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[vogonpoet]

Hi guys. I am returning to DF after long crawl playing haitus, and it feels like lots has changed as usual. I actually have loads of questions, but would first and foremost like some help improving the mental well being of my dwarves. Seems like my militia need some down time to craft pray and contemplate now?

I used to just have them train all the time near a pretty statue. What sort of schedule is best?

Keeping my other dwarves happy seems pretty tricky too for that matter. Should I be less strict about keeping my idlers down, or should i just try to remember how to put a waterfall in dining room?

Anyone have any simple tips to achieve dwarven nirvana?

Edit: there were no big trees or minecarts or religions or living worldliness the last time i played, if that helps gauge how out of touch i am.

[CyberianK]

I usually create lots of roasts by a high quality cook that is probably the biggest source of happiness.
Other than that just have lots of pretty things around. As for training I don't let them sleep in barracks I know that reduces training time but in a few years everyone is trained up anyway.
Also my barracks is in sunlight as I usually do an above ground part of the fort and my melees train on the ground level to react to sieges faster.
I have a big meeting hall and big dormitory where everyone sleeps/dines they got max room value.
After a few years you have lots of artifact furniture and such place those in locations where many dwarves are or go through.

Have some doors around so if miasma is created by body parts or fat/food it does not do much harm.

Also I like to sell/smelt/dump low quality clothing that way theres only high quality around so peoples pick that up and are happier.

[anewaname]

All dwarves like different levels of crafting, military, social, praying, other stuff. It is very dwarf-dependant.

For dwarfs that you want to become useful military dwarfs, having them training 70% to 80% of the time is good enough to ensure they have some time for other activities (whether you have the 10 of 10 dwarfs training for 9 of 12 months, or if you have 7 of 10 dwarfs training for 12 of 12 months..). Give them a labor like furnace operator, plant processing, or milling so they have civilian labor to be happy about. Make a temple and library for them to go to in case that is their thing. Then they will spend their off-time at the place they are most interested in.

Some dwarfs will be crafters that you never want to see get in a fight, but they might like military activities. You can put all important crafters in a "militia" squad and assign that squad to a barracks for 't'raining. There is no need to give the squad a schedule, you want them free to do their crafting. Then those dwarfs that enjoy military activities will spend some off-time doing Individual Combat Drills. These are not as good as as scheduled training, but if a carpentry job as added then your carpenter will drop his ICD and go to work. You can also get them to carry a weapon and shield this way and greatly increase their survival odds when the inevitable "civilian caught in combat" happens.

There have been posts about dwarfs getting stuck praying or in the library, but I don't understand the details. Assigning a barkeep to your tavern may lead to random dwarfs dying of alcohol poisoning.

The dwarfs that are doing individual combat drills, praying, and such will not be counted as an idle dwarf so if 30 dwarfs are doing these things and it shows only 5 idle dwarfs, you have about 30 dwarfs available for mass-hauling jobs.

Big trees... some will produce like 40 logs so you need a lot less tree-cutting.

Miners, woodcutters, and hunters still have problems with the civilian job uniform conflicting with military unitforms and if they are in a squad and get orders, they will drop their civilian labor's tool and then no longer respond to the civilian labor.

There are many new workshop/manager options available once a manager is set up. Get a manager and check a workshop's 'P'rofile.

Jobs can be modified with 'n'ow which will cause a dwarf to drop the whatever they are doing and go to the job.

[Killgoth]

I have found that the best way to keep my military personnel stable is to turn them into sociopaths.  The best way to achieve this is to have them kill as many humanoids as possible.  Once they do not care about anything, nothing can make them sad.

[vogonpoet]

Thanks people - I am giving my military types 3 months off a year for the moment, will see how it goes.

Next question: What the hell to do about the Rea outside my fort? My military types seem useless - lack of pathing I guess. Can I trap them somehow? Or just admit I will never complete my perimeter wall due to cancellation spam?

I was thinking about roofing over my tree farm and pastures, but the cancellations are already annoying me, and not even finished first floor of wall (which needs to be about 15 z levels high if I want to roof over the taller trees on the hillside).

