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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 become adults. 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 thoughts 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" female 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. Talking to a child causes a good thought. Children are known to start parties, being idle much of the time.
Babies
When children are born, the game will pause and announce the arrival of the baby. The mother will cancel whatever task they are in the middle of (even sleep) to seek their infant. They will immediately resume whatever task they were doing before the child was born.
Much like chinchillas who are born fully furred, Dwarven babies are born fully bearded. One may assume that this is a bug, but instead may be intended. The booze running through the mother's systems helps to promote beard growth, and in fact, while fetal alcohol syndrome exists in humans and elves, alcohol serves only to strengthen the Dwarven baby. Plump helmets in particular are known for promoting healthy beard growth.
Babies are looked after by their mother, who will continue working with their baby. Babies usually share a tile with their mother. 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 or deconstruct designated walls.
If babies are separated from their mothers (say, for example, the mother gets put in jail, goes for a swim, gets injured and gets carried off to the hospital), the baby will crawl around aimlessly. It will be fed and watered[Verify] 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' can be 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:
- socializing like starting Template:L;
- removing Template:Ls (such as Template:Ls, Template:Ls, Template:Ls);
- eating, drinking, and sleeping as necessary;
- Template:L Template:L, if the 'All dwarves harvest' order is on. This will also increase their Template:L skill;
- when they want to, storing their items. Yelling at them to clean their room has no effect.
- filling designated Template:L;[Verify]
- children can be affected my Template:L. The legendary status gained from that cannot be used before adulthood, though.
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.