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[wierd]

If you give "content with" more than one option (say 3, very common ones), they are about equivalent...


Content with would be "Satisfied, no boost", where the other two are boosts, and are luxuries. (since the need can be met with the content with options). 


They wouldn't need rye beer drenching everything to satisfy their diet wants, since they have some staples that they find "good enough" that should already be in basically every meal already. (Say strawberry, plump helmet, cave wheat-- or similar.  If you have several kinds of farm plot going, your standard crops are going to be strawberry, prickle berry, longland grass, cave wheat, plump helmet, rock nut, and the alcohols from those.  Basically every embark should have those, unless you purposefully embarked in one that has no surface plants at all and cannot grow any. (Undead biome, et al.) In which case, this is part of the FUN.

I would put desires for less common plants, and the like-- in the "Enjoys" category, and put rare items (like sunberry, et al) in the "greatly enjoys" category.  If you can *GET* it, it's worth it--- but if you cant, don't sweat it-- They are content with strawberries.

[FantasticDorf]

I believe you're right, and the eventual leap to recipies, but what we get off bodies is not in a good place and has been neglected for a few versions because there's no standard to what is 'tasty' or not if everything is determined by quality and other miscellaneous bugs.

Bodies leave a lot of items that are kind of detritus or inefficient use of stockpile cloggers ('chunks of meat', 'stacks of bones' coming back to having dwarves go bug eyed at the large quatity of mis-attributed bodyparts), or are too small to manifest at all. If we kept pigs simply because they tasted good (gammon/bacon/pork) and gave dwarves positive modifiers to eating the meat then that'd make all the difference depending on whether dwarves have a palette of things they like rather than (i flat out refuse to eat this, or begrudgingly eat what im given until my very specific demand is caved in).

little off topic maybe, but just one of the annoying needs that would be gratefully reworked, including the ones players actually have no direct control over fufilling like nature (how are we supposed to achieve that? bring plants inside to gawp at?, i've tried wild zoo animals and it hasn't achieved much)

[Splint]

If you give "content with" more than one option (say 3, very common ones), they are about equivalent...


Content with would be "Satisfied, no boost", where the other two are boosts, and are luxuries. (since the need can be met with the content with options). 


They wouldn't need rye beer drenching everything to satisfy their diet wants, since they have some staples that they find "good enough" that should already be in basically every meal already. (Say strawberry, plump helmet, cave wheat-- or similar.  If you have several kinds of farm plot going, your standard crops are going to be strawberry, prickle berry, longland grass, cave wheat, plump helmet, rock nut, and the alcohols from those.  Basically every embark should have those, unless you purposefully embarked in one that has no surface plants at all and cannot grow any. (Undead biome, et al.) In which case, this is part of the FUN.

I would put desires for less common plants, and the like-- in the "Enjoys" category, and put rare items (like sunberry, et al) in the "greatly enjoys" category.  If you can *GET* it, it's worth it--- but if you cant, don't sweat it-- They are content with strawberries.

I was just pulling random examples, because I've had dwarves who don't actually have preferred food, just preferred drinks and yet they still bitched about not having decent meals, with the drinks in question often being things that had to be imported because their source crop couldn't grow where I embarked, or was flat out unavailable (gutter cruror and sunshine being the worst offenders I've had.)

But yeah, having a compromise would be fine so it's at least a wash. Not really arguing there, I just find it absurd that presently it's basically demanded and for all intents, treated by your dudes (be they dwarves, humans, or whatever,) as a right to have whatever retarded meats, drinks, or plants they consider their favorites to be available at all times they get peckish or thristy.

[therahedwig]

I think the point of Loci's needs experiment was that needs aren't actually the primary thing causing the bad thoughts; rain, body-parts and personality changes seem to be the main cause. However, the needs system is a UX bug, as people are trying to fill needs in an attempt to regain control over the dwarf's stress situation.

Wandering is among the bugged needs, as in adventure mode all it requires is wandering on the map, and I am 90%(haven't bothered modding yet) sure this is the cause for elves taking mass-strolls in droves in adventure mode, but fortress mode characters don't know how to take strolls yet...

