v50 Steam/Premium information for editors
  • v50 information can now be added to pages in the main namespace. v0.47 information can still be found in the DF2014 namespace. See here for more details on the new versioning policy.
  • Use this page to report any issues related to the migration.
This notice may be cached—the current version can be found here.

v0.31:Children

From Dwarf Fortress Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
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.

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 or hospitalized, however, the baby will be free to roam as it pleases. A free baby acts in a similar manner to a Template:L adult, wandering freely over the map without any sense of self-preservation.

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.


D4Dwarf.png This article or section has been rated D for Dwarf. It may include witty humour, not-so-witty humour, bad humour, in-jokes, pop culture references, and references to the Bay12 forums. Don't believe everything you read, and if you miss some of the references, don't worry. It was inevitable.

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.

Labor

In Template:L, children cannot be assigned any labor, but they will perform a few simple tasks on their own:

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.