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[gestahl]

I'm sure this isn't the answer you want, but outfts of leather and bone armor last forever and only need the civvy reservsts to be active long enough to put them on.

[Dunamisdeos]

I usually dedicate a max size farm to pig tail production. I then use the manager to mass produce a set of clothing for my whole fort every year.

[Abaddon]

My current fortress has 40 female llama, 300 llama cloth and 1800 llama thread.  Having 40 also has the added bonus of being able to have 1 farmers workshop do milk/make cheese jobs on repeat without getting cancellations.

They produce 14-15 hair per shearing, I don't think I've been shearing them for 2-3 years now.

[cochramd]

I like to embark in jungles and forests and get a good supply of plant cloth just be collecting the local plants over and over again, though I don't get tons of it until I start farming.

[evictedSaint]

I rarely have any difficulty with clothing.  Ordering a full shipment of cloth, silk, and leather from the mountainhome is more than enough to last 5 years in game.

Then it's a simple matter of going to the manager and ordering (# of dwarves) cloth shirts, trousers, and leather shoes.  Plus silk cloaks, hoods, socks, and jackets if I have a surplus and I'm feeling nice.

[Max™]

My unfortunately favorite method to deal with this?

All civilians without useful military skills go into CivvySkivvies squads which assign leather helm/armor/leggings/boots. Once they're geared right that squad can go to over clothing and use whatever they want with the bare minimum that they won't be uncovered (and have a bit of protection in case of shit) with optional shields/basic weapons or dual shields depending on the environment.

I make clothing for only the most worthy of dorfs, the miners and the woodcutters. Only they can't be assigned armor normally. Hunters can go to hell, that shit should have been disabled in the first place, you and the fishermen can take your life's calling and shove it down the same hole you're hauling that stone to.

[Alfrodo]

Oh god, the clothing industry.

The trick with a clothing industry is not all the management into weaving, and leveling clothiers.

It's keeping it in check, and not obsessively make thousands of rediculously high quality, robes, dresses and socks.

I power leveled a weaver and clothier to constantly pump out Masterwork clothes.  That were masterfully dyed black, and made with masterwork cloth.

By the end of the ordeal,  I had several hundred thousand dollars in dresses, which went for 2k-4k each...


Also, my framerate died.  I do not recall why I did this.

[Snaake]

My current fortress has 40 female llama, 300 llama cloth and 1800 llama thread.  Having 40 also has the added bonus of being able to have 1 farmers workshop do milk/make cheese jobs on repeat without getting cancellations.

They produce 14-15 hair per shearing, I don't think I've been shearing them for 2-3 years now.

Interesting to hear this, it's not a very common thing to do. What would you say is the minimum amount of animals to stop milking/cheesemaking cancellations? For example, would 30ish be barely enough when you take into account breaks etc., but 40 is nice to get rid of all of them? Oh, and did you check/notice/know if the spinning thread bug was fixed? It used to be that a wool-producing animal would give stacks of e.g. 8-15 wool when sheared, but when you spun that, it consumed the whole stack to make 1 wool thread. I think bone had a similar problem at some point too, but there's usually much more bone available.

[zdrgn]

Interesting to hear this, it's not a very common thing to do. What would you say is the minimum amount of animals to stop milking/cheesemaking cancellations? For example, would 30ish be barely enough when you take into account breaks etc., but 40 is nice to get rid of all of them? Oh, and did you check/notice/know if the spinning thread bug was fixed? It used to be that a wool-producing animal would give stacks of e.g. 8-15 wool when sheared, but when you spun that, it consumed the whole stack to make 1 wool thread. I think bone had a similar problem at some point too, but there's usually much more bone available.

I wasn't asked but I'll throw in my two dwarfbucks.  You could halve his number by doubling the distance from the farmers workshop to the pasture.  The travel time would slow down your production, giving sheepies time to regrow.  I probably only had a dozen or so alpaca and when I was using the workshop I built near my farms(quite a distance from the pens I setup.)  I never got my repeat shear order cancelled.  You could also alternate Milk with Shear, and have another workshop dedicated to spin thread / make cheese.    I finally went and built these close to the pastures, but now I have to watch or they have cancelled repeat orders and I have to requeue.  I also butchered half my flock because I'm sub 20 FPS with 220 dwarves and 50+ livestock.  I haven't watched my stockpiles enough to say for sure if the bug you mentioned is gone.. but I usually find my spin thread task still repeating long after my shear animal task has been abandoned.

Edit:Fix some of my atrocious grammar.

[Gigaz]

I usually order all types of leather with highest priority from the early dwarven caravans. They tend to bring so much of it that, if you buy it all, no further raw material for the clothing industry is necessary for a very long time.

[MantisMan]

I usually order all types of leather with highest priority from the early dwarven caravans. They tend to bring so much of it that, if you buy it all, no further raw material for the clothing industry is necessary for a very long time.

Leather is usually pretty cheap, at least compared to the cloth bins.  I wonder why I never thought of this. Thanks for the idea.

I always wondered why leather was so much cheaper than cloth, since leather clothes in real life are usually so much more expensive than anything made of cotton.

[Bakaridjan]

I generally rely on making all my own clothes and burn all the goblin stuff, cause, yeah who wants to wear that? Early I rely on getting cloth and thread from caravans, until my own cloth industry is up and running.

I actually have one trick that I haven't seen mentioned here yet. Once you find the 1st cavern level, if it has cave spiders in it, you can dig out other areas of that same level, not open to the cavern and you will get cave spiders in them and they will leave silk around. I usually dig out a 30x30 or 40x40 patch somewhere and use it as an underground silk farm. You could probably make it more efficient by putting a loom right down on that level and assigning it exclusively to collecting silk thread. I haven't messed with that much, because generally lots of dwarfs and lots of time makes up for micro-managing efficiency. Like others have said, eventually it gets easy to have massive amounts of masterwork clothing laying around that you have no use for.

[Chagen46]

I even resorted to purchasing Rope Reed from the hippies, but the merchants kept getting eaten by Giant Armadillos (lol irony), making that an unreliable source at best.

I'm glad to see that DF is exactly the same as it was when I stopped playing a few months ago.

[Snaake]

I even resorted to purchasing Rope Reed from the hippies, but the merchants kept getting eaten by Giant Armadillos (lol irony), making that an unreliable source at best.

I'm glad to see that DF is exactly the same as it was when I stopped playing a few months ago.

A few months? That quote would've been valid a few years ago...

In fact, the dfwiki pages for 23a (the oldest ones that exist) already have articles on rope reed, elven merchants and giant armadillos, and from the release notes I managed to verify that at least elven merchants, probably all 3, have existed in the game since the first version to be published (21a, in 2006).

WarTraders... war traders never change...

[Baffler]

I rarely have any difficulty with clothing.  Ordering a full shipment of cloth, silk, and leather from the mountainhome is more than enough to last 5 years in game.

Then it's a simple matter of going to the manager and ordering (# of dwarves) cloth shirts, trousers, and leather shoes.  Plus silk cloaks, hoods, socks, and jackets if I have a surplus and I'm feeling nice.

This. I generally limit my population to 100 dwarves though so your mileage my vary. If traders can'take be relied on one of two of the fort's 2×10 farm plots just grows pig tails in the Autumn. Every dwarf is entitled to a cloth tunic, trousers, and socks, and his choice of leather shoes or low boots. The goblins' filthy rags go to the magma on principle, but I occasionally do a production run of luxury items if there is a surplus of raw material. I've done it like that pretty much since I figured the industry out, it seemed silly that dwarves had to rely on battlefield salvage to keep themselves covered but I didn't want to spend too much time on it either.