[Fleeting Frames]

I can totally understand making the conclusion that they do. If you have screen like this:

||

And it includes one thought of drinking without a mug, the natural conclusion is that lack of mugs makes dwarves insane.

[mikekchar]

Just a quick note: "Wandering" need is satisfied by hunting, fishing and plant gathering.  ob_keeping_this_on_topic: This is the kind of thing that makes it hard to manage stress -- no discernable feedback between what's wrong and what you need to do to fix it.  Although if Loci is right you can just ignore the wandering need and it won't have any impact on stress.  It's all very confusing.

[GoblinCookie]

Just a quick note: "Wandering" need is satisfied by hunting, fishing and plant gathering.  ob_keeping_this_on_topic: This is the kind of thing that makes it hard to manage stress -- no discernable feedback between what's wrong and what you need to do to fix it.  Although if Loci is right you can just ignore the wandering need and it won't have any impact on stress.  It's all very confusing.

It some cases we shouldn't have to fix it.  In some cases they should be able to fix it themselves.  For instance we often have family related unhappy thoughts despite family being present in the fortress; it would be good if the lonely dwarves would deliberately seek out their family members for a meeting.  A lot of social related stress-thoughts should lead to targeted socialising, so if I have no friends I should zero-in on someone in particular to actually befriend them. 

If they literally have no family in the fort however, I am quite happy with them not be able to do anything about their stress-thoughts however. 

[Shonai_Dweller]

Just a quick note: "Wandering" need is satisfied by hunting, fishing and plant gathering.  ob_keeping_this_on_topic: This is the kind of thing that makes it hard to manage stress -- no discernable feedback between what's wrong and what you need to do to fix it.  Although if Loci is right you can just ignore the wandering need and it won't have any impact on stress.  It's all very confusing.

It some cases we shouldn't have to fix it.  In some cases they should be able to fix it themselves.  For instance we often have family related unhappy thoughts despite family being present in the fortress; it would be good if the lonely dwarves would deliberately seek out their family members for a meeting.  A lot of social related stress-thoughts should lead to targeted socialising, so if I have no friends I should zero-in on someone in particular to actually befriend them. 

If they literally have no family in the fort however, I am quite happy with them not be able to do anything about their stress-thoughts however.

Leaving the fortress to go visit/rescue them (or petitioning to do so) would be nice to see. Then at least it's a player decision to lose a dwarf or try to keep its stress under control.

Really, this whole barrier surrounding the fortress is kind of silly. Just watched the circus wipe out a fortress, a lot of whom were outside hunting and gathering plants. Yeah, like, no that doesn't actually make sense.

[Tabbyman]

Chiming in after years of lurking because I saw a comment pointing out that feedback is probably skewed to people who've been tolerating the system well enough to troop through it somewhat, or just really dedicated fans. As I've not been trooping it and have essentially been driven away but took a peek at the website to see what's up, I'll leave a message now to share the perspective of someone who's been playing for a long time but can't handle it in the current state. Then I'll probably just disappear again for a few years at least. (I'm just not a social person)

I'll try not to go into much detail (try...) since so many others seem to have highlighted the points I found difficult and other points I myself wasn't perceptive enough to see.

I've played the game on and off since before Z levels and I've enjoyed the complexity, the difficulty, the psychological management, all up until the stress system came around. The idea of the system sounded really awesome, and I'm glad a legendary dining room isn't enough to have your dwarves run around with a mindless drooling grin everywhere they go, but...

They've become waaaaaaaaaaaay too sensitive. I feel like they don't de-stress, don't adapt, don't become students of the school of hard knocks. This is a medieval world. There should be some amount of "deal with it" mentality, along with some amount of alleviating factors from good fortress management.

I feel that favourite foods should be a bonus, not a necessity. Well prepared not-favourite food should still be enjoyable. If my favourite food is tacos but I have the opportunity to eat a damn good stir fry, I feel quite satisfied. If a dwarf likes cheetah spleen but has the opportunity to eat a damn good cat roast, he or she should at least feel marginally satisfied, if not ecstatic.

