Bay 12 Games Forum

That's an excellent idea, IMO.

The problem there is what to do while the new set of clothes is being produced.  I'm not sure there's a way for the job to connect back to the tattered dwarf, which means a dwarf with worn clothes would continue to spam the tailor for additional requests until the new suit is done because he wouldn't be able to tell he's already submitted a request nor the tailor know to discard the additional incoming request are redundant.  I could (hopefully!) be wrong about that disconnect, but I think that's the issue there.

Obviously, a dwarf could try to claim a clothing item to replace a worn one, leaving the old one behind as non-owned.  An option to auto-designate worn clothing to be dumped, perhaps with multiple levels of sensitivity to determine how worn the clothing needs to be first, would be nice.

If the dwarf can't find appropriate clothing to claim, a job to build a replacement item could be automatically queued up at a tailor.  I don't think the requesting dwarf could claim the upcoming item (as it doesn't exist yet) so there's a problem there.  Either he'll spam the tailors with requests or has to know he has already sent in an order.  I don't think jobs are marked in any way to support that right now.  I suppose the tailor shop could refuse auto-orders for goods it is already making, but that has problems as well, in that resupplying multiple dwarfs would become a slower process.

I could see a lot of potential in having the ability to flag a job's output as being for a specific owner.  It could allow making equipment (steel armor, for example) for specific dwarves, as well as filling in the missing link in the clothing chain above.  Does anybody know if such a thing is planned?  I couldn't spot it in the dev notes.

I can't say I object to the save-break at all. After all, the game is still in alpha and if this kind of thing doesn't happen occasionally, the game won't be able to progress.

At this point in development I think it would be more beneficial if more people had the game auto-save very often. That way it would be much less work to roll back to an early save to send to Toady when you encounter bugs. If someone really wants to save-scum, they'll do it anyway, with or without auto-save.

I agree.  I don't mind messing up because I didn't understand something or because I did something stupid but, without using autosaving at all,  I will backup saves if about to deal with something that might be buggy, and restore from them if the attempt fails because of something odd.  I think a more frequent autosave is a good thing at this point and won't lead to significantly more save-abuse than already occurs.

A-ha!  This also explains what happened with my current fortress and its sky-touching tower.  I started working on its all-block construction and suddenly the moods starting coming and then the sieges.  I thought the timing was just an irritating coincidence but it makes sense that the construction actually triggered the constant interruptions.  Gah!!! 

I believe anything flagged for a task is unavailable outside of that task, so anything flagged for hauling is unavailable for use until the item is, in fact, hauled.  That's why the tricks centering around canceling the hauling job re-enable the item for other uses.

I think it would be a really nice addition if, when searching for usable items, items flagged for hauling where melded back into the stack of candidates before the worker searches out the closest item.  That way, haul-able items will still get used in an efficient way, instead of not being used at all.  If it is as simple as that (although it probably isn't), maybe we can look forward to such a feature before too terribly long.

It sounds to me like they're all calculating their odds as 1 (their squad size) vs 5 (enemy size).  That's not great odds, even if you have the skill advantage on your side.