Bay 12 Games Forum

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Originally posted by Dryn:
<STRONG>There is also an exploit I found. Build your bedroom, resize it to one square, turn on 'rent', resize it to a larger room.

Basically when you resize it the second time the rent doesn't change, so they are paying bottom dollar for an expensive room.</STRONG>

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This works well for a while, but the game will eventually recalculate rent at the proper rate.  You may have to occasionally repeat this process for every room you've used it on.

[ September 30, 2007: Message edited by: Marble Dice ]

It was news to me, so I added it to the wiki.  Thanks for tip!  I hate filling the damn things just so I can empty them to build a bridge, then fill them back up once the bridge has been designed and constructed.

It'll all be moot once the next version's out, I suppose, but I'll sure make use of it in the mean time.

I recently ran into a problem where I couldn't get anyone to do anything at a leather works.  A noble had a mandate on leather backpacks.  I had a craftsdwarf with Leatherworking enabled, and a Leatherworks with 3 leather backpacks queued, and no other items.  The dwarf had "No Job" and the workshop did not show an "S" or an "A" on any of the backpacks.   I reset the workshop profile to permit every dwarf (it was not restricted to begin with, but I restricted it, and then cleared it).  I even went so far as to enable Tanning and Craftsworking on the craftsdwarf, but he still just sat around without making any backpacks.  I had plenty of leather, and received no error messages about job items or pathing.  I also tried enabling Leatherworking (and even Tanning and Craftsworking) on other dwarves that had "No Job" but they wouldn't do anything either.

The only thing I could think of that might have been preventing the work, was my Craftsdwarf Guild noble had recently been injured during a ratman attack.  He was resting in his bedroom; a couple craftsdwarves (including the original leatherworker with no job) tended to mill about his room.  Do the guild nobles actually hold meetings with the laborers?  If so, he may have been interrupted by the attack and subsequent injury.

The mandate expired so I stopped trying for a while, but ultimately I destroyed the leatherworks and rebuilt it, and the noble recovered.  I didn't have any trouble thereafter, but I don't know which event fixed it.

I realize interface isn't generally worth the time investment once you get things working and a game's final feature set and play-style aren't set in stone.  This's been alluded to before in threads like this and this, and I apologize if there's any formal plans to do something about this problem (There's a LOT of information to go through in searching the forums, the wiki, and the dev notes!), but I tell you what I'd love to death would be...

<<<If>>>

A labor management screen either off of the nits list or in a new entry-point entirely, similar to [m]ilitary-[w]eapons, that would list all the 46 labors, highlight the labors each dwarf is set to do, and let you toggle them.  Obviously 46 labors aren't going to fit onto one screen, but they could be separated into multiple menus such as nits-[p]roduction, nits-cr[a]fting, nits-[h]auling, etc, or I guess a two-list menu ala the custom stockpile settings menu or the prepare carefully menu might work too.

<<<If>>>

Micro-managing your team of haulers and farmers is possible and very effective for off-seasons and current fortress workload (massive furniture expansion, large waste generation, heavy food production) but gets very tedious with larger populations, having to use -select dwarf-[c]-[p]-[l]-edit labors-Space-repeat.  I've taken to giving my haulers special profession names that describe which haul settings they've currently got enabled so I can get a better idea of who's moving what, and where my workforce exceeds my hauling demands.  Does anyone who's been around longer than I have anything to say about solutions to this problem?  Obviously Burrows would help, but it seems that still could leave something to be desired in the mass designation of labor settings.