Keeping Your Fortress Happy - Dwarf Fortress Tips

hey there I'm further reading today we'll talk about happiness and stress in Dwarf Fortress one disclaimer before we begin which I will say is Walter because the Walter is too cute to be angry at share this video I will use the terms memories and thoughts interchangeably which is incorrect I'm only talking with thoughts here in Dwarf Fortress a memory is when you could re-experience a task that you already had I I don't want to be recorded entire video so this will do instead anyway enjoy the video like with a lot of systems in Dwarf Fortress this has a very complicated back end but in terms of how a player can interact with it and manage it it isn't as difficult as you'd expect to basically summarize how it all works if you open up a dwarfo laptop Zone here over here you'll see that he has a bunch of thoughts down here some are negative some are positive what happens is whenever they get a negative thought it adds a number to a stress rating for the dwarf whenever they get a happy thought it will move the number from the stress rating also over time the stress rating will also go down the way which goes down and the way to which these memories impact it will depend on some of the personality features of your dwarves the key to making sure that you avoid having more of sitting here in this unhappy part for too long or even try to minimize how much can be over here is by creating opportunities for happy memories to occur and avoiding negative memories to occur one of the most powerful ways to do this is by creating a misgenerator like I have here in my little Tavern slash Barracks this one is a more localized with generator What's Happening Here is these pumps or pumping water onto these statues in a circle you have the water hits the statue it creates a spray of water and that cheers up all the dwarves they get these um memories here we go she just got content because she was near waterfall I tend to either make these small ones here like so or in this case because I have a river up here what I did was if I scroll down a bit I actually mined into the river and I took the water down to the main Central staircase and then we have myth generators caused by the water hitting these grates on these floors and because all my dwellers have to pass through these floors to get to their bedrooms or to get to the tavern or get to the work area they're always seeing these which means they're very calmly getting these memories about being close to one of all this trick alone is actually one of the most powerful things you can do for happiness in the game in fact if you wanted to you could stop watching video right now just do this and you'll probably never really have many happiness issues um but please don't I've got more tips and I would love it if you could watch those tips as well for another way to kind of passively increase the happiness of your dwarves is just by having nice rooms and nice stuff all over the place so for example this door here into my Tavern is an exceptional door some of these tables are exceptional or some of them are Master work we got these Master cables and sometimes when the Dwellers walk past them they'll go oh that's a nice table that's an exceptional table and I'll cheer them up in addition because this is a legendary dining room because it's a high Valley room you want to learn more about making high value boobs check out my my High Valley Room video although I'm not using the X-Play from this this is just naturally high value because it's so big and full of Engravings with a bunch of artifacts in there they're going to die in a legendary dining room and that is also going to cheer them up um if their bedroom is really nice as well they'll get happy memory from sleeping in Van Nuys bedroom they like eating high quality food obviously another thing that comes to food and drink is it like having Variety in the food and drink you try to give them a mix so try to have a variety of drinks and in terms of meals you want to have lavish meals because lavish meals use multiple ingredients and that way it feels more varied to the dwarf to be eating all these different kinds of meals and if the dwarf likes a certain type of meat or some type of vegetable if there is four ingredients in it then maybe there's a it's more likely that they'll be eating their favorite food a lot more which will increase the stress reduction from eating a fine dish one quick thing I want to talk about is needs you see here this unmet meat section A lot of new players in particular get very focused on the section and try to make sure all the needs are matter to prevent your dwarves being unhappy this isn't actually how this section works when a dwarf has all their needs met they will work faster and having some of these needs on that can create unhappy memory so for example he is restless and lonely here this is because of his unmet needs however a lot of these negative memories actually have vital impact on the overall stress level a good example of this is zontier here zontier one of my Elite Max drops you'll see loads of unmet needs and look here he's uneasy because he can acquire something he wants to pray he wants to practice a craft you know so he has all these unhappy memories right someone happy thoughts I mean from dealing with however if I go here and I find him in my list here you can see he's actually at maximum happiness he is ecstatic right now I'll put them herself I stayed on Reddit that the amount of stress they gained from being unable to play is basically inexorable and through testing most players have confirmed as well that a lot of that unhappiness to come from these unmet Deeds aren't really impacted the overall happiness level of the dwarves so you can pretty much ignore the section entirely and focus on other means if you want to make sure your dorms are happy so when it comes to engaging with the system a bit more directly a good thing to look at is your personality Tab and we'll explain this by showing you a big mistake I made and how that mistake snowballed over time that's Sonic Sonic is my militia Commander Sanic is always either in this level of unhappiness or this level of open happiness the reason for that is because she is in a constant state of internal of age she wasn't originally she explained some trauma uh nine years ago in the second year I fought and since then she's always just been angry all the time I'm always angry I could have avoided this because if I had read down a lower you could see here she doesn't handle stress well so because she doesn't handle stress well then being in stressful situations through being in combat all the time in fact the main reason I leveled these guys up is by tying a ant to a pool and having them just murder the ant again and again and again these guys have killed quite quite a lot because