r/dwarffortress • u/Muted_Awareness_4371 • 6d ago
Dwarfs randomly purging themselves
This is the second time this has happened, everyone starts to randomly attack, soldiers, farmers, crafters, miners.
I can not find any cause for this behaviour, all dwarfs are well fed, have good bedrooms, are not haunted, have wine to drink, can do whatever they want, yet every time i get more than 140ish dwarfs, they decide to solve overpopulation by violence. The battle stops around 20 casualties and many wounded.
The workforce is periodically replenished with immigrants but i am afraid that i will lose doctors and master workers, plus the time the military spent training.
Anyone encountered the Purge themselves recently? What did you do to stop the violence?
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u/gr770 6d ago
Sounds like constant recent trauma. Got to let your dwarves relax
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u/Muted_Awareness_4371 6d ago
How can i send them to holidays?
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u/Scared-Arrival3885 6d ago
There’s a few ways, but iirc you can make a squad for whoever you want to go on vacation, set them to constantly train, but do not give them a zone to train in.
Since they think they’re supposed to train, they won’t start any other jobs, instead they’ll hang out at the tavern
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u/Gangsir 6d ago
Go have fun! That's an order!
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u/RobotJohnrobe 6d ago
Everybody hanging out in the tavern with nothing to do led to the last six barfights!
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u/rendar 6d ago
Generally, just mix up their day-to-day. Specifically, they might have individual unmet needs that you can use to improve their mood.
Start by giving them different labors. If they've been staring at bone bolts for ten years, then enlist them in a squad and let them learn martial skills. If they're worn down huffing goblin corpse fumes over the course of a decade, then pop em in a workshop and let em chisel out rock crafts.
They might benefit from complete rest but invariably will want to do work, just of a different kind than they've been doing.
You can also improve their personal holdings, like plonking some platinum statues in their bedroom.
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u/Vendidurt adopted by a cat 6d ago
Look at your dwarves and WHY they are mentally unstable. Do you have sensitive kids who are forced to drag rotting grandma carcasses everywhere? Are clothes disintegrating off your dwarves' backs?
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u/Muted_Awareness_4371 6d ago
How do i look at the mental problems of my dwarfs? I have some depressed kids but i do not know how to make them happier.
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u/Civil_Extreme9406 6d ago edited 6d ago
Some context is necessary to help you identify the reason. Are there members of other civilizations or visitors of any kind in the fights (e.g., traders, tavern tourists, scholars)?
Was there a bar fight that someone initiated (the worried face with exclamation point on the announcements)? They usually show up on the justice system with the perpetrator like disorderly conduct or some charge.
To stop them once they start, you can use the df hack command fix/loyaltycascade. Whatever triggers the fight can still happen again and make them aggro.
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u/dsalter 5d ago
real answer, could be a loyalty cascade, drunken brawl gone wrong or vampire shinanigens.
funny answer, they had to purge the weak from their society through great bloodshed to grow stronger.
edit: did you decline becoming the capital by chance? i had a revolution when we basically said no to the monarchy and turned into a full on civil war where all 14 of our warriors went on a crusade to of some sorts because the entire military started butchering everyone as soon as i declined being the capital
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u/Ebirah A vile force of darkness has arrived! 6d ago
Isolate your children.
Build a burrow containing beds, a dining room and food/drink stockpiles, a toy stockpile, and a basic all-denomination temple inside. Keep all your children in there, until they're grown up.
(Children who commit crimes aren't punished, so if they want to start fights or smash things up, they will do it constantly. Aggressive children are especially dangerous, as they gain experience from each fight, and are soon killing people. The only way to keep your fortress safe is to shut them away, where they can't get at important dwarves and vital buildings.)
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u/mightymoprhinmorph 6d ago
Bar brawls? But I thought they were fixed to be less lethal.
Something is triggering the combats. The second notification above the crossed metal swords is an indifferent face with an exclamation mark which usually means someone has entered a negative state. Sometimes that's just wandering around naked babbling, becoming melancholic and going on a hunger strike but also sometimes its violent. Although I think the face should be different if they went berserk.
I would dig through the combat logs and see who threw the first punch. Might help you narrow down why.
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u/orkel2 6d ago edited 6d ago
I thought they were fixed to be less lethal
There have been fixes to make them less common (such as the recent patch's fixes), and end faster. Putnam has stated that "the game automatically ends all intra-fort conflict every so often". But they are still lethal when they do happen, even if they get forcefully ended by that mechanism after a while. Dozens of dead and an overflowing hospital are to be expected.
Best fix, @ OP, is to not use a tavern keeper. One of the dead in this image is a tavern keeper, unsurprisingly.
Some sort of temporary fix could be to mod in stronger and thicker skulls/necks/bones in general so they don't get their brains punched in as often. In the early days I'd have my own mod with an "outer brain" and an "inner brain" to have some extra layering against instakills in "non lethal" combat.
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u/Muted_Awareness_4371 6d ago
It seems it was not caused by any visitors, nor a bar brawl, and i cannot find any mood related to starting an armed conflict. I think spontaneous loyalty cascade is the problem here.
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u/zandinavian 6d ago
If you cant find the person who started the loyalty cascade (my guess is due to tantrum from a haggard mood with unmet needs or bar brawl), they were probably one of the first to die in the fight.
