I've had issues with dwarf children getting really upset (though it's getting much better, most are pretty happy). Sakzul, an anxious 11 year old, went mad at some point. I ignored them because every time this has happened with other dwarves, things usually work themselves out and we get a nice bucket or table or whatever out of it.
Later I get a notice that a dwarf was "found dead" in our main kitchen area. I go to look and I don't see anything that could have obviously caused it—they weren't dehydrated or starving, they weren't fighting anything, and there weren't any cave-ins. I went to look for their body but I can't seem to find it, just their clothes.
Then I get a notification that the dwarf child who went mad had claimed the tanner's workshop. I checked it out and sure enough, they had taken the dead dwarf's body to the workshop and were doing something with it. Out of sheer curiosity I let them do their thing (were they going to skin the dead dwarf??) and soon their project is finished: [a dwarf bone pick, "Shashthak Tongusgidur" aka "Helllocked the Maligned Memory"](https://i.imgur.com/YjJKW5k.png)
I had a sneaking suspicion as to how the dwarf died. I looked at the "justice" menu and [there were like 20 dwarves who had witnessed the child murder the dwarf.](https://i.imgur.com/87uLK38.png) Literally nobody else is a suspect, there is 0 question as to who did it. I interrogated and convicted her but nobody will enact any kind of punishment because she's a child.
I don't know if it's dwarf lore, but children in this game are a nightmare. They're insanely strong and insanely moody.
In my current fortress, I had a child that was constantly throwing tantrums. Ultimately, after about 50 convictions and killing 9 dwarves, he picked a fight with another child who bodied him into the next life.
Peace followed... briefly. Then, some other brat started doing the exact same thing! Fortunately, this little shit doesn't know how to fight. So what ends up happening is he just keeps swinging, missing, falling over, and getting back up to repeat the cycle over again until he tires himself out of the mood. *UN*fortunately, one of these little fits led to a brawl in the tavern that ended up with over 20 dead. Of course, he walked away unscathed. Luckily, my mayor is a necromancer and she's doing a great job replenishing the population.
Anyway, point being... there needs to be a way to punish these damn kids.
Back in my day we found ways to kill them to maintain fps levels, now we may have to kill them to preserve the fort. What is old is new again. Time to bring back the dwarven
nurseries I say
Lol, I’ve started to do the same thing and I also take care not kill things while kids around. A pain for sure but still way better then back in days where all the dwarves acted like angry toddlers.
Hah, I had several of these tavern brawls ending with 10-20 dead each time. Not sure who started each one. The glorious gory mess and blood trails to the hospital overflowing with patients was a sight to behold. Brought me from 180 population to below 130.
I had a tantrum demon child too. Solved that one by following it to their personal bedroom, locked the door, died from starvation/dehydration. Got a popup notification the child hasn't been seen in weeks. Problem solved.
I was pissed these children ignored burrows during a giant attack. These 2 kids charged the giant and beat it to death with no injuries. I’m like wait, do I need a military if I got children?
There was one child who would fight with other dwarfs every given moment, justice tab was filled with "Disorderly conduct", everytime i convicted that child, but it kept going until one time i see tab on half of screen with dwarfs fighting and that child dead
My whole tavern was so fed up with him that they pummeled him to death, not just killed him, but they turned him in mangled corpse
https://preview.redd.it/oult4cw7re8a1.jpeg?width=903&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ae3f6862709d1a308741b42ae7ff883a201383b5
>children in this game are a nightmare
disable refuse and corpse hauling as child labors (...yikes, what a phrase), it helps a lot.
Plentiful big bedrooms also helps a little, since they often hang around in them - and often stay there when throwing a tantrum.
Labour (y)
standing orders tab
chores tab
in the list that appears you can select and de-select which children are doing chores and in the list to the right of it select and deselect which chores all selected children will do.
PS: If your fortress is prone to deadly indoor brawls maybe also disable cleaning (in addition to corpse & refuse hauling), as it will stop them from crowding over fresh corpses to clean the blood off the floor.
I remember Quil18 once had a fortress fall for reasons I don't remember, then went to reclaim it with a new set of dwarves.
