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[Shonai_Dweller]

We should start seeing fell moods and macabre moods with the amount of unhappy dwarves present.

Reddit forum has recently been discovering the joys of baby-bone pick axes...

[Shonai_Dweller]

They should only happen when the dead body is a dwarf or a citizen of your fort. That would balance the system completely. I don't think dwarves should give a single fuck about dead goblins, elves or humans.

You may not, but Toady probably does. DF ethics like torture and eating dead people are currently based on whether a creature is sapient or not.[/quote]

Yes, it would be simple to say 'not dwarf= No stress' except that 1) Civs are made up of lots of races. What happens when my human best friend dies. Don't give a single fuck because implied racism=better game?
2) What happens in human only worlds post-mythgen? Don't give a fuck about the mounds of dead humans outside, because they're 'bad people'?

Yes, it needs fixing, rebalancing, toughening up after seeing some bodies, an easier way to hide bodies or set up castes of body handlers or something. But "dorf hate elf" is a simplification too far, in my opinion.

[§k]

Toady did say the first "stress" update will be going a bit far. And then there will be testing and adjusting to find the middle way.

[forgotten_idiot]

You may not, but Toady probably does. DF ethics like torture and eating dead people are currently based on whether a creature is sapient or not.

Yes, it would be simple to say 'not dwarf= No stress' except that 1) Civs are made up of lots of races. What happens when my human best friend dies. Don't give a single fuck because implied racism=better game?

Yeah, but those sapient creatures are the *enemy*. Instead of being horrified by goblin corpses, dwarves should get happy thoughts for not dying a horrible death, shouldn't they.
Anyway, what do you guys think is the best way to avoid fortress-wide tantrum spirals after a bunch of goblins die on your porch? Is there a way at all?

(hm...maybe it's possible to mod in a caste of brainless emotionless "undertaker" dwarves? no idea how modding works)

...just lost the entire fortress to depression due to goblin deaths. Well, that was fun, except it wasn't.

[Dorsidwarf]

Maybe there could be an “Enemy” timer, where dwarves won’t get/get steeply reduced  bad thoughts from seeing invaders or enemies of the civ die until a certain length of time after the siege/ambush is over? That way the dwarves aren’t sobbing and crying over the merciless killing machines that want nothing but to cut their throats, but if you leave a sea of bodies outside the fort for too long or keep them in cages for years then explode them they’ll start feeling bad about it

[Leonidas]

those sapient creatures are the *enemy*. Instead of being horrified by goblin corpses, dwarves should get happy thoughts for not dying a horrible death, shouldn't they.

That should depend heavily on personality.

[PatrikLundell]

The breaking of a siege is definitely a candidate for a positive thought, but the corpses of the invaders can still provide a different thought, although it might be adjusted on the grounds of them being enemies, with different strengths of the factors involved based on personality and experience.

[FantasticDorf]

I'm 99% sure the problem/bug is that dwarves will only form relationships when idle and adjacent to other dwarves, which never happens if you have a library/tavern/temple, as they will not stand idle next to each other but instead read/socialize/pray. Interestingly, this means that the socialize job does not actually help your dwarves form relationships.

If you force dwarves to be idle and adjacent to each other, they will form relationships as intended, however.

I found personally its because dwarves fawn over their needs to argue too much, which causes the conversation to full-stop so they only get a few words in before a dwarf decides to hurl a insult and also hence they don't build up many social skills.

[anomaly]

We should start seeing fell moods and macabre moods with the amount of unhappy dwarves present.

Had a citizen bard with a fell mood.  He claimed the tanner shop, murdered a miner, then stood and watched as the corpse was entombed.  Proceeded to go insane while standing in the tanner shop.

What's funny is I suspect my fort has less stress than your average fort.  Siege defense is 100% handled by magma flood chamber - no corpses, no cleanup.  But I still have a good number of stressed dwarves.

The rebalance of stress has highlighted a lot of problems that nobody knew existed until now.  I am getting really sick of fortress guards beating my dwarves to death for kicking a duck.  Meanwhile, my vampire mayor got only jailtime after killing two dwarves.  (He did eventually get hammered, after another murder)

On the other hand, the problem solves itself pretty fast because the dwarves prone to stress get beaten to death quickly.

[Powersteve621]

I was so hype for some actual drama being added back into fort life when toady talked about revamping stress but in my heart of hearts I knew it would be broken somehow.

