Too many migrants too quickly

[Astraneia]

In simple terms: It's completely and utterly bonkers, that my tiny 15 dorf colony, suddenly in ONE season with ONE migration gets to 39 dorfs.

It more than doubled. I know it's linked with wealth, but yeah, be lucky to find some rare gems, be "stupid" to cut them and then attach them to your wares and suddenly you are a rich bearded person.

For the sake or Armok, also link immigration to fort size or at least give me the ability to chose, without needing to expel dorfs. There's 20 dorfs coming? Let them each go to my expiditionleader/mayor (whathavenot) and kindly ask them if they may join. Or give me an option that they need to do so.

Each visitor of my taverns or similar needs to. What makes the random dorf coming along more trustworthy than any other traveler?

And also ... give an option to have migrants not bring pets ...

I love getting free useful animals, but relationship burdens I can't even butcher and which might send it's owner into a rage? At the very least let me tell that dorf: Umm, your weird gerbil can't stay with you if you want to live here ... and have them decide, without mood penalty, if they wanna stay and leave their pet behind or rather not stay at all.

Goes hand in hand with approving each dorf. If that is a master weapon smith, they can stay with 2 gerbils if they so desire ... I'll make a smoothed and engraved room for their pets.

Loving the game anyway. Already made like 10 fortresses (and abandoned 5 of those).
Current one is my first vulcano one and boy is it relaxing not to rely on coal.
Thanks for listening in.

[Ashes-One]

make a dorm and only bedroom the important ones you like (at least a temporary solution)

[ian.whitchurch]

Immigration is driven by how rich your fort is getting how fast. Volcano forts can get very rich very fast.

If you really hate it, play with the population sizes in Options.

[[DFC] Chuck]

Last I checked (which was a while ago), the first migration wave with a big chunk of people was hardcoded in the game. The first chunk of the game for me is usually pretty frantically trying to get food production and producing enough beds and rooms for them. I usually end up making my entrance stockpile area half dormitory and use that as a temporary dormatory until I have dozens of extra unoccupied rooms.

You can also try using some of your excess labour to go be kitchen staff or pick fruit from trees if you want them to help compensate for the load on your food industry. It's definitely best to keep training 1 or 2 farmers, since big farming skill produces a LOT more food that little farming skill.

[Slick McFlick]

there's an option in the game menu, just choose how big a pop you want man.

[[GRVTS]Fat Bastard]

Calm down friend. They'll get married and share beds, and a lot of dwarves take two lovers.

[Grundy]

Don't smooth till later.

[Steve]

is there an option to pause on migrants arriving? That's 'my' biggest gripe.

But also, you might be getting too many migrants because you're fortress wealth is super high. Stop making lavish meals or golden crafts lol

[Steve]

Actually not a lot of people realise the migrants you get are relative to how much wealth your fortress is valued at. When a trader comes i think thats when it caches your current estimated value. It then uses that to determine how many migrants are attracted to your colony. I think there is a record somewhere for how many migrants you can get in a single wave, i believe someone got to over 100+ dorfs off their first proper wave

[internetgrout]

More dwarves are just an excuse to craft more tombstones so I don't know why you are complaining

[spear and magic helmet?]

Originally posted by Steve:

is there an option to pause on migrants arriving? \

Hoping to find this as well, I've not noticed several waves for Urist knows how long because it only put a very easy to miss notification thing in the corner. Likewise for strange moods. I'm not seeing any auto-pause settings anywhere.

[ByTheNumbers]

Originally posted by spear and magic helmet?:

Originally posted by Steve:

is there an option to pause on migrants arriving? \

Hoping to find this as well, I've not noticed several waves for Urist knows how long because it only put a very easy to miss notification thing in the corner. Likewise for strange moods. I'm not seeing any auto-pause settings anywhere.

I've read you have to mod a file that handles announcement messages. There isn't an easy setting in the steam version for some reason. There might be something in the workshop about it.

[Lamp]

In about 3 years my fort went from around 50 to almost 200. Every time the dwarven merchants showed up they promoted my fort title until we were a capital and got our first royalty- then my world and all my saves got bricked by the forgotten beast "Unit has misaligned body modifiers."

The world was bricked long before I knew it and I continued to binge hard for like 30 hours- all those saves ruined, all that time 100% gone. So could be worse :D

The lesson here is that you should use save and quit frequently, close the game and relaunch/reload often so you know early if you need backtrack/if your saves have been corrupted.

[spear and magic helmet?]

Originally posted by ByTheNumbers:

I've read you have to mod a file that handles announcement messages. There isn't an easy setting in the steam version for some reason. There might be something in the workshop about it.

Found it, see here for more info--https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Announcements.txt. There's a number of entries for migrants, it's unclear if you need to set these all individually or if MIGRANT_ARRIVAL is like a parent setting that will handle all the variations on migrant waves. I'll play around with it and report back.

[draeath]

In game settings, change your "Population cap" and "Strict population cap" to be lower, eg at or just above your current population.

Note that the result of this is delayed by a migration wave.

This is exposed in the in-game settings, but I'm unsure how that applies as it used to be an init-file change that required a game restart.

[spear and magic helmet?]

Originally posted by spear and magic helmet?:

Found it, see here for more info--https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Announcements.txt. There's a number of entries for migrants, it's unclear if you need to set these all individually or if MIGRANT_ARRIVAL is like a parent setting that will handle all the variations on migrant waves. I'll play around with it and report back.

Migrant notification trip report--changing the settings for MIGRANT_ARRIVAL_NAMED and MIGRANT_ARRIVAL had no visible effect. My game trucked right through a wave with only the sidebar icon.

There are some settings further down that do seem to help however, starting with D_MIGRANTS_ARRIVAL. Adding :P to this line will pause the game on an incoming wave, but will still only show the little icon on the side so it's still quite easy to miss. :BOX and :R both work as well, and will put the message in a box in the middle of the screen and recenter your screen respectively. So for instance,
[D_MIGRANTS_ARRIVAL:A_D:D_D:P:BOX:R] will pause the game, bring up a dialog box, and recenter your view on a new wave. There's a few more underneath for special cases (only one migrant, migrants came even though it was dangerous), presumably because the notification text is different, so you would probably need to change all of those lines to guarantee you notice new arrivals.