when i started playing DF i was warned about tantrum spirals and told they were just kind of an inevitable consequence of playing the game, but i hate seeing my dwarves sad so i started paying really close attention to their thoughts and memories
i was very bad at the game when i got started because i decided to learn how to play while i was fighting off multiple viral and bacterial infections at the same time and i drowned or immolated a lot of dwarves by mistake
my most notorious fort was one where:
dwarves were very horny and fucking a lot, and also having a lot of children
most of my migrant waves were children and/or refugees from previous forts i'd made and abandoned in the same world seed. the refugees retained their life memories and histories. many of them were miserable.
at a certain level of trauma, dwarves become numb - they don't feel anything when seeing horrifying events that they are used too, and they seem to take less joy from enriching activities. this is generally regarded in my experience as an unsalvageable state.
enter my beloved legacy dwarf, gremlin.
Gremlin was a master mason and stone carver who had survived almost every single learning fort - sometimes because i as the hand of god would reach down and exile her once i realized everything was going to fuck because i wanted her to live through it. she became an expert mason via carving coffins every hour of every working day in response to multiple dwarven mass death events, and my own player paranoia became an emergent thread in her life because the first thing i would do after arranging basic necessities was order enough coffins for the entire population+20 just so i'd be covered.
i did this because of the notorious fort incident, which was one of the first.
dwarves sometimes experience hyperfixations through Strange Moods - they have a craft they want to make, more than anything. It has maximum priority. they need specific materials to make what they want, completing it will immediately make them a master of the skill selected, and if they are UNable to finish their craft they experience a variety of undesirable side effects influenced by their personality. a dwarf who is depressive might lose all interest in food and drink and eventually dehydrate to death, for instance.
in the fort where everything went the most wrong it ever has for me, the dwarf who failed to get what she needed was a new mother with anger issues. she responded by snapping and throwing her baby at a wall in public. this killed the baby. nobody took that well, and everyone tackled her. she killed multiple people largely through biting and gouging.
i did not have my coffin routine at this point, so gremlin was ordered to begin when the deaths started. it takes a while to carve a coffin when you're just starting out with that skill.
there were so so many bodies when that riot was finished that i didn't have a morgue space big enough for them. i also forgot to turn off hauling labour for children. so the children of the fort were helping to move the rotting corpses. and growing numb to violence and death. and developing anger issues and depression from the bad material conditions and illness they experienced as a consequence of inhaling miasma.
one day one of them snapped and it led to The Child Coup. i had at this point in my learning started to design forts to have choke points to repel invaders after an incident in which a giant blob of sapient magma melted one of my guys and set fire to the huge open fungus carpet through the fort. the children occupied those choke points and proceeded to wrestle, swarm, and bite every adult they could get their hands on to death.
i liveblogged this entire thing in a discord server i was in with a mix of horror and awe which was helpful because it let me take notes for next time.
because from there it became my life's mission when playing the game to prevent anything like that ever happening again and it turns out that many traumatized dwarves are entirely salvageable if you plan for it, and provide quality of life spaces and take planning for mental health into account?
the most efficient way to store dwarves is in single tile bedrooms, yeah. but are they happy? eh. they're content. that's enough for some people, not for me.
i make them family unit apartments that sprawl up and down through multiple layers. i try to make sure every dwarf has art of their favourite animal in their living environment. i make creches for the children where they'll be socialized with positive memories and experiences, and a bolthole for them to go too in times of conflict that keeps them safe and far away from the conflict and its aftermath. i rotate my military dwarves out to prevent them getting numb to the horrors.
i cap my population to increase in increments of no more than 10 at a time and tweak the max child cap as i play to reflect what would be provision of birth control if that was a mechanic in the game
and at that point the only social doom spirals i experience are either novel situations or the result of a skill issue in execution on my part
when i retired that save i'd successfully rehabilitated gremlin into feeling things again after experiencing 5+ failed forts which remains a high i will chase in gaming forever
dwarf fortress is a wonderful and intricate game of cause and effect
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