Wednesday 27 November 2013

Going down to tantrum spiral, Part 2

Well, this is getting really frustrating.

The dwarves are destroying all kinds of random things in the fortress. The one that really irks me is, a toddler smashed the huge cage full of dozens of animals in the dining room (yeah right), grinding my framerate down with all the pathing and fighting the animals are doing. If I rebuild another cage to put the animals away, whoever constructs it will probably tantrum in the next few seconds and destroy it again.

Other tantrum-throwers destroyed the workshops, and I can't get them rebuilt because the tantrum-throwers are camping the sites and attacking anyone who comes near. I could rebuild the workshops somewhere else, but the guys throwing tantrums will gravitate to the new site, as they're marauding around looking for things to destroy.

I have lost 30 more dwarves since I last wrote, about half to the syndrome and the other half to bloody murder, and I am at a loss for what to do now. Nobody's responding to orders. What happens next? It's starting to irritate me. I've lost nearly every legendary crafter and Meng Berdakas, my legendary chef, who I wrote about before. Meng was kind of eccentric but he didn't deserve getting all his limbs hacked off one by one before he died, by a crazy dwarf with a bronze short sword. I'm also irritated because some bugs are showing up and I can't seem to do anything about them. For example:

Our armless ex-mayor got re-elected when the normal mayor died trying to save an injured patient. The armless mayor then tantrummed and has been magically grasping people with his arms and killing them, even though his arms don't exist and he can't actually grasp anything to do normal fortress work. How can he grab people and choke them with his left and right arms when he can't even take his clothes off or clean himself? How exactly did he tear the wings and head off of our tame buzzard with his "left hand" and "right hand"? I always knew he was a bloody liar about his missing arms. That lazy bastard!

I drafted the few still-responsive dwarves and sent them to take down the armless berserk mayor, and now they're tantrumming too, naturally, since the mayor was great friends with everyone in the fortress. If any migrants show up, I'm tempted to build them a completely separate fort and start over, but that's really irritating because I'm already suffering the FPS problems of an older fort. (Probably mostly due to the broken animal cage, but...)

We also ran nearly out of food and booze. People have been destroying it and the brewer and farmers can't work, as people are tracking poison blood or bloody murder all over the farmable ground (take your pick). People who try to farm get the syndrome and die in the field, and leave another pool of poison blood behind for the next would-be farmer (if the farm isn't being camped by some berserk expert soldier in plate mail with a shiny steel axe at that moment). I could rebuild the farm somewhere else on the site, but more blood will just get tracked in and it'll happen again.

I can see I've made some potential mistakes (though I'm not sure), like perhaps letting dwarves train in martial skills and carry weapons at all. When they started tantrumming out of control, I immediately made everyone who was still responding take off their weapons. But with everyone having some martial skills, their fists are pretty deadly too. I also don't know how I was meant to deal with that giant slate winged humanoid that died and left the blood on the ground that caused this disaster. The dwarves can't clean up the blood or help anyone who has the blood on them, and the blood pools just spread all over and multiply. Dwarves refuse to clean the stairways, and it's all over their clothes, so there's no stopping the blood now. It feels more like a bug than a believable scenario.

Should I see it through to the bitter end...?

Definition:

Berserk: A form of insanity (incurable). The sufferer violently attacks everything to the death.

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