If the good outweighs the bad, they should think back on stressful events in times passed as having built character. I used to live in the same house as a guy who ended up killing two people and getting into a shootout with the cops, but I don't look back in horror at the time I lived with the guy. (It wasn't fun.) On the contrary it gives me a story to tell people, and almost a sense of pride to have encountered difficulty and gotten through it (alive). And people like to share screwed up stories... (or maybe I'm just special...)

And maybe some people in real life have PTSD but they don't generally all go on a mindless rampage and kill 2 or 3 coworkers at McDonald's leading 10 of the surviving coworkers to develop PTSD and go on to kill the rest. Maybe once in a while... Who knows... But the level of lethality of psychological torment in this game has gone from a possibility to what seems to me to be inevitability.

Think back on the medieval times in the real world. Did every single village, town and city on earth end in a tantrum spiral? No. Did the surviving cities, towns and villages in the world today have a super experienced OCD overseer or benevolent dictator watching over them, tweaking everything to perfection to ensure survival? No. Did a rainy day lead to mayhem, destruction, and PTSD?...

I love this game and have been looking forward to the new features for a long time, but I can't take it...

Some point by point thoughts/ideas:

-Make dwarves less sensitive. PLEASE. Make them hardy but not invincible.
-Make nice things all around the board work a little better, without drooling ecstasy as a result (with the exception of some kind of godlike super-managed utopic fort design, which thus-far results in some super-genius players having a fort actually survive).
-Allow dwarves to put up with missing a need or two or three, as long as most aspects of their life are decent.
-Cut down on the building up of a psychological doomsday counter, and maybe focus more on shifting through levels of moodiness depending on a combination of whether it's been a crappy day and the general thickness of skin / positive or negative attitude an individual has.
-Don't have dwarves experience permanent unending trauma from things that happened in the past, with the exception of a few dwarves who just couldn't take some VERY screwed up thing happening (like having all their family murdered infront of them), and allow even them to be able to live on with help from friends, family, etc, with the occasional case of someone who snaps and takes some final way out (and depending on temperment, brings others with them).
-Give tormented dwarves a way to seek spiritual healing, comfort... Give them therapists, give them concerned family members, give them figures they can look up to for words of encouragement in troubled times.
-Let them actively seek the things they like (as has been mentioned).
-Maybe even have sort of a slider for each dwarf for how hard they should work on a daily basis, a work day length/free time per day timer. Give them assignable weekends. Apply the same mechanic to active and inactive military dwarves.
-Maybe even let them coordinate outings like ordinary real world people, let them agree to go for a beer after work so that they'll actually be guaranteed to socialize AND drink a beer.
-Give tavern keepers some amount of responsible alcohol dosing judgement ability (in real life we have certification for that). Only allow truly disturbed or problematic alcohol-addicted dwarves to poison themselves, with the occasional stupid teenager passing out and throwing up from inexperience. Have them learn from their mistakes with alcohol.
-Maybe give them an analogue to the labour menu in the form of a leisure menu where you can pick what leisure activities to spend the most time on so they spend more time praying, socializing etc.

I have no idea how difficult any suggestions I make would be to implement and am by no means making demands or ultimatums. Just sharing thoughts.

Well, that's my 2 cents, for whatever it's worth. Love this game, will continue donating regularly to feed the beast and watch it grow. Take care of yourselves. Bye for now. *poof*

[GoblinCookie]

Leaving the fortress to go visit/rescue them (or petitioning to do so) would be nice to see. Then at least it's a player decision to lose a dwarf or try to keep its stress under control.

Really, this whole barrier surrounding the fortress is kind of silly. Just watched the circus wipe out a fortress, a lot of whom were outside hunting and gathering plants. Yeah, like, no that doesn't actually make sense.

The 'barrier' is a function of how the world beyond the fortress does not really exist when we are not there. 

There is no real reason why we cannot use the visitor mechanics to have off-site relatives come visit their on-site relatives to arrange meetings similar to how the outpost liaison does. 

