Bay 12 Games Forum

It doesn't matter if you use DFTherapist, but it is very difficult to distinguish in the midranges if you're using the native labor functions. The profligate synonyms aren't descriptive, they're just confusing. Which is better: Talented or adept or skilled? Expert or professional? It's not intuitive and is not especially flavorful as much as it is a bunch of synonyms that hamper understanding the value of a simple integer.

I do, however, support adding "He is a talented mason and a high master engraver." to the status descriptions, listing off several of their highest skills. That would be a flavorful use of the descriptive thesaurus, and wouldn't harm clarity.

The clarity of the skill scale could be improved, and that's the function of this forum. The immediacy of a suggestion isn't relevant IMO. I like seeing NW_Kohaku's overly ambitious dissertations as much as a small pragmatic improvement like this one.

Source on the usability overhaul?

ToadyOne has mentioned it in DF Talks before, tied in with a UI overhaul, which he admits is a huge barrier to new players sticking with the game.

The bag/rope thing is the key. Bags are amazing. They can be built as containers and raise the value of rooms very quickly, and are very useful for milling and glass industries too.

Right now if you have ~200 dwarves, you can buy out caravans with just the worn out clothes from the previous year. This assumes you have legendary weavers, dyers, and clothiers making everything of course.

Toady One cited that pastures act the way they do because it would be too obnoxious to have dwarves constantly on animal hauling duty when the oblivious livestock wanders away. It's a concession to not being annoying, rather than realism. If pastures were redefined with a fence, they would probably need to be buildings, not activity zones.

As is, the fact that grazers will hang out in a stone dining room and starve to death is a testament to how half-baked animals operate currently. I think Toady One has a clear idea of how animals *should* work, it's just not that fun or important when the system right now let's us just dump them somewhere or clear out the grazer tag in their raws so they're at least not obnoxious to field.

@Maklak
I think both would occur actually.

If there's a spot open in a higher-priority stockpile, I imagine the job it creates presumably treats all lower-priority stockpiles as if they don't exist. This basically lets input  and specialty stockpiles always be stocked while general or reserve storage can be neglected. In practice, stockpiles you HAVE to keep full (i.e. inputs near the forges, stone piles near that megaproject, food for prisoners/burrowed dwarves) would stay full. If somebody wants to get ambitious and have layers and layers of stockpiles, good for them.

The advantage of this over Take From chains is that a stockpile doesn't need to be integrated into a chain to function. If the parent stockpile is moved, the child has to be reintegrated blah blah blah. <NINJA EDIT> This would be especially cumbersome given that a child can have multiple parents and vice versa. Severing a chain with multiple dependencies from one node is a huge pain to repair</NINJA EDIT>
q > navigate to new stockpile > t > navigate to parent stockpile > enterversus
q > navigate to new stockpile > +/- assuming +/- manages stockpile priority

I imagine that Dwarf society is as imbued with religion as the Middle Ages, so the preindustrial notion of "brilliance" is already expressed in moods. The artisan-craftsman's success was always guided by something metaphysical, whether muses or fate or gods or God or whatever. Saying that a dwarf is struck with "brilliance" of his own making would have been considered hubristic to any ancient/medieval society, because it challenges that a dwarf can be equal to a god.

Dwarves currently eat and drink without being told to do so, and I see this as the same thing - maintaining a civil society. I would imagine wear autocreates jobs at a clothier like rendering fat or tanning a hide. This could be easily set in the Standing Orders menu, and can currently be mitigated by forbidding a certain amount of thread, cloth and leather if all your current stock is used up.

Letting a clothier mend clothes seems natural - if a dwarf has the clothier labor enabled, they'd give it a shot. Skill should probably determine the amount of wear that the mending actually reverts. If you asked me to mend a shirt, the tears would reopen within days. If you asked a skilled seamstress to do it instead, it might last longer than the original clothing did. On top of this, a dwarf should always seek to replace his clothing with something of equal or better quality if available.

I'd say that clothing should only be mendable up to xPig tail shirtx quality, because patches, no matter how well-done, look shoddy.  Using thread alone to upgrade XShirtX to xShirtx and then using a portion of cloth for XXShirtXX to xShirtx seems reasonable.

I'd much rather have my dwarf take a short break to get her shirt fixed up by the clothier than to have her discard her shirt on the floor and end up throwing a tantrum because my cloth and leather supplies can't even keep up with the demand for children's clothes. Having the dwarf drop off her shirt would be problematic since she'd be running around topless in the meantime.

Another idea is using discarded XXQualityXX clothing as rags for patching and mending if no cloth is otherwise available, or possibly in preference to available cloth. Discarding ragged clothing altogether seems quite ahistorical, since preindustrial cloth was worth more than gold by weight due to the high labor intensity of its manufacture. Cloth was never discarded and was always reused for other purposes if possible in preindustrial times due to its value.

