Bay 12 Games Forum

The most important aspect of any dwarven industry is stockpile management. 

It only takes significant time to learn how to manage stockpiles the first few times, like any learned skill.

After you get the hang of it, it becomes second nature and takes very little effort.

The amount of time it takes to wait for dwarves to do things with inefficient stockpile management by far outweighs the time to manage stockpiles properly. 

There is really no need to have 350+ dwarves when you can easily break game economy with just 30 properly managed dwarven workers.

That being said, there is very little difference in managing stockpiles for 30 dwarves or 300, the only difference is in scale. 

In fact, it is even more important to properly manage a large number of dwarves than a small number of them.

Okay, I'll bite.  What is good stockpile management, and how do you figure it out, and how do you know when you have it?  Cause I've been through the wiki, and I've tried to follow that, and I generally have some initial success, but things still get bogged down as the fort grows.  Do I need to just un-designate everything and take an afternoon, paused, re-designating?  Bins everywhere for everything?  Lay out new workshops and storage from scratch (and if so, to what design)?  It really is not clear to me what a very good stockpile setup is supposed to look like compared to the klugey thing I have going on.

Hit "o", then "W" to make sure you haven't changed Auto Tan to No Auto Tan.

Make sure you have a tanner's shop built near your butcher's shop.  Then check your Tannerdwarf, make sure he has tanning enabled, and turn off any competing labors, even including hauling, so he has nothing else to do.  If that still fails, enable tanning on several peasants (and again turn off competing labors), though if you do that and you're butchering multiple animals you'll likely want to build an extra tanner's shop or two since they'll take longer unskilled.

Finally, if you do have any unrotten skins still around, try issuing an order manually in the tanner's shop to tan them (it'll be red and unavailable if no skins are still fresh), though once this is going they should be tanned automatically when new animals are butchered.

Adults Only!!!  Too hot for the Little Questions Thread!!!

Or maybe not, but since I didn't get an answer there:

I've had a military set up on a year round training schedule and I'm just starting to give them some down time, but is there a way to set that up automatically in the schedule?  Edit order doesn't seem to give me the option, except by dropping the minimum down to one (won't go to zero).  Or do I have to switch alerts to inactive manually each time?

Also, what's a good mix of down time to optimize training but avoid unhappy thoughts?  (For dorfs with military and civilian skills.)  I'd been assuming more Training was better, so was thinking of a two months on, one month off schedule, but am I underestimating the individual drills they do in down time?


Added:  more generally, can anyone link or point me to their favorite military threads on the boards?  Search kind of sucks and I'm certain I've seen stuff on the boards that's not in the wiki.  I feel I'm doing well enough overall, I have military dorfs trained to the Skilled to Talented levels without using danger rooms and can take out normal sieges before they get to my trap corridor, but I still feel like I don't have training as optimized as I've seen claimed it can be.  Your best practices, give them to me!

I think my dwarves participated in some sort of grand theft cloth.  As soon as the first Dwarven trade group arrived a bunch of my dwarves ran up to the caravan and hauled massive amounts of cloth to my hospital chests, will this make the dwarf civilization angry?  Is this a bug?

Flash mob!

Dwarfs don't siege you even when they lose a caravan so you should be okay.  You might consider offering a generous trade if you want a good sized caravan next year.  They do seem to track profit and loss when deciding how many merchants to send next year.

It sounds like a bug though.  Was anything else weird going on, casualties on the way in, depot deconstructed, or were you doing anything with designations at the time and place?

I've had a military set up on a year round training schedule and I'm just starting to give them some down time, but is there a way to set that up automatically in the schedule?  Edit order doesn't seem to give me the option, except by dropping the minimum down to one (won't go to zero).  Or do I have to switch alerts to inactive manually each time?

Also, what's a good mix of down time to optimize training but avoid unhappy thoughts?  (For dorfs with military and civilian skills.)  I'd been assuming more Training was better, so was thinking of a two months on, one month off schedule, but am I underestimating the individual drills they do in down time?

I've had good luck with a copper-armored military against most goblin invasions as long as I mass enough troops.  Goblin archers are the only things that give me problems.

Ah, thanks.  I don't know how I got the other idea, except the wiki suggested coffins over slabs.