Bay 12 Games Forum

Long post incoming, you are forewarned.

I would like to propose the following changes to skills:

1.  Roll Lye Making and Potash Making into one skill - call it Ashery Worker.

Reasoning:  Lye Making as it stands is currently the most completely useless skill in the game since the Ashery provides an option to make potash directly from ash.  Even assuming that this option is removed at some point, that would then make the Ashery require two completely different skills to obtain anything useful out of it which is pointless complication and inefficiency.

EDIT:  It has been brought to my attention that Soap Making still uses lye!  Although I still have reservations about the ridiculous number of skills in Farming (see 3 below), it would seem Lye Making is not completely useless, even if it is entirely uneconomical.

2.  Make Dyer a Crafting skill rather than a Farming skill.

Reasoning:  Although the textile industry creates considerable interplay between Farming and Crafting, the position within your fort of each of the different steps (growing plants, processing them, dyeing the thread, weaving the cloth) may vary considerably.  Your Dyer's Workshop is likely to be located near your Clothier, Loom, and cloth stockpiles whilst the Farmer's Workshop and Mill is much more likely to be near your farms and plant stockpiles.  Having a burrow with blue dwarves dyeing thread, weaving it, and then making it into clothes is much more intuitive and efficient than having one or two brown dwarves running back and forth between your fields and your textile workshops.

3.  Separate out Butchery, Tanning, Milking, and Cheese Making from Farming - make a new profession called Ranching.

Reasoning:  Farming is one of the largest professions in the game, being the overarching category for a whopping 15 (!) skills.  That's overwhelming and unintuitive, especially when these skills are spread out over a variety of buildings.  By creating the Ranching profession, a number of infrequently used but still useful skills can be concentrated in one place.  This would allow a mere one or two dwarves to handle all these skills in one small area rather than have the skills spread out amongst all your farmers.  To further increase efficiency, put Milk Creature and Make Cheese in their own workshop - call it a Dairy Workshop - and place this new workshop in your ranching burrow.

4.  Rather than move Dyeing to Crafting, move Dyeing, Weaving, and Clothier to a new profession called Textile Worker (or Tailor, etc.).

Reasoning:  Similar to 3 above, the purpose here is to lessen the number of jobs in a profession to reduce clutter, as well as making more intuitive burrow / workshop groupings.  I would actually greatly prefer this to 2 but it would definitely be more effort.

I agree with Silverionmox.  The current system seems to be:

Alert --> difference between Inactive and Active
Schedule --> what they do while Active

When it really should be:

Schedule --> whether a squad is Active or Inactive during a given time frame and what they do while Active (train, stand guard at their station, etc.)
Alert --> overrides the Schedule, calls the squad to Active, and maybe stations them in their barracks ready to be moved out

Posting a link to my other thread.

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=52813.0

It seems like crossbows in general may be borked somehow.

My hunter/marksdwarf did absolutely nothing without a quiver, and she kept trying to grab two crossbows.

Even after getting a quiver, she would never do target practice at the archery range and she took ages to start hunting after I took her out of the military. 

I did all the suggested things like assigning ammo but there is obviously something very wrong with marksdwarves.

She's the only marksdwarf I have.  Now she's just doing Individual Combat Drill.

Editing rather than double-posting:

This is especially irritating as my wrestlers (now axedwarves) are working perfectly: went to their barracks, started doing demonstrations to each other, grabbed their practice weapons once I assigned them, and so on.

Edit again:

Okay, it's now winter and she has FINALLY decided to go hunting after I took her off active duty.

I assigned ammo, didn't help.  Trying to get a quiver made to see if she needs to be able to carry the ammo in order to use it.

Hi, I'm a first time poster, long time lurker and player.

Anyway, the list of skills and descriptions of what they do on the wiki is very useful, but is there anywhere where the skills are organized according to what profession they fall under?

I ask this because they don't seem to be terribly consistent.  For instance, all immigrant Carpenters will show up with Wood Cutting, Carpentry, and then either Bowyer or Siege Engineer.  However, Wood Cutting isn't technically a Carpenter skill.  You can see this by making a new game and giving one of your dwarves nothing but Wood Cutting and he will end up as a Peasant.

Also, I'm sure I'm not alone in usually making my Mason my Building Designer, but immigrant Masons don't come with that skill, indicating it's not technically a Mason skill.  Does it even belong to any profession or is it unassociated like hauling?  On a related note, the Siege Operator skill also does not appear to have a profession.

It has been a couple versions since I tested some of these cases, so someone correct me if I'm wrong.

The floor of a murky pool is always some kind of "murky pool" material, rather than whatever underlying rock is actually there.

This makes it so that even if you drain the pool to make a mud room for farming, and even after all the water evaporates from the original pool, it still claims to be a "murky pool" and cannot be built upon or farmed.