But I am not bothered by people with no family members having unmeetable family demands. 

[Shonai_Dweller]

Apologies, deleted this post.

[Swordtoguts]

I went back to examine some of my more troublesome dwarves that were being driven insane by need thoughts and monitored their issues in dwarf therapist as to what their current stress levels where. Ultimately Loci is right when he says it isn't the needs system exactly to blame, in a bubble as his experiment goes the dwarves get bad thoughts from needs but do to the long drive time on needs to get really bad they do not get bad enough to start effecting most dwarves to stress immediately some don't build any lasting stress do to their own personality even with an abundance of bad thoughts related to needs.

What seems to be a problem is the effects of the number of bad thoughts and specifically the ones that cause people to dwell on them after "traumatic events"(rain too) dwarves start thinking and the personality starts to get hammered and it seems to be the not the needs themselves but how all bad thoughts that effect personalities seem to target the stress vulnerability long before anybody notices the problem and from there is where the needs system seems to catch the most of its bad wrap.

Once that stress is established on a small handful of dwarves out of so many the ones prone to violence tend to inflict trama on others and they too seem overly prone to having their stress vulnerability tweeked eventually as well and dwarf by dwarf they all get the sanity chipped away and banishment becomes really the best option.

While playing as a goblin civ in my recent games with the all races playable the need to eat didn't bother them too much but of the starting 7 one goblin who used to be at a more manageable stress vulnerability saw a few dead bodies starting with werecreatures and following into actual invaders and one day he changed to 100 stress vulnerablity when I checked him with dfhack.
From there no matter how much I tried to save a legendary axemen from his stress, stacks of positives thoughts only brought him down by around 1.8k. By this time he stopped reacting to dead bodies but the stress vulnerability was done.
Now the only thing that is ruining his life now is how a single bad need at that level of vulnerability jumps his stress back up by 2k-3k. Ironically its the need to eat or dring most of the time which a goblin won't willfully do.

Perhaps someone is more aware but is stress vulnerability just how stress is scaled up in power when its applied(Like the stress hits harder) or is it a reduction of the effects of positive thoughts(as if the value is to retain stress) its could honestly be either but I have never seen a single positive thought ever be a quarter as powerful as the strongest negative thought so every bad thought needs to be drowned in a sea of happiness.

[FantasticDorf]

Chiming in after years of lurking because I saw a comment pointing out that feedback is probably skewed to people who've been tolerating the system well enough to troop through it somewhat, or just really dedicated fans. As I've not been trooping it and have essentially been driven away but took a peek at the website to see what's up, I'll leave a message now to share the perspective of someone who's been playing for a long time but can't handle it in the current state. Then I'll probably just disappear again for a few years at least. (I'm just not a social person)

[snip]✂️[/snip]

Some point by point thoughts/ideas:

-Make nice things all around the board work a little better, without drooling ecstasy as a result (with the exception of some kind of godlike super-managed utopic fort design, which thus-far results in some super-genius players having a fort actually survive).
-Cut down on the building up of a psychological doomsday counter, and maybe focus more on shifting through levels of moodiness depending on a combination of whether it's been a crappy day and the general thickness of skin / positive or negative attitude an individual has.
-Maybe even let them coordinate outings like ordinary real world people, let them agree to go for a beer after work so that they'll actually be guaranteed to socialize AND drink a beer.
-Give tavern keepers some amount of responsible alcohol dosing judgement ability (in real life we have certification for that). Only allow truly disturbed or problematic alcohol-addicted dwarves to poison themselves, with the occasional stupid teenager passing out and throwing up from inexperience. Have them learn from their mistakes with alcohol.
-Maybe give them an analogue to the labour menu in the form of a leisure menu where you can pick what leisure activities to spend the most time on so they spend more time praying, socializing etc.

I have no idea how difficult any suggestions I make would be to implement and am by no means making demands or ultimatums. Just sharing thoughts.

