Bay 12 Games Forum

I am having an issue where workshop repeat jobs are being canceled due to lack of materials even though there are materials available in a nearby stockpile.  This seems to mainly happen with items stored in bins and barrels.

Very extremely common issue.  Either live with it (the cancellations only happen once in a while, and you can just wait a bit and re-queue the workshop jobs), or use the manager to auto-re-queue jobs, or use quantum stockpiles instead of traditional stockpiles, or have SO MANY plump helmets (or whatever) that there's always an un-busy barrel of them for the brewer.

Werebeasts are totally random, and really quite powerful.  An early military isn't really your best choice either, because even if they kill the thing, having one of your military become infected just propagates the problem next month.

Realistically, the best I can come up with is to keep most of your dwarves inside most of the time.  If a werebeast hits, hope that he finds one of your (few!) outside workers first, so you can hole up until he transforms and runs off.  Then quarantine any injured dwarves until you're sure they're not infected.

I have no strategy for werebeast visitors inside your tavern/library....

Paved roads have the perk of only needing ~1/3rd of the materials of the same amount of floors (3 blocks for a 1x10 road).  So that's less hauling jobs from your block stockpile/mason's shop.  Though iirc, it's the architect that does the hauling

Yeah, that's the bottleneck.  If you designate a large floor area, you might need 20 blocks, but you can have 20 dwarves each carry 1 block simultaneously, and the floor is done quickly.  But with a road, even if you only need 6 blocks, one dwarf has to carry each of those blocks, in 6 separate trips.  So it takes much, much longer.

Well, I still think I would double-check each of the dwarves' labors.  Maybe you missed one.

The only reasons a military dwarf should ever drop a weapon would be if they are going off-duty and need a different uniform for civilian life (either due to squad orders not to wear armor while off-duty -- which would be a really poor decision -- or because of a Mining, Woodcutting or Hunting labor), or if they have just assigned themselves an upgrade weapon (higher value) and are en route to pick it up.  (They do drop old gear before moving to the new gear.)

Depends on the job.  If it's a 1x4 wall, you specify the 4 building materials in advance.

If it's cooking, the dwarf seems to choose each ingredient only after he brings the previous one to the kitchen.  It's extremely dynamic.

How do you retrieve the corpses for butchering after a cave-in?

Near as I can tell -- but this is still just speculation -- dwarves seem to pre-select where they are going to stand when they do a job, before they actually get to the job site.  Now, it's not as bad in the current versions as it used to be.  Dwarves who have to pick up a building material object along the way tend to stand on the side of the site that the object came from, so they don't wall themselves in quite as often as they used to do.

Nevertheless, dwarves are persistently stupid and inflexible about construction.  At some point, the spot they will stand for a given job is decided, and that decision is final.  That is where they will stand.  If you suspend the job and resume it later, they'll come back to that same spot.

Now, "creature occupying site" can mean an animal, or a dwarf, and that includes the dwarf doing the construction.  There used to be a horrible epidemic of dwarves standing on the spot where they are building a wall, and suspending the job because there's a dwarf in the way.  There was a bug fix for this, and now it happens a lot less often, but it's still something that occasionally happens.

Since dwarves do not have the imagination required to stand in a different spot after you resume a suspended job, they keep going right onto the construction site, and then -- surprise! -- there's a dwarf in the construction site, so they can't build there.  The only fix is to completely cancel that job and try it again.

On the other hand, if it's an animal that's in the way, you might be able to get the job finished simply by retrying, when the animals are no longer there.  It helps if your crazy cat lady dwarves are not on the construction site.