EDIT: Bonus question - *other* than chopping them all down, is there a reliable way to stop dwarves getting stuck up in the trees and dying before I notice?

[Werdna]

I generally find the military are by far the least stressed out in my fort.  They gain so many big happiness boosts from training they are far ahead of the rest of the fort.  In particular, virtually all of them have "exhilaration" from sparring, in addition to combat skill-gain happy thoughts.  I think its mostly a matter of getting them to a point where they spar and they are all good from there.

[anewaname]

Next question: What the hell to do about the Rea outside my fort? My military types seem useless - lack of pathing I guess. Can I trap them somehow? Or just admit I will never complete my perimeter wall due to cancellation spam?

Are "Rea" Kea? If yes, station a squad of crossbow dwarfs near the work and they will happily shoot at them. An attempt to build cage traps would run into the problem of the dwarfs being interrupted while building the traps.

EDIT: Bonus question - *other* than chopping them all down, is there a reliable way to stop dwarves getting stuck up in the trees and dying before I notice?

They get stuck there for different reasons. Dodging from Kea is one, and this is exactly how dwarfs end up on top of walls, and why you will eventually get a habit of building ramps or stairs adjacent to any "roof" or wall you build. If you look at the trees there are three main components to them (WIKI!).. the trunk sections cannot be entered by the dwarfs, the branch sections can be walked on just like a floor, and the leaf/twig sections cannot be walked on. So they need a path off the branch sections and that can be a set of stairs. It is a pain to wait for the up/down stairs to be built so you can build another up/down on top of that, but if you see a cluster of trees with a lot of inter-connecting branch sections, you only need one set of stairs going up adjacent to one of those branches and the dwarfs will run across a half-dozen trees to get to the stairs and climb down. Also, you can build your stairs in the square where branches or twigs/leaves are and replace them. If you build a tower around some fruit trees, I suggest a set of stairs to allow access to every layer of the tree.

[Nagidal]

I think dwarf happiness is best achieved by a confluence of several organizational things. Here are my thoughts:

- Make them join the military early so they form their social bonds to fellow soldiers. Otherwise, after they have been slacking off in the fortress for three years as your accasional hauler, they will complain about the draft and not seeing their loved ones when on duty.

- It does help to raise Discipline if you let them see corpses frequently, e.g. let them frequently walk by a corpse stockpile. After a while they won't feel anything when they see somebody die.

- Let them fight often (arena fights) or spar often. It's very good if you read in their happy thought about having had a satisfying sparring session.

- Keep them out. It's not nice when your squad is cave-adapted. The moment they get out they are nauseated by the sun which is an unhappy thought.

- Give them some off-time. I usually have 80% of the squad members train, patrol, or station for 2-3 months, then giving them one month off.

- Give them their favourite food and drinks. If you love micromanagement, you can make stockpile of your soldiers favourite foods and drinks in a dining hall or tavern close to your barracks. Otherwise just rely on food and drink variety. Try to buy lots of different food and drink items from your traders and hope that your dwarves fill find their favourites.

- Assign your soldiers pets, but pasture them in the barracks or in the soldiers' quarters. Do not allow pets join your soldiers in battles. Soldiers will get happy thoughts when they see their pets.

- Have temples where your religious soldiers can commune with their deities. Masterwork decorated temple equipment helps.

- Have a waterwall in the barracks, tavern, or any place which the soldiers frequent. They will be relieved being close to a waterfall.

- Have a high quality hospital. Masterwork beds, masterwork traction benches (with masterwork mechanisms, masterwork ropes/chains), decorated floor, nice table, chair, chest adjacent to every hospital bed, preferably decorated. This will give your patients happy thoughts while they recover from wounds.

- Cherry-pick doctors and nurses who are suitable for their roles, i.e. have a high empathy, love to help others, console others.

- For ultimate happiness, have the furniture in the barracks and in the soldiers' private quarters made of their favourite material.

- Set child cap to 0 to prevent soldiers from giving births on the battlefield, or don't draft women into your military.

- Care for the soldiers fitness. Strong soldiers attack and defend better, wear heavy armor with ease. Run them through a treadmill training program, i.e. let them often operate a water pump (even when not actually pumping water). Your soldier will grow muscles.