Well, that's my 2 cents, for whatever it's worth. Love this game, will continue donating regularly to feed the beast and watch it grow. Take care of yourselves. Bye for now. *poof*

Sorry to hear that, its kind of true statement i can empathize with though, i've dropped off playing pretty much entirely after hitting my limit of toleration for having to design my fortress a particular kind of way best theorized, i've had some enjoyable runs but it is frustrating to know the game won't run without my explicit supervision or outright cheating (most people just DFhack to reset negative stress and traits, which defeats points of the game), havent picked it up in like... two weeks rather than just on-off.

Your suggestions are pretty good, you should honestly go platform them in suggestions for best effect even if just to elaborate for yourself and Toady's sake if nobody replies or it generates mild interest

I would back

-Maybe give them an analogue to the labour menu in the form of a leisure menu where you can pick what leisure activities to spend the most time on so they spend more time praying, socializing etc. ((You follow them on the jobs screen *not that you can actually stop them, but it'd be nice to illustrate the places they are not allowed to be, such as pulling away permission from the dwarves you rely to pull levers to get caught up in a tavern dance routine so they are restricted to meeting zones. Sober designated driver kind of deal))

-Make nice things all around the board work a little better, without drooling ecstasy as a result (with the exception of some kind of godlike super-managed utopic fort design, which thus-far results in some super-genius players having a fort actually survive). ((i mean, meeting zones used to be enough, but religion comes in close but is eclipsed by the need to use it building anxiety, some dwarves seperately have religious needs so skewered they do literally nothing but pray and fufill their needs, these are the kind of people you throw away into monastic cults or something and still suffer because they can't get enough god.))

-Allow dwarves to put up with missing a need or two or three, as long as most aspects of their life are decent.

-Cut down on the building up of a psychological doomsday counter, and maybe focus more on shifting through levels of moodiness depending on a combination of whether it's been a crappy day and the general thickness of skin / positive or negative attitude an individual has. ((though that's what a stress-tantrum is, a treasured part of DF. But the negative moods precluding it are if not almost worse and a freefall))

-Give tavern keepers some amount of responsible alcohol dosing judgement ability (in real life we have certification for that). Only allow truly disturbed or problematic alcohol-addicted dwarves to poison themselves, with the occasional stupid teenager passing out and throwing up from inexperience. Have them learn from their mistakes with alcohol. ((Tavern keepers really are a unpolished feature, i support but dwarves will inexplicably always abuse alcohol for numerous cultural and creature based reasons, so a figure for temperance of the habit in charge of drinks to be chosen is fine, greedy dwarves will just be annoyed to not be served more than they were expecting and go drink extra from a barrel or something))

[clockwork]

I've been playing dwarf fortress on and off since version 23...something? I don't remember at this point anymore since it's been a while, but I have seen nothing but varied improvements since (and bugs which have mostly been fixed!  ). In fact, I haven't had a fort downfall due to a stress spiral in a really long time..since v0.34? Within the more recent versions, I have never had a fortress end or become unenjoyable to play because of "game ending stress" Maybe I cater to my dwarfs needs earlier on than the average player? Hard to say.

I believe the game was made to be more difficult over the years with more surprises - and there is nothing wrong with that. Just taking a look at something along the lines of nethack, which is quite difficult to beat, I think dwarf fortress was designed in the spirit of a roguelike's difficulty at it's heart. I don't think there's anything wrong with dwarves being "too sensitive" nor do I think the psychological development in game, is flawed. Now, could it be tweaked here and there? Even further developed perhaps? Yeah sure, maybe.

There's nothing wrong with listening to your community when developing a game, as that is somewhat important - but don't let the popular consensus drive away features and changes you want to implement. Sometimes, communities latch on to a concept and never let it go. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[PlumpHelmetMan]

I honestly think the truth is more nuanced than either the "everything is fine" or "stress will be the end of DF" viewpoints suggest. I would say some players are probably blowing the problem out of proportion, but that doesn't mean problems with the system don't exist. Dwarfs suffering total PTSD from things as simple as bad weather or substandard food is at the very least an issue from a standpoint of game immersion, regardless of how one feels about difficulty.