Since DF doesn't model most of the things rags are actually used for (dish towels, pitch torches, etc.), being able to use cloth for patches or unweaving then respinning it into thread seems reasonable. Smelters already store portions of material, so storing portions of cloth from respun rags at looms seems likewise reasonable. The quality of the material should probably be set to baseline to prevent looms from having to track stocks of every quality of cloth-portions separately.

I'm definitely +1 on the idea that higher quality clothing wears out a lot more slowly than lower quality, and REDUCING the rate of wear on clothes.

Considering dwarves seem to follow generally European pre-industrial ethics, I'd say that the shame of not being fully clothed in public should be pretty traumatic. There's a reason so many of us have nightmares about not being able to fully cover ourselves. That being said, clothing needs to be better addressed, whether through decreasing wear or increasing output.

My 200 dwarf fortresses usually require 4 or 5 full-time clothiers just to keep up with births and wear.

I am new here, so forgive me if some of these have been suggested to death. A couple of simple and low-cost ideas that would make stockpiles easier to manage:

I have an idea that will hopefully improve stockpiles, which is, more or less stockpile ordering.

A simpler idea I've had floating around in my head is along the same lines:

Stockpile priority
Every stockpile is assigned a priority number/quality (0 1 2 3 etc. or lowest low high highest etc). Defaults to 1/low and it goes up from there. Whenever a hauling job is initiated, the destination is always in the highest priority stockpile. If there is an open space in a stockpile, the stockpile automatically creates a job to haul from any lower-priority stockpiles. That's it.

When I have general storage for wood in my fortress, it's priority 1/low. Next to the wood furnace and carpenter, each have their own stockpiles at priority 2/high. The stockpiles near the furnace and workshop each fill up BEFORE the general storage stockpile no matter what, and any open space in their stockpile automatically creates a job to pull from the general storage. Booze and prepared meals can be kept in central storage with priority 0, but the Legendary Dining Room can have a small priority 1 stockpile that stocks booze and another that stocks prepared meals. Even the central stockpile can have its mouth designated priority 1/low, then the rest of the stockpile designated 0/lowest to speed up retrieval. I realize you can basically do all this with the very spare "take from" system currently, but prioritization allows an automatic process that only needs assignment once. Keeping track of myriad custom stockpiles and "take from" chains is a clumsy pain when you're trying to make sure several different workshops have their own stockpiles of fuel or ore or whatever that need to be full to maintain efficiency.

Workshop input/output stockpiles
Be able to flat out designate that a workshop takes inputs from a specific stockpile or workshop only/first. You guys have suggested this already, and it's great.
Be able to designate where workshops output to first, and whether anyone (the crafter too) or a separate hauler takes the job.

Make stockpiles resizeable, renamable, splittable, fuseable etc.
This seems obvious. Nobody likes undesignating and redesignating custom stockpiles. Stockpiles also need to be splittable and fuseable. Splitting would create another identical stockpile that is designated separately, and fusing simply combines the current stockpile with another targeted one, combining their settings additively (booze stockpile + meal stockpile = booze/meal stockpile). Discontiguous stockpiles even across Z levels would be awesome, but who knows how useful.

I would imagine you'd select the stockpile with <q>, then hit <r> or whatever to resize just like a room or activity zone or whatever, then:
a add a designation rectangle
x remove a designation rectangle (just like activity ones)
f fuse/merge with another target stockpile (a la "take from")
s split a new identical stockpile with a designation rectangle
n rename the stockpile

Drop-off status
Designate a stockpile as a drop point, meaning that it's a valid destination for a hauling job NOT from a stockpile, and immediately creates another job for a different dwarf so that it is by definition only a temporary stop. Woodcutters or goblinite gatherers drop just inside the fort's entrance, the undergrounders pick up the goods and carry them to central storage/workshops. This seems a little trickier than priority, since multiple drop-off piles could interfere with one another.

For further complexity, a priority number could be used, and the drop-off status means that proximity trumps priority until the item enters a drop-off point, but jobs FROM a drop-off follow priority. So a priority 0 drop-off point receives wood from the overworld due to proximity, feeds to a priority 1 drop-off point underground due to priority, which feeds to a priority 0 central stockpile due to the drop-off status, which feeds to a priority 1 workshop input stockpile.

Quantum dump-like
Be able to designate an area that acts like a quantum dump currently does, except more, er, kosher. Make a new kind of mass designation (say, a Mass Move designation) and everything des'd is moved AS CLOSE AS POSSIBLE to the selected designation point/plane. It disappears once the Mass Move is finished, so you don't have dozens of dumps clogging up your room list. I guess it'd be considered an Activity Zone while the Mass Move is in progress if you need to be edit the Mass Move and we're shooting for the stars? The point of this idea is a "legal" solution to the very real problem that quantum dumping solves.

More robust take-from
This seems obvious, but infinite take-from or give-to commands. It doesn't seem difficult to have an indicator if you accidentally do create a take-from loop (e.g. WARNING: SUPPLY LOOP). I have no idea if anyone else on earth played CivCity Rome, but its warehouse routing was very flexible and worked beautifully.