Bay 12 Games Forum

I wasn't say I deal with socks all the time (I only get relatively occasional "drop all clothes when coming off duty" problems, anyway), I was just dealing with the how-to-find-the-SOCK-concerned issue (replace SOCK with whatever it might be).

Anyway, you are right, in that it's deviating from the OP, but at the time it seemed like a relevant deviation.

(When it comes to lost socks, I generally find the Z-stocks helps out, but I appreciate that there might be exceptions in a fortress with a ton of the things in normal use.)

I would have preferred "more Z-to-zoom" option on the notifications.  e.g. for cancelled "give water" jobs, who is it they were trying to help out?  Sometimes it's someone who has just entered a slightly thirsty state, as far as I can tell, but sometimes it is indicative of a bad bit of architecture/excavation having isolated one area of the fortress from the rest.  Anyway, enough of specific examples.

And, either way, the forthcoming major release probably does not need too many more distractions.

Or we could use an "ignore" designation. It would work the same as the "forbid" designation, but this one would be applied automatically to items that generate job cancellation spam (and can be filtered for in the item list, so you can detect where problems arise). In addition, it could also work on creatures that scare of dwarves, but only applied by the player, valid until they actually injure a dwarf: that would be useful if you have deep pits full of carp in your dining room that don't endanger your dwarves because of the depth.

Interesting post.

Ideally we'd need to come up with some workable solutions for the edge cases. But even as a general rule, exponential backoff with some kind of reasonable maximum cap value is something that warrants consideration even in the short term.

Imagine if we capped backoff at just 5 steps? Say in the current implementation, some job cancel spammed once every second. Under a capped exponential backoff, job spam during the first 63 seconds would be reduced from 63 entries to 6. Thereafter, that job would only be tried at rate of once every 32 seconds instead of once every second. That'd be a noticeable result, and probably not make the difference between life or death on eat or drink job spamming.

Perhaps the cap could be a configuration item as well, so that players could move it around to their liking, or turn it off.

Moreover, if this was all about breaking up a dangerous home invasion ring[...]

Problem is, leather is almost worthless as armor. It might stop a human or maybe an animal from biting out your throat (maybe, I don't know for sure) but it won't reduce the damage from a real weapon by enough to make any difference.

Adamantine cloaks might be different. I've still never had a chance to test (since afaik you still can't equip them in the arena) and my forts always die FPS deaths by the time I get to it in fort mode.

This leaves us with a use for all three of the weapon types: blunt weapons for armored combat, broad edged weapons for human-sized or similar unarmored combat (with any armor weaker than your axe not counting as armor), and spears for enormous unarmored targets like the various animal-style megabeasts, plus giants and similar.