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[Jurph]

I would like to start a fortress with a Dream Team of workers -- the Kryptonian Baby-Capsule of my Dwarvish civ.  To this end, I'd love to start with

• A pair of miners with side talents - one loves ballista parts and happens to be a gifted siege engineer; the other loves chain mail and is an armorsmith on the side.
• A carpenter who loves pine (or oak, or maple) and beds.
• A brewer who loves barrels and pig tails
• A cook with a penchant for longland flour, or dwarven syrup
• A mason who happens to love statues and marble, and maybe also likes platinum or gold nuggets

...and so on.  The idea is artificially cobble together a custom team of dwarves who love their jobs, and exploit the high rate of high-quality goods generated by a dwarf working on items he prefers.  Any idea how I can do this other than rolling dozens of batches of new dwarves?

[sonerohi]

I don't recall ever seeing any difference in quality due to just material prefs regarding the jobs being worked on...

[woose1]

O.o

If toady EVER released the source code for DF, Im sure this would be possible, but other than that, you have a hard job ahead of you.

[BurnedToast]

I don't recall ever seeing any difference in quality due to just material prefs regarding the jobs being worked on...

This.

I know it's been tossed around alot that material preference = higher quality items using that material but I don't know if it's true or not. AFAIK the only evidence was that in the 2d version, adamantine items frequently came out with modifiers even if the creator was only dabbling and it was attributed to every dwarf liking adamantine.

It seems like it would be easy enough to test, though. Just find a dwarf with no stoneworking skill and a preference for a stone you have alot of and have him churn out a few dozen mugs (be sure he does not make enough to get novice skill) and check if any of them have a quality modifier.

Anyway, despite all that, to answer your question as far as I know there is no mod or utility to edit preferences. I don't if it would be possible to make one or not, either.

[userpay]

I think tweak might have something but that could be related to embark profile as opposed to dwarf profile.

[Warlord255]

Well, call me a sentimentalist, but I like assigning dwarves to jobs they're inclined to like. Otherwise I'd feel bad that they would hate their jobs.

[profit]

Well, call me a sentimentalist, but I like assigning dwarves to jobs they're inclined to like. Otherwise I'd feel bad that they would hate their jobs.

I dont.

[Aqizzar]

I used to do stuff like that, and still kind of pay attention to it at embark.  I really don't care anymore, except I sometimes assign butchery tasks to wimpy sounding dwarfs to see if they ever crack.

[Jurph]

After dozens of restarts (pick embark location, embark!, check skills for compatible matches) I managed to get a mason who likes basalt on a map that's full of the stuff.  He started at Proficient, and during his run of proficiency -- until he moved up to Adept -- I was able to clock his results as slightly higher than expected.  Unfortunately the small sample size makes me suspect that it could just be normal variation.

I'm kicking myself for not setting up a better controlled experiment, and now I'm looking for peasants with good material/item pairs in their preferences to try out the following:

• 100 un-favorable objects (I could just use the figures from the wiki as a control but I'd like to verify what a "normal" result looks like)
• 100 objects made of favorite material
• 100 objects of favorite type
• 100 objects of favorite type, made of favorite stone

I have noticed that placing (e.g.) a native copper cabinet in the room of a dwarf who loves native copper will generate a fairly strong happy thought - this seems obvious and is probably well-documented.  Perhaps there is no quality benefit (or an imperceptibly small benefit) but that a "satisfied at work" thought comes more often when working with preferred materials or making preferred items?  Don't know how to test this.

[BurnedToast]

You should have started him out with no skill at all. Dabblers can only produce no modifier items, while (according to the theory) if they like the material they get a boost and can produce modifiers even at dabbling.

Otherwise it's not possible to generate a statistically significant number of items before they gain a skill level so it's impossible to say.