of all these like Mass executions and watching all this debt occur all the time uh it really stressed out and because she doesn't handle stress well it's stressed out much faster than everybody else then when she experienced trauma because she's so stressed and because she's having stressed well she actually ended up having a personality change from that and now she's angry all the time in addition it says here she actually avoids exciting or stressful situations again after experience of trauma which is difficult because she's the militia commanders so every situation she's in is exciting or stressful to kind of show more how this is snowballed down in here we can see that she values peace over War and she finds those that develop skilled with weapons in fighting distasteful um she's surrounded by people who have skill with weapons and fighting that's what she does she's I have a set to constant training that's all she does that's all she does and when she socializes with a lot of people who are like legendary combat dwarves so she's talking people she just tastes all the time and again that is just further impacting the issues with our unhappiness so when you've got dwarves like this who are just super unhappy all the time and they are at risk of going into a tantrum how do you deal with that uh the first easiest way to do it is just Exile them you hit this button you Exile them and they leave then they become somebody else's problem that you know is fine in some cases I don't want to do with Sonic because Sonic you know is a legendary military dwarf I I don't want to get rid of her but in other cases if someone who's a bit more more replaceable it's only just Exile them and just get a new dolphin uh one of the best ways if you want to manage a bunch of unhappy dwarves and fix them for a long period of time is to something that's called making a Dwarven therapy Squad a drovement therapy Squad is just a military Squad you can create a brand new Squad uh give it to somebody and fill it full of dwarves you don't you don't have to have a uniform it's full full of dwarves and then give them a bow because they haven't trained that Barracks when they're training they're going to be learning about stuff sometimes they'll be teaching stuff and it's going to be improving so they are going to be getting happy memories just from training alone but this is only like the first level of the drawing therapy Squad the second level is to put that Squad inside the tavern I've mentioned this before in one of my other tips videos but this is actually a much cleaner example of the benefit of putting your barracks inside a Tavern you'll see up here do some decided to see betrayal at Super figures and he enjoyed doing that if I go to my drawers over here uh they're all you can see that they have they're interested after watching a performance and if I go through you'll see some of them there we go he saw the door of the site BC Bachelorette suburb so he's even though he was doing his drills these guys are on concentrating he was able to see do some to his performance and he became interested and got a happy happy thought from that performance tonight you'll see most of these guys actually have just watching performance one over here we've got covered the bookkeeper he's currently reciting a poem and he's doing it right next to him so when he finishes we're saying the poem they are going to get another happy memory here main uh you can see here that she's socializing and she was talking with a friend in the acquaintance if I check up here not not you is it with you there we go find this talking to a friend so you actually cyber was speaking with you uh talking with the Creations that is his own tier so zontier is also talking to me or you're talking with friends as well so it actually could be maybe you're actually uh Wayne's friend doesn't tell you like who the friend is but basically rain's been here talking to people and creating happy memories again even though they're currently busy they're still able to socialize and get happy memories from socializing they can do multiple things at once one last thing I want to talk about and that is in the personality traits doesn't care about anything anymore uh this is a trade that some people get after they've experienced a bunch of trauma and I can't really get a confirmation on what this actually does you think that by the way it's phrased the basic downside don't even make him happy or nothing to make them sad but that's not the case they go to our thoughts they'll see that voicecraft um has a mixture of negative and positive thoughts uh what she does get specifically I know for fact this is going to do is don't care about dead bodies it can fall on you'll see they have no strong feelings about dead bodies but they can still get happy memories and sad memories from other sources what's interesting is if you go to this fellow moral and go to his thoughts you see that he doesn't feel anything but you don't have to cry something being away so like there's a lot of stuff he doesn't feel anything about Ida on top of the the dead bodies but he still feels happy memories and stuff so some people think that it'll maybe while it will completely remove the impacts of seeing a bunch of dead bodies that the other memories as well can be reduced however I I find it's pretty rare that anything isn't dead body related will become it didn't feel anything I have seen it happen for positive memories as well for other dwarves but it's pretty rare usually people who have this trade today that will only alone impact dead bodies it is possible to farm this trait on your dwarves however I I find that we need to farm that most dwarves would end up getting it anyway just to the Natural violence of living in a Dwarven Fort but also stuff like the Dwarven therapy and the misgender will do far more to help you manage your stress levels than people having it straight so yeah that was kind of a general overview of the happiness system like I said a lot of the stuff isn't very transparent to the player but through having a misgenerator engaging in Dwarven therapy and having nice stuff around your thoughts you should basically be able to avoid your dwarves getting so unhappy that they're gonna be having 10 trips I hope you found this guy useful and if you did feel free to like And subscribe if you want to watch more content like this you can check out any videos on screen right now or find me on Twitch where I stream Dwarf Fortress and games like it pretty regularly hopefully I'll see you soon

Channel: FurtherReading

Views: 6,702

Keywords: dwarf fortress steam, dwarf fortress premium, tips and tricks, guide, mine cart, traps, defense, defence, tutorial, Minecart Tutorials, dwarf fortress, Moods

Id: rSUY8PRGtqU

Length: 12min 35sec (755 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 24 2023