Bay 12 Games Forum

This is frustrating... I have plump helmets and pig tails withering in the fields next to an empty plant stockpile. I have marked my farmer as specialized labor but he just sits in the gathering place with No Job. I've also tried creating a custom work detail that's only Food Haulers and assigning a specialized dwarf to that labor detail, but they still won't harvest.

The harvest plant stockpile has everything excluded except for the subterranean crops: quarry bushes, pig tails, dimple cups, plump helmets, cave wheat, and sweet pods. But no matter what I grow, nobody will take the crops off the farm plot. They'll plant new seeds under the crops as they wither. The harvest stockpile is empty except for an empty barrel, and I have plenty of other empty barrels. I also tried reducing the harvest stockpile's allowed barrels to zero, thinking maybe it had something to do with conflicting container tasks, but it didn't make a difference. Also, I noticed that the max barrels had been reset to the size of the stockpile the next time I looked, so maybe that's bugged at the moment?

I've also tried forcing the plants to be used in tasks like brewing and processing, but I gathered a bunch of plants and haven't gone to the length of forbidding every plant except the crops yet.

I've also tried toggling the farming labor between "Only selected do this" and "Everyone does this".

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong? This is kind of a showstopper for any fortress!

I'm writing a game diary with lots of screenshots, but the wide text on Thoughts and Preferences and other screens is a huge hassle. Total non-starter on mobile, very labor-intensive to stitch together sentences split into multiple lines, and so on.

Can anyone recommend a good starting point for scripting/modding where I could dive in and figure out how to extract this text? I'm most familiar with Ruby, Python and JavaScript; C's all right too. I've been coding for twenty years, but I've actually never looked into this sort of work (modding, reverse engineering, etc), so I don't really know where to start.

It would be great if someone had, like, a hacky Python script that just pulls some text out of memory, so I can hit the ground running and figure it out from there.

I'm trying to improve my stone management without just dumping everything, especially since stockpiles can use wheelbarrows to increase hauling speed.

My embark site is primarily microcline and gabbro with a mixture of other stone types, but for consistency purposes, I created three stockpiles, each with three wheelbarrows: one for microcline, one for gabbro, one for everything else.

I already had a p-->s stone stockpile out front of my fort, which I deleted with p-->x after designating the three internal stockpiles.

I now have 20 idling dwarves, and no one is hauling anything ANYWHERE!

Here's a screenshot of my internal stockpiles:



Please note that the microcline and gabbro you see in the screenshot were not hauled there by dorfs, they were already there when I dug out the chamber!

And here's the old de-designated external stockpile:



What's going on? Is it because of the boulders already on top of the new stockpiles? Should I dump them and re-claim?

I always seem to run into ridiculous stockpile issues. For example, I desperately wanted to engrave the bucket for my well with gems, but I could not for the life of me convince these dorfs to put the damn thing in the stockpile that fed to my special jeweler's workshop. I had it set to accept ONLY silver buckets of any quality level, and I even tried dumping it and re-claiming it, but by God, they just left it sitting there in the garbage dump tile until I gave up and used it for the well without engraving it. Ugh!

• If I want my squads to store their equipment in their barracks, what should I do? Right now I designated a bed into a barracks. Inside that barracks are a chest, an armor stand, and a weapon rack, but they're not using them.
• What is the difference between the "Individual Equipment" and "Squad Equipment" orders in the barracks menu?
• If I see a green checkmark next to a piece of equipment in the Military -> Equipment screen, but the dwarf is not actually wearing it, and the "Replace clothing" option is chosen, how do I get the dwarf to actually equip it?
• Is there ever a reason to go with "Over clothing" instead of "Replace clothing"?
• Does anyone actually know what the deal is with schedule rotation and morale? Sometimes it seems like you're supposed to just schedule "Train, 10 minimum" all of the time so they're always on-duty because it's the act of swapping that pisses them off. But other sources seem to say that the rotation is important.

I created a squad with the "archer" uniform. There are a bunch of spare crossbows just lying around in my weapon stockpile, but when I look at the squad screen, the "Positions" tab says that it has 3/3 Marksdwarfs, 2/7 Wrestlers, and on the Equip screen, only three of them have green checkmarks next to "indiv choice, ranged".

How do I get the two slackers to pick up crossbows and start training?

• Plump helmets are set to Brew enabled (it's blue), Cook disabled (it's red)
• There are 53 plump helmets on my stock screen
• My main food stockpile accepts plants from anywhere, and gives to my still stockpile
• The plant-only stockpile next to my still accepts only from links, and gives to my still
• The plump helmets are not currently being hauled. They're sitting in a plant barrel in my main food stockpile

What do? The brook is frozen and my dwarves are thirsty.

What do you guys specify for the stockpile near your butcher?  I try doing "Remains -> Corpses", but that's definitely too broad... skeletons and stuff end up in there.  Also, not all creatures are butcherable anyway. What do you do?

I constantly find myself running out of food.  I have two farm plots growing plump helmets in every season (and they're both almost always fully seeded), at least 5 dwarves hunting at any given time, but I never have any stores of meat.  Also, it drives me crazy that dwarves will auto-butcher, auto-tan, etc., but I have to manually tell them to render fat and clean fish all the time.  Is there really no way to avoid the manual repetition in brewing drinks, cleaning fish, rendering fat, preparing meals, etc.?  Also, why exactly do I keep running out?  Doesn't matter if my fort has 20 or 120, I never seem to have enough food.  (Or booze.)