Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Saladman on August 26, 2011, 09:00:09 pm

Quote from: Berserkenstein on August 26, 2011, 04:22:51 pm

The most important aspect of any dwarven industry is stockpile management. 

It only takes significant time to learn how to manage stockpiles the first few times, like any learned skill.

After you get the hang of it, it becomes second nature and takes very little effort.

The amount of time it takes to wait for dwarves to do things with inefficient stockpile management by far outweighs the time to manage stockpiles properly. 

There is really no need to have 350+ dwarves when you can easily break game economy with just 30 properly managed dwarven workers.

That being said, there is very little difference in managing stockpiles for 30 dwarves or 300, the only difference is in scale. 

In fact, it is even more important to properly manage a large number of dwarves than a small number of them.

Okay, I'll bite.  What is good stockpile management, and how do you figure it out, and how do you know when you have it?  Cause I've been through the wiki, and I've tried to follow that, and I generally have some initial success, but things still get bogged down as the fort grows.  Do I need to just un-designate everything and take an afternoon, paused, re-designating?  Bins everywhere for everything?  Lay out new workshops and storage from scratch (and if so, to what design)?  It really is not clear to me what a very good stockpile setup is supposed to look like compared to the klugey thing I have going on.

The basic idea is that each workshop should have a stockpile of the resources it needs and for the products it produces.

For instance, if you have a crafts workshop to make bone bolts, you should have a refuse stock pile of bones around it and a stock pile of bolts next to an archery range or somewhere where you expect your hunters or military to use them. 

As another example, let's take a quern which you want to only make dye.  It needs two resources, millable plants and a bag, so you put a furniture stockpile which ONLY accepts empty bags next to it and a stockpile of ONLY millable plants next to it.  Now you don't want dimple cups, sliver barb, blade weed, or hide root to be in any other stock pile since you want all your millable dyes next to your quern.  You will want plants that are millable but are not dyes, such as whip vines, cave wheat, and longland grass, to be stored as far away as possible so your dwarves will be less likely to mill them.

The key is to keep all of your workshops uncluttered.  For workshops which produce end products which are not used in any other industry, such as furniture or crafts, just make sure you have a very large stockpile, if it is furniture, the stockpile should be placed near where you want to place those items, if crafts, you want the stockpile next to your trade depot so your dwarves won't have to haul that crap through your entire fort when the caravan arrives.

A prime example is a butcher's workshop, the produce a ton of resources which will easily clutter them.  Make sure hair/fur goes next to a farmer's workshop for spinning, bones, skulls, horn, and tooth/ivory goes next to a crafts workshop, make a separate refuse pile for cartilage, scales and tissue somewhere else since they cannot be used by any industry.  Have a large meat and fat stockpile near a kitchen or soap maker's shop, since you will produce ridiculous amounts of meat and fat.

If you want to build a construction out of blocks, then designate a stockpile of blocks next to the build site.  Just don't begin construction until the blocks get there.

It's simple to figure out, it is just common sense.  Unfortunately, it is easier to do when you are beginning and very hard to fix if you already made tons of stock piles without planning ahead.