How do I get my Dwarves to be happy?

[Valsalan]

I going into the third year now, and my fortress has a large tavern (with tavern keeper and musician, but only one instrument), a decent temple (~3000 value I think), most of my Dwarves have 3x3 rooms with a bed, chair, table, chest, and a dresser. All hallways in the mountain (except for my storage room) have been smoothed. For the first year or so most of my Dwarves were slightly pleased, with one or two exceptions for Dwarves with anger issues. However, I'm noticing a general shift in my population towards displeased (it's not too far yet, but I'm not sure how best to tackle keeping them happy):

Looking over the thoughts of several Dwarves the main desires I've noticed (in order of prominence in the fortress) are:

-Wants to fight
-Wants to spend time with family
-Wants excitement
-Wants creativity
-Wants decent food
-Wants to acquire an item.
-Wants to make merry

I'm not sure what is wanted by the desire to fight (could that be solved by setting Dwarves to a military unit set to train, or do they want to go attack the Goblins for that one?

Now, I started playing as a civilation of Dwarves with only one stronghold on the world map with a population of ~1. Which was immedietly taken over by Goblins. So I have other faction members, and no real immigration. So the Spend time with family one I can't deal with since all their families are probably dead.

I've given them a fairly sizable tavern and other areas to socialize, so I'm not sure what more I need to do to get them excited (apart from just make more instruments for the tavern and assign more musicians).

For creativity, I'm planning to build a library, but I don't know the game well enough to know if that will solve their desires or not.

For food, I've been giving them fine meals only, but I think they might be getting sick of fish, plump helmets, cave nuts, and ample foraged surface plants. So do I just need more variety, or is it a matter of them wanting only lavish meals?

For 'wants to acquire an item' I'm stumped. Do they want me to just mass produce jewelry and clothes, do they want dyed clothes, or do they just want better tools? Also, I've not been producing clothes because I don't have access to pig tails, and only have nettles for cloth.

[jeetrix]

You basicly create things they get positive thoughts from, outweighing the things they get negative thoughts from.
A strong positive element is Mist from a waterfall which will drastically improve the overall condition of happiness in your fort.
Acquiring items is about every dwarf wanting to posses things like food, clothing etc. They will drag it to their room then its 'acquired'.
You also want to have them eating great food and drinks and upping all decorations in places where they walk a lot. F.e. some nice statues in a carved out hallway then designate traffic so everyone goes through there, having some mist there, does wonders. A library with scholars will make them discuss things and sometimes discover things , write it down and scribes will make copies of it, providing them stuff to read, which also generates good thoughts. But its just one of the many ways to diversify their shedule.

[Savok]

Check their preferences. Make sure they have access to things they like. Also

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Needs

[LastChime]

Enlist everyone give everyone except actual squads orders to train like 4+ or something for 1 month of the year, surround the tavern with their barracks.

This slows stuff down a bit tho in general cause they'll drill whenever they want, as a bonus it makes them REALLY good at strangling ravens.

[McFuzz]

You cannot, they insist on being sad.

Lol, fulfilling their needs. The easiest way is to have a temple and a tavern and a barkeep, as that fills quite a few needs.
It's not as easy as "Just make the fort nice". It used to be.
I set stone crafting to all, because it's a good way to make sure everyone fills that 'wants to create' need, and like, who cares about rocks lol.

You also kind of need to avoid traumatic things happening? lol.
Turn off refuse hauling and burial for children. You can also make a custom labour just for refuse and only sign it to a couple dwarves, to stop everyone from seeing corpses all the time.
Use a combination of focused labours and general labours to ensure everything gets done, but everyone gets lots of downtime.

Unless you're really into micro, you can ignore a couple, like the martial training.

[Haethei]

A few of these should be solved by having a tavern and making sure your dwarves have time to be idle and hang out there together. Making merry, being with family/friends, socializing, spending time with people etc should all be fixed by allowing them to be social there

The meals need to be high quality and/or contain one of their preferred ingredients. Value is way easier than the ingredients. Make lavish meals (there's no reason to make fine meals in this game tbh) and just get the highest value ingredients you can find. Cheese is valuable and easy to get, honey is great if you use my mod to make the bee industry more worthwhile

"Doing something creative" is "create or perform any artistic work", which might include things like poetry/singing at a tavern or possibly engraving, making statues etc, hard to say but I think the tavern is a safe choice anyway

Fighting can be solved with literally any type of fighting, put them in a squad and tell them to beat up a goat or something?