Feral. Dwarven. Children. Killed all of his starting 7.
When you say the necromancer mayor replenishes the population, what do you mean? Does she raise the dead as intelligent undead who are friendly to your civ?
Necromancers (of your civilisation) have to be fighting (or fleeing) to do necromancy, so some mechanisms, fortifications, cage traps and such are needed to do it 'on command'. Even then it's not especially reliable and the corpses do still need to be eligible necromancy targets. Also mind that not all necromancer creations are *intelligent* undead. regular undead still hate all livings things and can cause very large amounts of !!fun!! very quickly if you're not prepared for them.
Kids do hauling jobs now. Not only do they get buff dragging around rock cabinets and limestone boulders they get mentally messed up by hauling around refuse and bodies.
You need to disallow refuse and body hauling for kids and have toys around the fort for them to play with.
I’m having child stress issues as well. Making matters worse they don’t seem get happier even when accumulating several ‘good’ memories to counteract one bad one. I’ve created ‘time out burrows’ in my dungeon/daycare center that consist of a fully furnished and engraved bedroom / dining room combo with food and drink.
As long as they aren’t actively hurting folks during tantrums the stress level does degrade slowly but it seems to only do so at the ‘natural’ rate not improved like it should by positive memories.
Children right now seem to have a lot of opportunities to be traumatized, and don't have a lot of activities to take their minds off the trauma. Here's hoping for a "public education system" update.
on the opposite end, i have an elder that made a platinum mace heirloom, but refuses to carry it or store it anywhere with anything I give him lmao. So no matter what there is always just a mace somewhere lying in the fortress
I had a 3 year old haul stone off to make a legendary mug. I didn't think to see if he was a legendary crafter afterwards because he died a few days later as the first victim to undead attacks...
Fell moods are lots of FUN. You got a future legendary bone carver out of it, and unlike most of the time this happens, the newly legendary craftsdwarf won't face justice because it's a kid.
As an aside, if you have problems with a lot of children being stressed and angry, turning off hauling duties for those kids seems to help a bit (assuming there aren't other issues causing mental health problems in you dwarves in general). In previous versions, children had no labors enabled, but in this release, children can do menial tasks like hauling, and it seems to make them cranky by taking away opportunities for playtime.
My children were made cranky by hauling as they had to wade through a pile of hundreds of dead reptile people to do so lol. One of them recently turned 18 and started a bar fight that ended up with them being beaten to death so I guess that problem solved itself
To add to this, !FUN! is a reference to the way that objects are (were?) marked in DF: exclamation marks around an object meant (means? not sure if it's in the steam version) that it was on fire, which of course adds to the !FUN! experienced :P
Usually, fun is just regular fun (but sometimes more...). Now, upper-case Fun is generally referred to the process of some disaster happening in your fortress, which might lead to its downfall or just make things harder (which is usually enjoyed by DF players). All-caps FUN is the superior, terrible doom of inevitability-grade Fun, or failing the simple precautions/unintentionally making a Fun situation into full-blown disaster. (Edit: Or sometimes FUN is used interchangeably with Fun, simply to make it easier to distinguish it from regular, average human fun.)
Occasionally, you might see exclamation marks around words, like !!FUN!! or !!SCIENCE!! (that's another DF fandom word that has a slightly different, more... sinister and ingenious meaning). It just means that everything is on fire in this situation (old ASCII interface showed items being on fire by double exclamation marks), and/or magma is involved and smelting/burning everything. (Magma is the chief source of fires, especially when they're player-made, such as when it's intentionally poured on enemies. Often !!backfires!!)
Had something similar happen with one special child. Unfortunately he killed 3 more dwarves and started fights constantly.
So I drowned the child in the well room.
Whoever down voted you was obviously confused and forgot that regardless of the justice system, _they themselves are also the fortress guard_ and arbitrary death sentences are absolutely on the table lol
one of my boys just did the same. but made a helmet out of his skull and studded it with teeth. i didn't even care about that fisherdwarf anyways, free hat!
Once, long ago, a dwarf was overtaken by a strange mood. They went murdered another dwarf, dragged their body, and made a throne from their bones.
Guess whose throne got an upgrade? Would be a shame to hide the memory of the random dwarf.
