Bay 12 Games Forum

the fact that her title actually connects to her association is kind of interesting.

I think gods that take titles get said titles from a pool or words related to their sphere.

What's happening is that you have 14 siltstone on the north side of the floor you're trying to build, and when you select one of them (which is the default, since they are the closest) the game says "OK, the mason will be coming from that side" and only stuff accessible from that side. When you go to choose your materials, press 'x' to expand your options, and choose only siltstone that are more than 1 tile away (with the setup shown in your screenshots, all the inaccessible siltstone is considered 1 tile away from the building designation). That should force your masons to grab stone from the south, i.e. accessible, side and once you have a floor across to the inner ring you can use those 14 as well.

Though yes, it does not make sense how something so broken can keep coming after you. It is puzzling.

"Peasant cancels Store Item in Bin: Interrupted by Armorer's third finger, left hand." Main reason I don't enjoy having zombies about.

... Dfhack cleaned 4517 contaminants from 2538 items and this is after I let everyone idle out after they did their cleaning jobs already. Removing those 4500 useless splatters and pools of blood allowed me to restore 20% of my FPS and bring it back up to my cap.

I have 1349 creatures in my dead/missing pile...

DFhack also has a command called 'autodump' with an option for 'destroy.' If you want to snag another few handfuls of FPS back, you could use it to get rid of useless items - dead goblins, severed body parts, unusable single bones, surplus stone, etc. Just make sure you don't have anything important marked for dumping when you use it. "What happened to all the gold ore I was quantum stockpiling?" is not a question you want to have to ask yourself at any point.

Bins?  Hate 'em.  Space is cheap and quantum stock piles are even cheaper (pun intended).

I make 9x9 stockpiles with a central stair.  That's 80 squares of space to drop things on.  Immediately to the east of the stairs just off of the stockpile I place a one square dump zone.  When the stock pile fills up completely I dump all to that dump zone.  Those zones are always a multiple of 80 even when I undump them (when the stockpile gets empty I un'd' the entire zone, then re'd' it when the stock pile is full).

I can always easily see how much of whatever that I have.  I hate bins because I have to look inside them to see how much is there AND they always have mixed items.

Redesignating what items a stockpile takes is trivial.  Setting only one dump zone active allows me to easily move whatever to where ever.  I used a "sorting" floor of stockpiles just under my depot.  I use it mostly to sort out the wood that I buy off the treehuggers.  All my traps are made of Alder.  All power generation and distribution uses Oak.  This is how I keep things organized.  Bin just mess everything up.

Bins, bah!

You sound like one of those people who is OCD to a point beyond simple ridiculousness but is in denial about it, so much so that you blame everything else for "messing things up" when it's really just fine, if you know how to manage it.

Here's my take on bins: They're great for trading.

I've largely stopped using stockpiles at all, preferring to streamline by way of sticking all the relevant workshops near each other. I still use stockpiles for some raw materials: stone, wood, uncut gems, craftable butchery products, etc., just to get them gathered up from their various origins. This cuts down considerably on my hauling dwarf-hours overall, leaving more of them available for building structures and bringing 'round wood or stone.

The one time I use bins regularly is for export goods. I set up a stockpile near the depot that accepts all the unusable Finished Goods (i.e. excludes bags, clothing, waterskins, etc.) and, later in the fort, only high-quality items. This stockpile uses bins so that when the caravan shows up, I can quickly shift thousands of dwarfbucks worth of totems and such in just a few seconds, rather than having my haulers carrying them individually from the workshop all at once.

I have yet to get the hang of using minecarts to actually make hauling more efficient

The only time I've ever used them effectively for this is on low-ore sites, to take bought ores from the trade depot on the surface to the forges above the magma sea. That's pretty much it.

gently plowing a cheesemaker with an empty oaken cart for the first time is quite a feeling.

In the back seat of the minecart, I assume.