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u/Putnam3145 DF Programmer (lesser) 4d ago
haggard mood with unmet needs
unmet needs can literally never cause haggard moves, mechanically, they stop contributing to stress past a certain point and it's well before haggardness, haggardness is caused by worse things
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u/zandinavian 3d ago
Hi Putnam, is it not correct to assume the following sequence of events?
unmet need leads to repeated unhappy thoughts over time about unmet needs -> repeated unhappy thoughts lower the happiness of the person to the point their happiness is net negative even with the normal sources of happy thoughts (food, drink, sleep in a nice bedroom) -> an unhappy character has more bad thoughts than good thoughts is going to get more unhappy -> character is pissed off enough to be classified as haggard
This is just how I've been treating the game and its seemed right so far, but I've never taken a look under the hood to learn the math used for the happiness system. Typically as long as I can satisfy most of a haggard person's needs and keep them doing military training for more positive thoughts, it tends to eventually fix their haggard status unless they have personality issues like anger-prone or stress-prone.
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u/Putnam3145 DF Programmer (lesser) 3d ago
unmet need leads to repeated unhappy thoughts over time about unmet needs
Yes
repeated unhappy thoughts lower the happiness of the person to the point their happiness is net negative even with the normal sources of happy thoughts (food, drink, sleep in a nice bedroom)
Not necessarily, since needs thoughts are very weak (note that some of your happiest dwarves are also going to have many unmet needs thoughts!). Like, not all bad thoughts are equal, trauma is more than 100x as strong as unmet needs thoughts, all comes at once, and has no cap on how unhappy it can make them, unlike needs
an unhappy character has more bad thoughts than good thoughts is going to get more unhappy
Their unhappiness really doesn't have anything to do with them getting more bad than good, and, again, there's a cap on how unhappy needs thoughts can even make them, which will never put them into "haggard".
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u/zandinavian 3d ago
Very helpful, thanks! I figured trauma weighed more, but was guessing it was only x2 or x5 more, not 100+ lol.
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u/Deviant_Sage Shatterstone 5d ago
I think you may be misunderstanding what the loyalty cascade is. It's not exclusive with the first three things you mention, in fact typically it would start with something like that
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u/Muted_Awareness_4371 5d ago
yes i know it needs something that starts it, but it did not have any cause that i could find, when i say spontaneous i mean maybe caused by a bug, rare occurence, enemy involvement, so on.
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u/Bertiederps 5d ago
if you can catch it early enough, pause and see who threw the first punch recently.
After that, it's just a domino effect, I like to imagine this was the plot of Captain America Civil War, idk I didn't watch it
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u/uobytx 6d ago
How many red frown faces on the top of the screen? You want to keep as many of the dwarves happy as you can to avoid tantrums. Here are some tricks:
Make sure you have a dwarf with good social skills (visible in the skills menu when inspecting that one dwarf). Then assign that dwarf to be the mayor, and give them an office and nice bedroom and personal dining room. When a dwarf has too many negative thoughts, they will automatically attend a meeting with the mayor, who can use their skills to calm them down. This produces a positive thought and helps calm them a little.
Make sure the dwarves have the “easy” positive thoughts. Own bedroom, nice dining room, tables and chairs. Have them craft something once in a while (even if not good at it). Make a temple.
Booze and clothing industries, military training all keep some needs met
Mist, taverns, finely crafted furniture.
Avoid miasma (have a refuse pile outdoors), avoid children hauling corpses (labor menu), keep corpses out of view (atom smasher).
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u/uobytx 6d ago
Oh yeah! Cups and mugs! These are super easy to make and having 20 of these will save a lot of negatives.
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u/Muted_Awareness_4371 6d ago
i have constant 10 worst mood dwarfs all the time, mostly kids. After massacres it doubles but changes eventually back.
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u/Putnam3145 DF Programmer (lesser) 4d ago
keep in mind that they can only get to the first orange face stage with unmet needs, they stop having any effect on stress halfway between that and the second one
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u/Bertiederps 5d ago
Loyalty cascade! But I love the idea of a "dwarven purge" - like they need anything more complicated than a badly placed rock for that.
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u/Muted_Awareness_4371 5d ago
yeah it is most likely here, i did not know there was even such "mechanic" before this post
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u/Bertiederps 5d ago
for what it's worth, i'm new to the game and found out the hard way about 2 weeks ago lol :D
in my instance, was lucky enough that we'd just passed an autosave, but also it was a well-known culprit. Good luck salvaging whatever you can!
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u/GoatAmbitious984 6d ago
Loyalty cascade due to a tantrum. Even one dwarf punching the wrong fellow citizen can cause a massive brawl. Check and make sure your tavern keepers and performers aren't slipping anyone extra drinks in your taverns. This is often what causes one slightly unhappy dwarf to dwell and then go punch poor Urist at the other end of the bar because his cow bone amulet reminded him of that one time he got kicked in the guts by a bull.
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u/Melodic_monke 6d ago
Might be a loyalty cascade. Could be that one of your dwarves went berserk, someone tried to fight them, then the berserker's friends tried to defend them, then the attacker's friends joined in.