture.  Granted,  I have to use additional fuel for each smelting job, but its at worst something like 1.12 units of fuel per item compared to 3 units each if making clear glass entirely from wood.  Green glass isn't that much more expensive than standard wood/stone (value of 2).  Earthenware is actually 3 and stoneware 4.  If you have fire clay I'd just make some statues out of that.  Hell, bronze has the same value as clear glass and is also much easier to make.  You'll usually want to clad your military in steel (or at least iron), so you can divert the bronze to furniture making.  Iron itself is value 10 (equal to silver) and steel is 30 (equal to gold) if you have an abundance of iron (I've settled on maps with all 3 ores of iron available). 

Also, don't forget decorating.  You can also cut chunks of rock into gems for decorating. Thus, you can make a marble coffer decorated with microline "gems"  You can also decorate with bone from butchering.  Cloth/leather bags can have cloth/leather decorations on them as well.  Decoration tend to multiply the decorations value by the quality level, so even adding cheap decorations can pay off.  Masterfully set bone should add about 300 value to an item.  Masterfully set cut stone gems add about 500 I believe. 

My point is that, without magma, clear glass is generally a waste to set up.  Ordinary stone items decorated with stone is much simpler to set up and probably more overall value.  Now, a masterwork clear glass cabinet masterfully decorated with marble gems will be more valuable than an equivalent stone cabinet, but the later is good enough to keep peasants happy (they are just ecstatic to not be sleeping in the mud and just having furniture in the first place).  Since you have lignite, you don't have to use 3 wood per clear glass item, but it still requires setting up an entire complex industry (that piggy packs on textiles) while training up glass makers.  You should already have a mason set up, and gem-setter is actually one of the requirements for gaining the king (glass is not).  Gem jobs generate far more wealth that can be applied to other industries as well- its also much easier to set up. 

Always carve dining rooms and bedrooms out of stone.  Afterwords, you can smooth/engrave the crap out of everything.  This alone usually does the trick without fancy furniture.  As far as admiring statues and the like? Anything designed by an architect gains a quality level that -only- applies to the value of the structure.  Masterfully designed paved stone floors cannot be engraved, but you can make them out of platinum for -very- impressive results.  Due to all their materials/need to be designed, wells can also have sky-high value.  Architects aren't even that hard to train- they just need to "design" a structure, not actually build it.  You can thus have them design a whole field of archery targets, but burrow them in so that no one follows behind them to assemble them.  Then just "deconstruct" each with a keystroke and repeat.  You can also just pave roads all over your fortress to prevent trees from growing in the dirt tiles.  You can also just disable the required skill on any dorf while designing metal supports.  This can be done early on easily enough before you have a proper metal (furniture) industry set up. 

Oh, one last thing  Dorfs love waterfalls.  The get all warm and fuzzy walking through the mist.  Thus, its great to set up a "mist generator" at the entrance to your dining hall/statue garden.  They are also great at the entrance to your fort for cleaning mud/blood/evil funk. 

[Max™]

Hmmm, I'm not sure if you folks saw the thread and stuff done some time ago about how room value is calculated, but one of my happiest forts had a single huge engraved room with tons of beds designated to fill up a huge chunk of it, statues here and there, armor stands/weapon racks mixed in, a couple hospital/wells on either side.

An almost empty but massive room can count as a royal bedroom, an engraved one with statues and weapon racks and armor stands can overcome any hit from overlapping rooms MANY times over, and generate happy thoughts from the various dorfs with fetishes for said furniture types, plus it makes it like impossible for vampires to feed on the dorfs. I know, I brought a dorf I turned into an adventurer back to the fort as a vampire and he just hangs around sitting on a coffin in the bedroom chillaxin' rather than feeding on folks.

I did learn something though, if you do this, do not, I repeat DO NOT put cabinets/coffers/bags in there because every dorf with a bedroom overlapping them will spend all their time swapping their stuff into one at random, which will then trigger the owner of the stuff they removed to put theirs in a different one, and on and on and on forever.

