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[Daris]

I'm experimenting with a fort with no migration, and with only 7 dwarves I'm noticing things I never did before about job prioritization.  The most vexing aspect is that dwarves seem to want to do literally anything other than deal with stuff that will lead to miasma.

Animal corpse in the entry hall, or the poultry coop?  Dwarves will walk right over it in order to move balls of yarn from the farmer's workshop to the cloth stockpile.  Freshly prepared meal on the kitchen floor?  I recently had a roc roast worth more than the rest of my fort put together that everyone ignored.  I picked a dwarf near the kitchen and turned off all labors and all hauling other than food hauling, and then followed him as he picked up every dimple cup seed from the mill to put into the seed stockpile rather than move the food 2 steps out of the kitchen.  I finally had to forbid all seeds to get him to stop prioritizing seed stockpiling over not letting valuable food rot.  Marking things for dumping to a dump pile over a stockpile seems to actually slow the dwarves from handling things like not-yet-rotted corpses, as they prioritize dumping even lower.

It seems that the game will look for any job to give a dwarf other than handling things that can rot and generate miasma.  In a 200-dwarf fortress, it runs out of busy work pretty quickly and allocates some idle dwarf to handle the potentially smelly thing, but in a 7-dwarf fort that isn't the case.  Is there a way to deal with this other than micromanaging the seed reserves?

[Di]

Uhm, flushing it with water or dust to rot-preventing stockpiles?

[Vattic]

I'm surprised dumping it hasn't helped.

For the food you could make a temporary stockpile under it to stop it rotting and then set it to give to your main food stockpile.

[PatrikLundell]

I don't think spoilability is taken into account when it comes to hauling (unfortunately), so they'll gladly pass by the fresh animal corpse to gather old bones from a long past FB rampage and then get unhappy thoughts from the miasma that eventually develops in their path.

Temporary links only stockpiles as proposed by Vattic is a reasonable work around.
A micro management intensive version is to use burrows to ensure the food hauler doesn't have access to the seed stockpile, but there is a significant risk the hauler will just do nothing because he'll constantly take and drop seed hauling jobs with the attendant cancellation spamming.

The jobs rewrite has improved a lot of things, but there definitely is still room for a lot of improvement; improving it without impacting performance is the tricky part, though.

A low dorf fortress is micro management intensive since too many dorfs have to wear too many hats, and it's very easy to build up mountains of pent up hauling work. once a mountain is addressed, you don't have much influence over the order in which it's addressed.

You could set up a seed links only stockpile in your mess hall to block hauling to the seed stockpile, but that will cause the farmer to have to walk to the mess hall for each seed to be planted, and it won't do anything for the still. You might also use a setup that has no seed stockpile at all, so all seeds have to be collected from where they're dropped for planting, as I don't think seeds spoil.

Refuse hauling has an even lower general priority than food hauling, so using dumping to speed up food moving will only work if refuse hauling is enabled and food hauling is disabled, and you don't have other refuse hauling jobs pent up. Enabling hauling refuse from the outside and the hauling of vermin is probably harmful in this case, for instance.

[Daris]

I'm surprised dumping it hasn't helped.

For the food you could make a temporary stockpile under it to stop it rotting and then set it to give to your main food stockpile.

Unfortunately that would require me to disassemble the kitchen, and building/disassembling buildings also seems to be a low priority.  I'd have to strip all labors other than deconstruction to make a dwarf do it now.  Forbidding seeds in the stocks menu seems like a quicker micromanagement technique.

Temporary links only stockpiles as proposed by Vattic is a reasonable work around.
A micro management intensive version is to use burrows to ensure the food hauler doesn't have access to the seed stockpile, but there is a significant risk the hauler will just do nothing because he'll constantly take and drop seed hauling jobs with the attendant cancellation spamming.

I have NEVER figured out burrows.  The only one I can make work properly is the civilian alert burrow.  I know, in principle, how to use them, but the logistics of keeping the dwarves fed and boozed and supplied with materials is beyond my current knowledge, so I just don't use them.  Linked stockpiles generally works for me so I've had no impetus to learn burrows.

Insofar as dwarves wearing many hats, I have the division of labor arranged pretty well.  Stuff like clothing and glass production goes reasonably smoothly.  It's just this cursed miasma that trips me up.  There's something fudged about this game, though, because I have refuse-gathering from the outside turned off, and yet dwarves are constantly going outside to collect vermin remains.  They'll ignore the emu corpse the war dogs just created, but pick up frog bits to bring inside to the vermin pile.  I've watched them actually cross the river, where no parts of the fortress are located underground, to grab vermin.  I can't figure that out, either.

[§k]

Land under tree is inside.

Dwarves won't collect vermin remains or seeds if there's no such stockpile. Actually, it is unnecessary to stockpile seeds and vermin remains.

[PatrikLundell]

§k might have some of the answer. It might also be a matter of history, i.e. what the setting was when the corresponding remains were generated. At least that's the case with killed enemies that you can change the settings to collect their remains and bodies (I think) or not, but the settings active at the time of death are reflected on the remains and the possessions, so changing those settings later won't affect those already lying about.

It's true vermin remains no longer need to be collected, as they no longer generate miasma. The refuse stockpile settings can be changed to disable vermin, I think.

[Daris]

Land under tree is inside.

HUH.  Well, that would explain it, if counterintuitively.  Lesson: clear-cut immediately.

Thank you!

[Loci]

Dwarves won't collect vermin remains or seeds if there's no such stockpile. Actually, it is unnecessary to stockpile seeds and vermin remains.

It is unnecessary to stockpile nearly everything. Leave your thread in the farmer's workshop, your cloth in the loom, your tables in the mason's shop, etc. Not creating jobs to haul stuff back and forth across the fortress will save lots of labor, and allow the two or three necessary stockpiles (food, refuse, ?) to receive the attention they need.

[Finn]

I'm experimenting with a fort with no migration, and with only 7 dwarves I'm noticing things I never did before about job prioritization. 

I also prefer to play forts with no migration. How do you stop the first two migrant waves?  Are you using dfhack's fix-population in season one?  What version are you playing?

[Daris]

I also prefer to play forts with no migration. How do you stop the first two migrant waves?  Are you using dfhack's fix-population in season one?  What version are you playing?

I'm playing 40.24.  I used dfhack to set a population max of 7, and a strict population cap of 200, with child limits set ridiculously high just in case my original settlers ever settle down.  I think my age differences are too high in this game for that, though, so I may be stuck with 7 forever.

[Gwolfski]

I also prefer to play forts with no migration. How do you stop the first two migrant waves?  Are you using dfhack's fix-population in season one?  What version are you playing?

I'm playing 40.24.  I used dfhack to set a population max of 7, and a strict population cap of 200, with child limits set ridiculously high just in case my original settlers ever settle down.  I think my age differences are too high in this game for that, though, so I may be stuck with 7 forever.

not forever, just about 100 years, seeing most dwarfs at embark are about 60

[Daris]

I wound up starting over and forcibly marrying 6 of my dwarves at embark with the family affairs mod.  It's been a lot more interesting keeping 30+ dwarves fed and clothed and safe when only 7 of them work and hauling prioritization is so kludgy.  The only workaround I've found is to do everything in stages.  Nothing can be multitasked.  Everything is on rotation: a year to grow food, a year to deal with clothing, a year to turn quarry bush leaves into epic salads while everyone but the cook loiters in the dining room waiting for a meal to be finished so it can be moved into the stockpile ASAP.  Harvesting became less of an ordeal once I had a big pack of kids to help out, but cooking remains fraught.