Bay 12 Games Forum

It takes some effort to get all of your dwarves working, but once it's set up, it's going to be /R and forget.

Planting is the basis for several job chains.  You want to have large enough fields and awesome enough growers.  Planting gives you the clothing industry (pig tails + dimple dye = growing, harvesting, milling, threshing, dying, weaving, clothes making, clothes decorating), but it also gives you brewing and cooking (process to barrel, process to bag, milling, cook lavish meal).

If you have magma and sand, glass making gives you gather sand, make green glass gems, cut green glass gems, decorate with green glass gems.  This also gives you legendary glassmakers (for furniture and trap components), and legendary gem setters (to make really, really awesome stuff with all those cut gems you've been buying with your cinnabar mugs covered in broken glass).

You can also use those crafts to purchase metals from the merchants, to supplement your ore from mining.

Have you tried just marking the bin for dumping?  To avoid potential problems with accidentally throwing your artifacts under an atom smasher or down a pit, just make a dump zone right next to the bin.

Dunno if it works, just a thought.

yeah, they'll do it one tile at a time.  Each time a damp wall is revealed, and it has a digging designation, the dwarves freak out and remove the designation, while telling you all about it.  If you're drilling a corridor or a room, I would suggest just doing one tile at a time in a straight line, then you can designate both sides of revealed damp tiles, dig them out without interruption, and repeat.

Pretty much what they said.  Or forbid plump helmets from eating and just brew them so the seeds end up next to the farm plot anyway (your stills are next to the farm and main food stockpile, right?).

You can build up 200 seeds pretty fast with legendary farmers and brewing.  Once you have 200, you can either re-enable plump helmets for eating (as long as you're still brewing, most of the seeds will end up there).

Even with lavish meals, you'll still run across dwarves who get a hankering for Plump Helmets.  Maybe the like them, maybe they just crave variety (by eating a staple?), who knows - they're dwarves.  I always have quite a variety of foods (I try to grow everything that will grow in my biomes), and my dining halls are loaded with seeds and bones awaiting hauling.  I pretty much just ignore it, my dwarves don't seem to mind eating in a refuge heap.

I must be thinking of PERSONAL_MATTER wrong then.  I thought it was up to the individual whether they did it or not, and that others would react based on their personal views, and thus some dwarves would be like "well, you did what you had to do" and some would be "wow, you're a friggin monster"

In any case, I'm pretty sure Urist McSnack's friends would find the whole thing quite horrifying, even if they found EAT_SAPIENT_KILL:DESPARATE acceptable.

I'm guessing he's making the Manhattan Project.

I like to take highly toxic stones (like pitchblende and cinnabar) and turn them into mugs which get decorated with glass, which I sell to elves.

You know, you're completely right.  I saw 'reserve' and immediately thought moody dwarf, re-reading carefully, it does appear I was wrong.  :/

So I'll just say "What he said" with the addendum that, to a dwarf, "closest" means "as the mole digs" not "path distance."

What this means is that a rock 2 zlevels straight down is closer than a rock 3 tiles over.  Despite the second rock having a path distance of 3 and the first rock having a path distance of 300.

One tactic that require less micromanagement is to have a stockpile that accepts what you want to be decorated next to the workshop (along with a stockpile for the appropriate kinds of gems).  Then install a lever operating the door to the workshop/stockpile area.  Change the profile of the lever so only the jeweler can pull it.  He walks in, pull the lever, locking him in, then you can encrust all you want without worrying random stuff that you don't want will be encrusted.  When you're done, pull the lever again, the door opens, and you can refresh the stockpiles.

Depending on your attention span, you may want to include a bed and a small food/drink stockpile, just in case you forget about your jeweler for a few years (learn from my mistakes!).

If you don't mind more micro, but still want to be absolutely sure that you only encrust what you want, you could put a hole in the roof of this sweatshop, dump in goods to be encrusted, gems to encrust with and food/drink.  Reclaim it and when you're done with the encrusting, dump the finished goods out a hole in the floor and reclaim it.  This way your poor jeweler cannot possibly encrust anything but what you want, and, bonus, he's protected from the hammerer (and any social interaction, and freedom, but what does a dwarf need with those?)

Sometimes underground pools will be dry on embark - which means no mud, either.  It can happen to both exposed and truly underground pools.  It's better than if you get a magma pool that's dry on embark...