I gave them each personal dining room/offices with a cabinet/coffer to fix that problem.

There's a way to set shared bed area while having individual storage.  Toggle the door as internal, assign the bedroom to include what's beyond the door with coffers, then toggle off the door's internal. 

In this example, I have 6 beds in the same living area, while each door belongs to individuals.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

h h h
h h h
d d d
b.b.b
.....d
b.b.b
d d d
h h h
h h h

where h=coffer, b=bed, d=door, .=floor.


...

Well damn, and here I thought I was smart and whatnot after perfecting my dorfwash. Though I did work out a way to make all of the dining/storage/offices with unbroken walls and access through staircases... but yeah I could have just carved the access to the storage nooks that way... damn.

[Sadrice]

Gold ore is wasteful in that in prevents you from getting 4 statues out of that one hunk of ore.  If wood is -very- tight (glacier, desert, wasteland) and gold abundant... I guess go for it.

Statues require three bars, and so only use 25% less gold than ore carved by a mason.  Generally, if I have gold, I have way more of it than I know what to do with, so a slight loss of efficiency is well worth it, if I have a legendary mason but no skilled metalsmiths (a very common situation).

I'm currently diggind the first residential area, 10 3x3 rooms, 5 on each size of a 3-tile wide corridor. To enter it, dorfs have to cross a (yet to build) statue garden.
Alas, in this fort I do not have gold, the only ore I found is Hematite.
I was thinking about glass statues, since I have sand, a lot of lignite and too much wood.

Iron is valuable, with a multiplier of 10, making it twice the value of clear glass, one third that of gold, and equivalent to silver.  If you have enough iron that your weapon and armor needs are amply covered (iron is often abundant when present), make some of it into furniture.  Unless you're totally swamped with iron, I would be hesitant to leave a "forge iron furniture" task on repeat.  Due to the high bar cost of most furniture, this can run through your iron very quickly, and having to rip out your dining hall to melt down because you don't have enough armor is damned annoying.

I strongly agree about gems, and other decorations.  Cave creatures often have valuable bones, and it's common to have an excess of their corpses and parts.  Decorate everything with elk bird or cave crocodile bone, and you will have rather nice increases in value.  The only issue with decoration is that the item selection is odd, and it's hard to control what get decorated.  I use a somewhat convoluted string of stockpile links.  I make a feeder furniture stockpile next to my cut gems shop (i have a separate gem cutting shop, with QSPs for each), that takes from furniture producing shops, only accepting my currrent preferred decorating item (doors, statues, beds, etc allowed.  Bags, mechanisms, barrels, bins, minecarts, and wheelbarrows prohibited), and gives to the jeweler's shop.  The jeweler's shop gives to the central furniture stockpile.

This means that by messing with settings on the feeder pile, I can put exactly the furniture I want in the queue to be decorated, and it will go there immediately after it is made if I don't have too much of a backlog, and due to the one way chain of links, it is impossible for the jeweler to just keep picking up the same item (it is closest, after all) to continuously redecorate.

[taptap]

keep unhappiness, stress, miasma, corpses and enemies away.

[Deboche]

Another tiny tip. If you can capture elk birds, breed them and slaughter them for bones, horns and gizzard stones which you can use as gems.

[utunnels]

keep unhappiness, stress, miasma, corpses and enemies away.

Be ware of buzzards and keas.


I turned all extra steel and gold into statues and put them in their bedrooms and dining halls.

[KingBacon]

I think the truly appropriate question is "How do I keep my dorfs happy while I treat them like expendable slaves?"

In .34 I used to be able to just dig out a hole, make some booze, dormitory, and fancy dining room and my slags would be set. Now with stress and the emotion rewrite I cannot embark at a treeless icy wasteland without my dorfs getting sodding stressed and sad.

[utunnels]

I turned all extra steel and gold into statues and put them in their bedrooms and dining halls.

Proof