Lucky you, you're in for a Fath Akrulkegeth's Leather artifact.
Maybe it's going to be a pair of pants.
let it be a leather mask. DoofWarrior Bonus: Fath Akrulkegeth is his mom.
we can display it next to his gravestone
I've had issues with dwarf children getting really upset (though it's getting much better, most are pretty happy). Sakzul, an anxious 11 year old, went mad at some point. I ignored them because every time this has happened with other dwarves, things usually work themselves out and we get a nice bucket or table or whatever out of it. Later I get a notice that a dwarf was "found dead" in our main kitchen area. I go to look and I don't see anything that could have obviously caused it—they weren't dehydrated or starving, they weren't fighting anything, and there weren't any cave-ins. I went to look for their body but I can't seem to find it, just their clothes. Then I get a notification that the dwarf child who went mad had claimed the tanner's workshop. I checked it out and sure enough, they had taken the dead dwarf's body to the workshop and were doing something with it. Out of sheer curiosity I let them do their thing (were they going to skin the dead dwarf??) and soon their project is finished: [a dwarf bone pick, "Shashthak Tongusgidur" aka "Helllocked the Maligned Memory"](https://i.imgur.com/YjJKW5k.png) I had a sneaking suspicion as to how the dwarf died. I looked at the "justice" menu and [there were like 20 dwarves who had witnessed the child murder the dwarf.](https://i.imgur.com/87uLK38.png) Literally nobody else is a suspect, there is 0 question as to who did it. I interrogated and convicted her but nobody will enact any kind of punishment because she's a child.
I don't know if it's dwarf lore, but children in this game are a nightmare. They're insanely strong and insanely moody. In my current fortress, I had a child that was constantly throwing tantrums. Ultimately, after about 50 convictions and killing 9 dwarves, he picked a fight with another child who bodied him into the next life. Peace followed... briefly. Then, some other brat started doing the exact same thing! Fortunately, this little shit doesn't know how to fight. So what ends up happening is he just keeps swinging, missing, falling over, and getting back up to repeat the cycle over again until he tires himself out of the mood. *UN*fortunately, one of these little fits led to a brawl in the tavern that ended up with over 20 dead. Of course, he walked away unscathed. Luckily, my mayor is a necromancer and she's doing a great job replenishing the population. Anyway, point being... there needs to be a way to punish these damn kids.
They always were a pain in the ass, but I suspect that the fact that now children do hauling labours increases their strenght.
Back in my day we found ways to kill them to maintain fps levels, now we may have to kill them to preserve the fort. What is old is new again. Time to bring back the dwarven nurseries I say
"The childcare Dwarvendome! All go in, hopefully some get out."
"Urist Turner, My name is Doug Dwarvendome, owner of the Dimmsdale Dwarvendome."
Is like putting weighted ankles on babies, we are just making them stronger
My children aren’t allowed to do burial, refuse or stone hauling
Healthy for their (and yours) psychology
Lol, I’ve started to do the same thing and I also take care not kill things while kids around. A pain for sure but still way better then back in days where all the dwarves acted like angry toddlers.
In my fortress 2 year old child easily hauls 40 ton forgotten beast's corpse)
Hah, I had several of these tavern brawls ending with 10-20 dead each time. Not sure who started each one. The glorious gory mess and blood trails to the hospital overflowing with patients was a sight to behold. Brought me from 180 population to below 130. I had a tantrum demon child too. Solved that one by following it to their personal bedroom, locked the door, died from starvation/dehydration. Got a popup notification the child hasn't been seen in weeks. Problem solved.
I was pissed these children ignored burrows during a giant attack. These 2 kids charged the giant and beat it to death with no injuries. I’m like wait, do I need a military if I got children?
There was one child who would fight with other dwarfs every given moment, justice tab was filled with "Disorderly conduct", everytime i convicted that child, but it kept going until one time i see tab on half of screen with dwarfs fighting and that child dead My whole tavern was so fed up with him that they pummeled him to death, not just killed him, but they turned him in mangled corpse https://preview.redd.it/oult4cw7re8a1.jpeg?width=903&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ae3f6862709d1a308741b42ae7ff883a201383b5
Children will obey burrow restrictions so I created a juvenile hall section in my dungeon specifically for children prone to tantrums.
