Dwarf Fortress – How to Deal with Decreasing Dwarf Happiness

Tips to Levelling Dwarf Happiness

All credit goes to [UA]Jordy!

In General

Make sure they have mugs, decent clothes, aren’t stationed outside in the weather. Make sure you have alcohol. Make sure there’s no corpses laying around where they live/work.

In Details

High quality food and drinks can do a lot for happiness.

High quality furniture (in their rooms and/or the meeting hall) too. Engraving the walls and floors of your fort also helps.

In general, nice or even luxurious surroundings will do a lot because your dwarves will look around while walking or sitting, and get happy thoughts if they see nice stuff. And sad thoughts if their surroundings are rather bleak.

If you notice a sudden decline in happiness in a lot of your dwarves, the reason could be that their clothes are deteriorating (check their thoughts, or look at the quality and state of their equip).

The sudden death of friends is a common trigger for sadness spirals. Some people try to mitigate this by letting their dwarves socialize as little as possible (i.e. no meeting halls, no taverns), but it’s quite hard to prevent them chatting with each other and making friends.

You need graveyard and coffins for dead dwarfs. Also you can place some statues or other well crafted stuff for them to observe. It’s give them happy thoughts.