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.

Toady wasn't kidding when he said he gave migrants more starting skills.

I've got a Woodworker that arrived as a High Master Bowyer... but he's also an Expert Bone Carver?

I've got a Farmer that arrived as a Talented Lye Maker, and also a Novice Bowdwarf, Novice Archer (?!), and Novice Trapper?  What on earth is the difference between Bowdwarf and Archer?!

Would it be possible to have all those extra skills in their actual area of expertise instead of this bizarre shotgun approach?

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.

First of all, I realize that as Toady is currently working on immigration as the groundwork for armies, he may be doing some related clean-up in the code.  If any of what I'm about to discuss has been pre-empted by this, then feel free to ignore it.

Anyway, as immigration currently stands, all immigrants arrive with three skills pulled from the pool of skills tied to their job.  (There are exceptions to this, but only in those cases where the job does not have three skills to pull from, such as Miners and Mechanics.)

However, these three skills are not necessarily random; as of v0.23.130.23a., all immigrant Farmers arrive with Grower, Butcher, and then one other skill chosen from their vast list.  By the same token, all immigrant Carpenters arrive with Wood Cutting, Carpentry, and then either Engineer or Bowyer.

Of particular concern to me in this discussion are Farmers.  As mentioned, a Farmer's third skill is pulled from a very large list.  In fact, there are more skills tied to Farmer than other any job, with the consequence that in a large fort where specialization becomes crucial, you tend to need more Farmers than any other type of dwarf.

Therefore, I propose the creation of a new job, the Rancher, which would take over the following Farmer skills:  Butcher, Tanner, Milker, Cheese Maker, and Soaper.  One could conceivably add one or two more to this list such as Lye Maker or Wood Burner.  The non-random job for Farmers would remain Grower, and the non-random job for Ranchers would be Butcher.

This would be beneficial in a number of ways.  First, it would increase the chance of a Farmer arriving with a useful skill like Cook or Brewer by giving them two random skill slots instead of one.  Second, by removing Butcher from Farmers, it means that separate dwarves handle two time-critical tasks (planting crops and butchering animals) instead of forcing the same dwarves to prioritize.  I cannot count the number of times a kitten has saved itself in the nick of time by adopting, just because a Butcher couldn't get to it in time.

I realize that I likely do not have a full appreciation of the technical hurdles involved, but should this idea be feasible, I
think it could be a very useful change.

Edit:  fixed some organization issues.

[ January 26, 2007: Message edited by: XenoZergie ]