"Edyom Oltaringiz has been utterly harrowed by the nightmare that is her tragic life." is exactly the kind of thing I want in my dorf but not if every dwarf is inevitably going to collapse into a gibbering wreck with nothing the player can do to stop it. Seems like it would be pretty simple to make it so only dead people they actually knew has a lasting effect. It's been easy enough for people to otherise our opponents during conflict IRL and they weren't even green cannibals who's boss is literally a demon.

[Robsoie]

So with the addition of memory we're back at having the emotions so completely broken out of scale and control that whole fortress are diving into heavy depression like in early df2014 when Toady added them ?

I am currently 5 years into my new fortress on 44.10 .
And on the 80 dwarves there's probably 50 (if not more) of them that are heavily depressed, haggard and stumble oblivious to anything.

And all of that because of a very small scale (they were only 8 or 10) goblin attack that my military annihilated without losses on year 2 .
Since then after the clean up, all the dwarves have been horrified seeing gobs dying, then they have been horrified by remembering gobs dying.
And this led them to get into "great deal of stress" and regardless of the temple and library and dining meeting hall and all those statues and drink, they all fall into depression then get oblivious to anything.
then with all the stress out of control, one of them will eventually go berserk and is then killed and with the dead body there's more "great deal of stress" of horrified dwarves and with remembering dead guy there's more depression and oblivious people.

And all of that from only 1 small scale gob attack that did no casualties in my dwarves.
It's not fun like tantrum spirals were when they still happened, now it's just broken.

[forgotten_idiot]

It's not fun like tantrum spirals were when they still happened, now it's just broken.

Like any other mechanic added by Toady, until it is fixed (sort of). If I understood today's log update correctly, he's already working on it.

[Robsoie]

Hopefully it's going to work well for the next update, as even dwarven kings disapprove of the current situation

[BruceyBoyo]

Yeah, this seems almost game-breakingly extreme. I think part of the issue is that seeing 47 dead bodies is actually 47 times as bad as one dead body - which wouldn't be true in reality. (At a certain point, you just see "some dead bodies".) I got sieged by goblins and when my dwarves go to grab a sock form a dead goblin, they're insane before they make it back to the fortress. Until I figure out a way to dispose of these corpses without anyone having to haul them (and without a stockpile, as that will essentially kill a dwarf for every corpse or body part stored) I... have to try and play Dwarf Fortress without using any violence. Which is hard when 47 dwarves at a time siege me... (Goblin-employed, since it was "a vile force of darkness") If this new system is to work, seeing the corpse of the enemy has to be way less horrifying, or at least not stack ridiculously. It was bad enough that drinking water made dwarves disgusted after having to drink vomit...

I also find they tend to tantrum regardless of if they're stressed yet or not... and become harrowed regardless of if anything actually increases their stress.

I wonder if this is a bug, by the way - it seems that my dwarf with a permanent injury keeps getting randomly shaken by it. She has reliving suffereing a major injury way back, so I'm not sure if she's actually shaken repeatedly by the injury, or if it just doesn't say "reliving" for what she's feeling right now.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, do positive thoughts even do anything? A dwarf can have pages of happy thoughts, but it seems they all go out the window if anything unhappy appears.

[fearlesslittletoaster]

EDIT: I forgot to mention, do positive thoughts even do anything? A dwarf can have pages of happy thoughts, but it seems they all go out the window if anything unhappy appears.

They do. The problem is that seeing people killed or seeing bodies generates the most powerful negative thoughts in the game. With the new memory system there are sixteen (8 short term/seasonal, 8 long term/annual) slots for memories. The stronger a good or bad thought, the more likely it is to take up a short term slot, and the more likely it is to eventually take a long term slot.

The negative thoughts from death and corpses are the strongest in the game so they are basically guaranteed to take a slot each. According to the emotions page on the wiki it takes communing with a god, playing with a child, or something equally positive to generate an equally powerful good thought. Good and bad memories return and re-apply their effects periodically. 

I've got a fort going with every good and joyous thing a dwarf could ever want and a focus on providing powerful happy thoughts. I'm averaging two to three full strength good thoughts per dwarf. That leaves five or six that would be automatically overwritten by seeing a corpse.

Since each death and corpse-view is a discreet event, killing four goblins (four deaths, then four corpses) will result in every involved dwarf getting whammied with max negative effects over and over for a season, then at half strength after that. While it might be possible to eventually replace the bad long term memories with extremely powerful positive ones, that would be the project of years and would only be possible by turtling and removing all sources of danger. Even then I think the replacement of long term memories is chance based, so who knows how long it would take.

So the very short version is yes, good thoughts do have an impact, but right now they are completely overwhelmed by the bad ones.