Bay 12 Games Forum

I haven't seen exactly this, but I did notice that in 40d13 sometimes all the dwarves on the screen start moving much faster than they usually do; this goes on for a while and then they slow back down.

How should it behave if there are multiple paths to produce the intermediaries?

Breadth-first search of the dependency tree, so you get whatever chain is shortest, would be good enough for me.

It might be nice to retry longer chains when it hits raw materials that don't exist, in case you do have some intermediaries on a longer chain, but I wouldn't miss that.  (The only case of multiple paths I know about is ash->lye->potash versus ash->potash, and breadth-first search would get that right anyway.  Maybe it might come up for alloys? But you always say exactly which metal you want for metal items.)

There's closely related stuff to this in several of the popular job-related suggestions, but I haven't seen exactly this, so...

Some things your dwarves can make are at the end of long chains of production operations.  For instance, take glass blocks:

• Chop wood
• Wood furnace: make ash
• Ashery: make potash
• Kiln: make pearlash
• (Glass furnace:) gather sand
• Glass furnace: make clear glass blocks

If you don't have magma, you also have to produce fuel for three of these operations, and if you don't have bags for the sand, you have to make those too.  Every link in the chain currently has to be scheduled individually and micro-managed lest jobs get canceled for lack of raw materials.  This is silly.  The dwarves should be able to handle job dependencies for you (I envision this being a Manager function).

There's two aspects to this.  First, if the appropriate raw materials are lacking for any job, it goes into a new "waiting for materials" state and does not try to assign a dwarf; it automatically comes off the "waiting for materials" state when materials become available.  The jobs screen sorts "waiting for materials" jobs separate from all others, and shows you what is missing for each.  This, all by itself, would be a significant improvement over the present situation.

Second, if you queue a production order via the Manager, she checks the stocks and automatically queues production of whatever that job needs that you don't already have.  She does this recursively, so a single request for clear glass blocks would schedule everything on the above list, but she stops when you hit true raw materials (ore, wood, stone, sand, plants, etc).  If you don't have enough of those, the manager will still let you queue the order but she'll tell you (as best she can given the state of the stockpile records) how much of which things are required. You then go designate more mining or whatever.

If you can't make something because you are missing a workshop for something on the dependency chain, or a dwarf with the necessary labor enabled, the manager should also be able to tell you that.

Relatedly, it would be nice to be able queue construction of furniture in advance of its production (as long as you don't care which chair goes where) -- each construction would just take whatever furniture of the appropriate type is next produced.  This should *not* auto-queue furniture production, since you probably care what materials are used, but the manager screen should have a second list of all the furniture that needs production.  (Noble mandates, trade good requests, and undersupply of bins/barrels/bags could also show up there.)

It doesn't seem like someone who dislikes intellectual discussions would wind up as a philosopher.

quote:

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...press [c], select the civ, [tab] to the "trade agreements" part...

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I see this:

quote:

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Staddatpesor, "The Watchful Confederacies", Human

Trade Agreement (Imports from Fikodeshtan) 1060
Trade Agreement (Exports to Fikodeshtan)   1060

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but neither trade agreement is selectable.  The arrow keys make the top "Imports" line appear and disappear, +- do nothing, and Enter does nothing.

(A nice bit of humor if one selects the kobold civilization and tabs to the export/import screen:

quote:

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Exports to Fikodeshtan: Petty Annoyance
Offerings from Fikodeshtan: Death

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hadn't seen that before...)

I'd like it to go even further, and create all resizable constructs with the designation interface.  Arbitrary size, so you can order construction of the entire whatever all at once.  And it prompts you for exactly the right amount of material, after you've designated the whatever.

Those annoying antmen crawl up from the chasm, and your traps / dogs / fighters kill them, and then you have to haul their corpses all the way out of the fortress (unless you want miasmas) and then you have to wait for them to decompose, and then you have to haul their bones back in to the craftsdwarf to make bolts out of.

The solution is corpse beetles (Dermestidae).  A corpse beetle colony is a workshop, runs off Butchery (or perhaps a new skill).    To build it you have to collect beetles from along the cave river (this happens automatically when you ask for construction).  The task is called "Clean Corpse"; it takes one inedible corpse and produces however many bones/shells that corpse would have produced plus one unit of compost.  Compost is just fertilizer.

Unlike most workshops, you can have multiple Clean Corpse jobs running at the same time, because the dwarf just has to dump the corpse into the colony and then come back later.  (There should be a limit, but it should be high, like 10.  Otherwise this doesn't do anything to prevent miasma / long hauls.)

If you don't give the colony any food for a year it dies and you have to re-seed it with beetles.