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v0.31:Children
| This article is about an older version of DF. |
Most creatures, including Template:L, start out as infants, then after a certain number of years become Children, and then finally attain adulthood. For Template:L, childhood starts after reaching 1 year of age, and continues until they are 12 years old.
In fortress mode, some migrant dwarves are married and may bring children. Children who immigrate to your Template:L might be any age from 2 to 12. You can determine the age of any child by viewing their thought screen, which will give you the child’s exact age as well as their date of birth. You can see this information regardless if the child was born in your fortress or came to it as a migrant with its parents.
"Resident" dwarves may also give birth to children. This can be stopped or reduced by editing the BABY_CHILD_CAP setting in the init file. Dwarves even can have miscarriages, which causes an unhappy thought for the mother but not for the father.
Babies
When children are born, they are looked after by their mother, who will continue working, leaving the baby in the workshop if they go to get materials. It is thought that babies sharing a tile with their parents always lie down, not the parent. Babies do not have to be born in beds, but are born wherever the mother happens to be; the birth will interrupt the mother's current action. If the mother is sleeping, however, the birth may not wake her, and the baby will go about business as if it were a child. Often this means crawling to the dining hall or attempting to harvest plants/deconstruct walls. Still the game may report the message "...cancels sleep: seeking infant."
If babies are separated from their mothers at some stage (say, for example, the mother gets injured and rushes off to the hospital zone for treatment), the baby will crawl around somewhat aimlessly either where they were left, or perhaps into the main dining hall, or just generally clutter up the corridors as it meanders through them. It shall be fed and watered as requested (rather like a semi-mobile injured dwarf), and as long as it's not within reach of a hostile creature, then no harm will be done to it. 'Job cancellation spam' is sometimes generated as the baby is seen by the game to be 'insane' (example: "Urist McBabyname, Dwarven baby, cancels Clean Self: Too Insane"), but once it reaches childhood (at 12 months), that will stop, and they shall go about their business like any other dwarven child.
Labor
In Template:L, children cannot be assigned any labor, but they will perform a few simple tasks on their own:
- socialising;
- removing Template:Ls (such as Template:Ls, Template:Ls, Template:Ls);
- pulling Template:Ls;[Verify]
- Template:L items to the Template:L;[Verify]
- eating, drinking, and sleeping as necessary;
- Template:L Template:L, if the 'All dwarves harvest' order is on;
- Arranging Template:L;
- filling designated Template:L;[Verify]
Children may not be assigned to the Template:L. However, they can be assigned bedrooms.
Dwarven parenthood
As an oversight in programming, children's parents can become so preoccupied with finding their children that they can die of thirst.