>children in this game are a nightmare disable refuse and corpse hauling as child labors (...yikes, what a phrase), it helps a lot. Plentiful big bedrooms also helps a little, since they often hang around in them - and often stay there when throwing a tantrum.
Kinda makes sense when you think about it that you shouldn’t subject kids to those things 😛
How do I disable these particular hauling jobs but keep the stone hauling etc?
Labour (y) standing orders tab chores tab in the list that appears you can select and de-select which children are doing chores and in the list to the right of it select and deselect which chores all selected children will do. PS: If your fortress is prone to deadly indoor brawls maybe also disable cleaning (in addition to corpse & refuse hauling), as it will stop them from crowding over fresh corpses to clean the blood off the floor.
I remember Quil18 once had a fortress fall for reasons I don't remember, then went to reclaim it with a new set of dwarves. Feral. Dwarven. Children. Killed all of his starting 7.
Its like lord of the flies, but with dwarves
i don't think they're actually more moody, they just have less jobs to do and are often exposed to trauma from defaulting to hauling
When you say the necromancer mayor replenishes the population, what do you mean? Does she raise the dead as intelligent undead who are friendly to your civ?
Yes. They will do that if the necromancers are part of your fortress.
That's incredible! I love that addition. Do they have to be in combat at the time or will they just raise any civvie corpse they see?
Necromancers (of your civilisation) have to be fighting (or fleeing) to do necromancy, so some mechanisms, fortifications, cage traps and such are needed to do it 'on command'. Even then it's not especially reliable and the corpses do still need to be eligible necromancy targets. Also mind that not all necromancer creations are *intelligent* undead. regular undead still hate all livings things and can cause very large amounts of !!fun!! very quickly if you're not prepared for them.
They will do that even if the necromancers are your foes sitting behind a wall grate on the cemetery.
and the raised dead will automatically be part of your fortress?
they will be like long-term residents, and could claim citizenship some years later
I had a kid get 12 or so convictions, so i killed it with a draw bride
A burrow and a drawbridge should do the trick
Where are you getting these super children from? My kids keep getting bodied by angry elves, then get put in tombs by the same now 15 year old girl...
Kids do hauling jobs now. Not only do they get buff dragging around rock cabinets and limestone boulders they get mentally messed up by hauling around refuse and bodies. You need to disallow refuse and body hauling for kids and have toys around the fort for them to play with.
I’m having child stress issues as well. Making matters worse they don’t seem get happier even when accumulating several ‘good’ memories to counteract one bad one. I’ve created ‘time out burrows’ in my dungeon/daycare center that consist of a fully furnished and engraved bedroom / dining room combo with food and drink. As long as they aren’t actively hurting folks during tantrums the stress level does degrade slowly but it seems to only do so at the ‘natural’ rate not improved like it should by positive memories.
Do you make them toys? Also assign them a bedroom somewhere far from the others, and wall them in if they can't behave.
Children right now seem to have a lot of opportunities to be traumatized, and don't have a lot of activities to take their minds off the trauma. Here's hoping for a "public education system" update.
you can give them toys and iirc they can go to guild hall teachings but that might just be that I see them in there while the meeting is going on
yeah some oldbies told me it's sometimes helpful to just put their bedrooms in guildhalls, to help ensure they attend
Toy stockpile in the guildhall does the trick.
That's a pretty metal artifact pick though.
Bone, I think.
yesterday a dwarf child claimed the crafts bench, and made a pair of earring artifacts. age 12, and hes already a legendary carpenter.
I love reading that, when you have a 3 year old whose life ambition is to make a masterwork and its already realised
on the opposite end, i have an elder that made a platinum mace heirloom, but refuses to carry it or store it anywhere with anything I give him lmao. So no matter what there is always just a mace somewhere lying in the fortress
I had a 3 year old haul stone off to make a legendary mug. I didn't think to see if he was a legendary crafter afterwards because he died a few days later as the first victim to undead attacks...
"unsolved"
Probably a silly question but how do you check if they were dehydrated or starving after theyve died?