"Acquire an item" happens automatically when a dwarf hauls a trade good to a stockpile, make a bunch of trade goods and whoever is idle will be hauling them

Tl;dr: let your dwarves be idle in a tavern sometimes, also check this page

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Need

[NimrodX]

Make engraving an "everybody does this" thing, exclude some high skilled craftsdwarves dwarves from the "everybody does this" work using the "specialized" flag, then have rest engrave stuff.
I think that will solve the creativity problem.

There's so much wall and floor to be engraved that they can easily just be allowed to go nuts with the engraving grafitti and it can be at a lower priority.

Not sure why you don't have pig tails because you can bring seeds for those with you and grow them underground. But you shouldn't really need new clothes for 2 years or so.

Bring chickens or peafowl to get tons of eggs for food. Cook lavish meals once you have a small stock of easy ones and lots of food. If you let the poultry breed out of control you can slaughter tons of them (starting with 95% of the roosters) for lots of leather.

Buy all leather and cloth plus random plants, seeds, and meat from caravans.

Mass produce rock mugs and rock crafts. Just one dwarf working full time on trinkets can buy up all leather, cloth, meat, and seeds from caravans and give the others plenty of trinkets to possess.

Libraries would help but are not the easiest first thing to get going.
Mist generators aren't super hard but are helpful.

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Mist#Generating_Mist

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Stress

[AurelianDio]

How's your clothing situation? My first almost successful fort failed because I didn't realize clothing wore out and had to keep producing new pieces to replace old ones and dwarves with old rotten socks get very angry... I had 170 pop and went down to 50, twice, eventually no more migrants came and the fort stagnated and the pop dwindled slowly from 5 to 20 and there I called it and retired the fort.

[Xcorps]

Originally posted by AurelianDio:

How's your clothing situation? My first almost successful fort failed because I didn't realize clothing wore out and had to keep producing new pieces to replace old ones and dwarves with old rotten socks get very angry... I had 170 pop and went down to 50, twice, eventually no more migrants came and the fort stagnated and the pop dwindled slowly from 5 to 20 and there I called it and retired the fort.

You don't have to replace every item of clothing. As long as they have trousers shirts and shoes you are good. Cloaks and hoods are nice, but not mandatory. Their bad thoughts from wearing tattered socks will go away when the socks rot off their body. This should only happen 1 time to each migrant wave/new arrival, as long as you aren't making socks and mittens and loincloths and the other nonsense.

[jeetrix]

my dwarfs are pretty happy after nearly 40 years
some of them will tend to slide down the sulking mentality
they need some special care and follow up to find a suitable role

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2912715592

[db48x]

Unmet needs don’t directly affect a dwarf’s mood, although it is logical to expect that they would. Concentrate instead on the thoughts that they have. Blue and green thoughts relieve stress, while yellow, orange, and red thoughts cause stress. Part of the exploratory game play is to discover how to create situations where stress–relieving thoughts predominate. This may mean going out of your way to build your fortress a certain way, either to cause stress–relieving thoughts or to avoid stressful ones.

The primary effect of unmet needs is lower productivity when working, although there may be a few positive and negative thoughts associated with them as well.

[BauerHaus]

Originally posted by jeetrix:

my dwarfs are pretty happy after nearly 40 years
some of them will tend to slide down the sulking mentality
they need some special care and follow up to find a suitable role

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2912715592

From what I understand, and I could be wrong, but dwarves socially interact only non-diagonally, also each table can only serve one chair, so instead of [chair - table - chair - space - chair - table - chair] if you change it to be one wider you can do (table - chair - chair - table - table - chair - chair - table) to maximize their social interaction. Since starting that I get way more marriages and a less lonely moods. I also read that you should leave a 5x5 space for dancing, which I have seen them use.

[Savok]

I can confirm they only like one chair per table. The rest of that is interesting.

[Rainbow Jeremy]

The chair back to back between 2 tables strat is legit and leads to way more socializing.