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[blaster395]

So, I was playing my new fort. 10 dwarfs on the first hard-coded wave, 6 on the second. Everything developing nicely with 20 excess housing.

Then 44 migrants arrived and I rage quit. I don't have the patience to deal with the game dumping 44 random dwarves with useless skills on me.

Is there a way to ensure that you get few migrants without just deliberately not making anything to keep fortress wealth low? Ideally I want 5-10 migrants at a time.

[Orange Wizard]

Set up a migrant processing facility. Screen each dwarf for useful skills before they make it into the fortress proper. The useless ones can be sent to be atom-smashed, or dunked in magma, or drowned, or left in a box to starve to death.

There is no way that I know of to reduce migrant wave size, but I might be wrong.

[blaster395]

I would rather not have to process 44 dwarves for skills; the tedium of doing so is identical to the tedium of adding them to your fort as permanent residents.

[Orange Wizard]

Dwarf Therapist

[blaster395]

I am already using dwarf therapist.

Is it possible that, by generating an extremely sparsely populated world (huge world size, very few civilizations, 5 years of world generation) that the dwarvern population will be so low that I get fewer migrants?

[Lielac]

Probably, yeah.

You could also produce high-value stuff as sparingly as possible while you're setting up. Beds and barrels/pots and food/booze and stone and such are kind of inevitable, but don't go out of your way to increase wealth until you have enough space for a whole crapola of dwarves?

Also, dormitories. Dormitories are a godsend in the early years.

[vjek]

There are DFHack scripts available to clear or set skills (one, some, all) if you want to customize dwarves.  You can also change their personality and preferences, if you want to go that far.

Additionally, you can set the population cap to whatever you want, and set children and births to 0, and it makes things a bit more predictable, population-wise.

Put another way, there aren't really any useless skill dwarves, even if you don't use DFHack, any dwarf can do any task.

[Methadone]

If you really don't need them, draft them as full time millitary, have them sleep in their barracks and constantly train. Once an attack comes, you have a large suicide squad ready to go.

[Orange Wizard]

If you really don't need them, draft them as full time millitary, have them sleep in their barracks and constantly train. Once an attack comes, you have a large suicide squad ready to go.

+1

[Quietust]

If you're using DFHack, then you should run "fix/population-cap" right after you embark so you can notify your mountainhomes of your current population - once they know, they will do their best to not exceed it (though you'll need to rerun it after each migrant wave, since the mountainhomes don't assume that the migrants that left for your fortress actually arrived there safely and will continue to send them until a caravan returns with updated statistics).

[Necrisha]

If you're using DFHack, then you should run "fix/population-cap" right after you embark so you can notify your mountainhomes of your current population - once they know, they will do their best to not exceed it (though you'll need to rerun it after each migrant wave, since the mountainhomes don't assume that the migrants that left for your fortress actually arrived there safely and will continue to send them until a caravan returns with updated statistics).

This is the most efficient process, decide your max for migrants before the wave, change cap to have current pop+max migrants wanted then use DFHack to tell the mountain homes how many migrants you want, before they are scheduled to come. then after the migrants show; if you've decided you want more migrants the next season, increase the cap by the amount you want, DFHack to message the mountainhomes, rinse repeat.

[Duuvian]

In one of the init files in the dwarf fortress directory you can set a population cap. I usually set it to about 30 or so.

You will end up with more than 30 as immigration waves will appear as normal until the cap has been breached AND the fortress liason has successfully made if off the map but you can limit the number you end up with by simply not having your dwarves do much beyond what's necessary to survive until you reach that number. This will keep the immigration waves small.

It might be a good idea to turn off invaders at the start, as your fort will be underdeveloped compared to what is possible normally, not to mention your smaller population and lack of more immigrants (until enough dwarves die to put you under the limit.)

Children are a different init setting if you don't want a lot of dwarf children.

[Fluoman]

If you want something that looks like small migrant waves, you can always get the first 2 hardcoded waves with popcap set to 0. If you then set dwarves to grow after a short amount of time (4-6 years), you'll have a steady influx of workforce instead of a tidal wave.

[Duuvian]

That's not a bad idea. It feels like forever from birth to 12 year adulthood when you don't have enough haulers because ALL your dwarves are busy doing their career jobs.

[Fluoman]

I'm always unsure about this method though, since I like having all my children do pump operating to raise their attributes and six years can be a little short if there are too many.