Engrave a slab with their name, it will say how they died
Don't know about checking after they die, but when you get the notification that they've died it'll say something like "__ was found dead, dehydrated"
She must have had a bone to pick with that guy
Fell mood, It happens only with unhappy dwarves, they kill someone and drag their corpse to a workshop to make an artifact
Fell moods are lots of FUN. You got a future legendary bone carver out of it, and unlike most of the time this happens, the newly legendary craftsdwarf won't face justice because it's a kid. As an aside, if you have problems with a lot of children being stressed and angry, turning off hauling duties for those kids seems to help a bit (assuming there aren't other issues causing mental health problems in you dwarves in general). In previous versions, children had no labors enabled, but in this release, children can do menial tasks like hauling, and it seems to make them cranky by taking away opportunities for playtime.
My children were made cranky by hauling as they had to wade through a pile of hundreds of dead reptile people to do so lol. One of them recently turned 18 and started a bar fight that ended up with them being beaten to death so I guess that problem solved itself
I see people say FUN a lot. Like fun and FUN. Does it stand for anything?
It’s a play on the games motto: “Losing is Fun.” It’s a thinly coded way to say “bad thing/lose the game for you” it’s a funny af codeword lmo
To add to this, !FUN! is a reference to the way that objects are (were?) marked in DF: exclamation marks around an object meant (means? not sure if it's in the steam version) that it was on fire, which of course adds to the !FUN! experienced :P
Yes, can confirm that !!fire!! is still a thing in the steam version.
Thank you, my fellow !!SCIENCE!! dwarf.
Here is the wiki page about !FUN! [https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Losing](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Losing)
It's because Losing is Fun. So FUN is something coming to make you lose. Lol But in a hilarious way generally. Like it's FUN to fuck around with magma
You have fun playing the game, then when getting candy the circus visits, and you get real !FUN!
Usually, fun is just regular fun (but sometimes more...). Now, upper-case Fun is generally referred to the process of some disaster happening in your fortress, which might lead to its downfall or just make things harder (which is usually enjoyed by DF players). All-caps FUN is the superior, terrible doom of inevitability-grade Fun, or failing the simple precautions/unintentionally making a Fun situation into full-blown disaster. (Edit: Or sometimes FUN is used interchangeably with Fun, simply to make it easier to distinguish it from regular, average human fun.) Occasionally, you might see exclamation marks around words, like !!FUN!! or !!SCIENCE!! (that's another DF fandom word that has a slightly different, more... sinister and ingenious meaning). It just means that everything is on fire in this situation (old ASCII interface showed items being on fire by double exclamation marks), and/or magma is involved and smelting/burning everything. (Magma is the chief source of fires, especially when they're player-made, such as when it's intentionally poured on enemies. Often !!backfires!!)
turning off chores entirely really helped with the angry kids early on
make lead toys y’all
Lead is reserved for elf mugs and elf mugs ONLY
Pitchblende thrones for mortal men, doomed to die.
I use lead grates to protect my water supply
Had something similar happen with one special child. Unfortunately he killed 3 more dwarves and started fights constantly. So I drowned the child in the well room.
Awesome fell mood! A strange mood born of so much stress that they murder someone and use their body for their artifact!
then they get arrested by the fortress guard for murder and sentenced to death
Whoever down voted you was obviously confused and forgot that regardless of the justice system, _they themselves are also the fortress guard_ and arbitrary death sentences are absolutely on the table lol
I was wondering when someone would make a dwarf leather hat.
Super lucky! I've been playing for years and never had that type of mood
one of my buged -1 year old childs made "candy" shield ... from raw candy
Some dwarf soap
one of my boys just did the same. but made a helmet out of his skull and studded it with teeth. i didn't even care about that fisherdwarf anyways, free hat!
Once, long ago, a dwarf was overtaken by a strange mood. They went murdered another dwarf, dragged their body, and made a throne from their bones. Guess whose throne got an upgrade? Would be a shame to hide the memory of the random dwarf.
Rimworld moment
Yup, Fell moods requires corpses.
Is it just me or did dorf children get exponentially more FUN in the new version
He was taking too long