- Have good performers in the tavern your soldiers frequent.

- Have something nice for them to read in your library.

[Werdna]

Lots of good suggestions there, but I believe the water-pumping advice for attribute gain is not necessary.  Properly training soldiers are very fast at attribute gains; the rate they gain Str, End, and Agility will outpace any sort of mundane training program.  Training also trains their Armor User which directly affects their speed.

I've often considered training up haulers in a military program to quickly train up their speed and strength, but am hesitant since you have to stop them at the right time to prevent them from becoming too attached to the military way of life.

[Fleeting Frames]

Ah, the needs system. The fulfilling of needs varies, but you generally need to do something like giving them a job to make a table every so often. See my and PatrickLundall's posts in Future of the Fortress for more in-depth explanation.

However, this doesn't impact happiness strongly. Rather, the focus is up to ±50% bonus to their skill rolls, iirc. (There are some mentions of it being speed only, some anecdotes of quality doing better.)

Animals and even FBs can grow distracted too, due inability to pray to their gods. Relatively harmless, though there have been mentions of war dogs failing to react properly to intruders.

When it comes to happiness itself, dwarves are generally content nowadays, however, some of them are more easily stressed and can become stressed if they sit in the rain for half a decade with nothing to do and no needs able to be satisfied.
Rather, one should avoid big stressors:

- Vengeful thoughts ("vengeful when joining an existing conflict") can spread fortress-wide and give all dwarves bad thoughts for every conflict a kea pack causes - potentially allowing the avaricious avians to provoke tantrums.
- Seeing dead bodies causes bad thoughts. Seeing things die builds discipline, but the bodies after the fact not so much. However, it will be like seeing them die again emotionally - it's fun to look at migrants' thoughts after they walk by your corpse pile by the entrance, but it's theoretically possible to QSP a corpse pile so deep that any hauler who looks at it goes mad.

Personally, I started about a year ago and never had a dwarf tantrum or even grow stressed when I have location zones available.

For general reacquainting, this collection of links may help.

[Werdna]

I think they can be inured to it with a low enough starting-stress level.  Almost all of my citizens haul, and have regularly visited the ossuary to stack up the latest crop of invaders for 10 years or more without any tantrums.  I'll post a pic of the ossuary when I get a chance, it's at least 1.5k bodies.  My citizens have 3 pages worth of corpse thoughts.  I only recently started getting migrants a year ago after fixing the merchants bug, but none of them have freaked out yet (but I should check their stress, I've forgotten about it).  The only one gone haggard so far is a visitor immigrant, but that I think might've been clothing related (took me a bit to realize they needed and how to make large clothing).  The group's symbol is a coffin so maybe they started off a bit more morbid than normal...

[Werdna]

Spoiler: Cold storage/ossuary, almost half full (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Most stressed immigrant/hauler after one year (click to show/hide)

 

Bones (above) is at 53k stress and is the worst of the 21 that arrived that season, but is still listed as 'Fine' in Dwarf Therapist. 

Spoiler: A typical super happy military veteran (click to show/hide)

[vogonpoet]

That is a fine ossuary indeed.

I have improved general happiness in my fort a fair bit with some squad schedule shuffling, letting the goons do a bit of crafting/engraving every now and then. I also got some marksdwarves to shoot the annoying birdies - which went much much much faster when I remembered I could make training bolts out of wood as well as bone - D'oh.

Also, reading these posts, I realised that I made some big temples, an awesome library and a well equipped hospital, but forgot to make a tavern. Can I just use my main dining room for the tavern, or should it be an additional location?

[PatrikLundell]

You can convert your dining room into a tavern. I'd recommend removing the room designation and paint a zone there, however. A room designation and a zone over the same area both designated as part of the tavern results in double counting things stored in the chests. I haven't heard of any effects worse than that, but zones work fine, so I stick with those. Don't forget to have space for a dance floor.

[callisto8413]

Statues.  Statues are cheap and you can place them in all the rooms, hallways, stairways.   Statues, statues, statues.  And with details, you can make them stuff people like.