Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: martinuzz on February 24, 2016, 05:48:54 am

Sadly, it does need a worldgen to take effect, so no home made whips in my current fort.

Edit a mace or other weapon to have the name, stats and skill usage of a whip.

Yeah, this. Worldgen fixes which items / reactions your civ has access to, but the items / reactions themselves are not fixed. So it's less a case of 'my civ has 7 weapons' and more a case of 'my civ has 7 weapon slots' I do try to limit that sort of editing, because I tend to forget what I've done and possibly carry it over to the next worldgen, leaving misleading IDs all over the place.

(I mention reactions because there some new ones that people might want to use with a fortress established in a previous version.)

I'm trying to find a job that can be done en masse, so I can order it done and have every dwarf in the fortress turn up and fulfil their crafting needs. It'd be nice if engraving counted, because it's just what I'm after. Select a 10x10 area of floor, generate 100 jobs, and by the time the first few dwarves have finished with a tile a lot of the rest will be reserved for other dwarves.

I've tested an assortment of jobs, and so far all the ones not based in a workshop are unsatisfying. Architecture, building stone forges (it grants Mason XP), smoothing, engraving, plant gathering (didn't think it'd work).

One idea would be to use the manager's ability to add a job to a workshop with ten suspended orders. Have a bunch of workshops you otherwise have no use for, fill them with suspended orders, and then order enough jobs for everybody. Since there's a delay between the workshop's job list being emptied and it being refilled by the manager, each dwarf will have a chance to wander off and not be the closest for the next job.

In my current fortress the best workshop would be the screw press, I think.

1. It's a 1-tile workshop. Space-efficient.
2. No bees, and tallow soap only. Don't need the workshop for anything else.
3. Pressing is not a moodable skill.
4. The reaction is in the raws, and so should satisfy crafting needs. I haven't tested them all, but I tried an assortment and edited the 'tan a hide' reaction down until it was just an ID, a name, and an associated building. The dwarf walked to the tannery and immediately left, satisfied with have practiced a craft.

Quote from: letsdance on February 21, 2016, 06:48:28 pm

no trading stone crafts

Also, what on earth do you trade with the elves?!

Meals, bone crafts, spare animals, green glass gems / crafts, anything made of metal or leather or stone (most things are really heavy, but cabochons are a fine way of chewing through spare rock and training a different skill), old clothes...

BTW, I'd never use training weapons for military. Dorfs can become attached to weapons and never put them down without a hissy fit. If your axelord won't put down that artifact steel axe? Who cares. But when you realize your swordmaster named so e dinky PoS "Marceline" and attacks anyone that tries to take "her?" Eh.... You can still take the item away, but it causes massive u happiness iirc.

Dwarves don't care if they have to drop "Marceline". They'll keep hold of their favourite weapons until you change their uniform to exclude that weapon, and then they'll put it down to conform to the new uniform. Then you can get rid of the named weapon, just in case the uniform changes to allow it again. There are no unhappy thoughts about it.

I don't use training weapons either. Dwarves play nicely with whatever they're holding, so sharp weapons are fine.

The thread linked to references leather bucklers as being examples of why the colour workaround doesn't work, but it works fine for those as well. The only other brown material you can normally make a shield or buckler out of is highwood, which has the same density as leather.

Setting your armour to "green" means the dwarves will only equip dyed green armour. Because shell isn't dyed they won't be equipping it.

Have you tried this?

Giraffe Boo?

You could also set a whole bunch of 'proper' orders and allow them to be distributed across all the workshops. Some of the jobs will be carried out at the 'skilled-only' workshops, some at the 'unskilled-only' workshops.

Then you start to be discerning. Good-quality items go into storage, bad-quality items go into a stockpile that feeds into a magma chute or atomsmasher. If you need the good stuff made right now or have limited resources, then you can manually specify it at the 'skillled' workshops. If you don't have enough 'skilled' workshops to hold all your orders, convert the 'unskilled' workshops or build more workshops.

You'll lose out on a little skill gain if your unskilled carpenters are making one table per job instead of three cups, but ehh. Even a Novice will produce a masterwork, given a good roll of the dice.