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[Bumber]

What conditions should I set on the milling order? Will it spam when there are no wheat but many pods?

Check for wheat and whichever material of bag is most common in your fort (to avoid chests.)

The problem is the conditions don't actually set the material used, the production order does. So the job will check for wheat before it fires, but it will mill whatever is available, because you are still teling it "mill plants".

Hence the workshop-specific order with stockpile links.

[Snafu]

What conditions should I set on the milling order? Will it spam when there are no wheat but many pods?

Check for wheat and whichever material of bag is most common in your fort (to avoid chests.)

The problem is the conditions don't actually set the material used, the production order does. So the job will check for wheat before it fires, but it will mill whatever is available, because you are still teling it "mill plants".

Hence the workshop-specific order with stockpile links.

Hence my order says "process to barrel" rather than "mill", which according to the Wiki will turn only sweet pods into syrup. Is that what you wanted, or was it sugar (which may be more of a headache..)?

[Bumber]

Hence my order says "process to barrel" rather than "mill", which according to the Wiki will turn only sweet pods into syrup. Is that what you wanted, or was it sugar (which may be more of a headache..)?

See:

Any ideas about dwarven syrup? I want to process all pods to syrup, and mill wheat to flour, but don't mill pods to sugar. How?

He wants flour, no sugar. The problem is that the milling would interfere with syrup production. Solution: Only give the mill access to wheat.

[Snafu]

Ah; my mistake then

[Qev]

Does anyone have any ideas how the manager might be tracking the quantity of dye powder?  Using what makes sense, "Item: powder; Material: dimple dye" doesn't work at all.  Using "Item: none; Material: dimple dye" does sort-of work, but the values it tracks don't seem to match the amount I have in stock even remotely accurately.  If I have 8 units of dimple dye, the manager thinks that's 85 units; if I have 4 units of redroot dye, it thinks that's 70 units.  Halp? 

[Gigaz]

Has anyone found a way to queue a Milk animal job if there's a milkable animal? The job is there, but I can't figure out the condition. Same for Shear animal.

[Qev]

Has anyone found a way to queue a Milk animal job if there's a milkable animal? The job is there, but I can't figure out the condition. Same for Shear animal.

There is a Trait condition for "Milkable", but since animals aren't 'items' there's no way to actually use it.  The only thing I can think of to do is set it as a daily repeating task and deal with the cancellation spam.

[Snafu]

If you have more than 1 milkable animal there shouldn't be cancellation spam, shirley? That only applies to shearable (which may be better off being set to 'seasonal' or whatever the number of shears per<time period> is relevant)

That's how I work it anyway: milkable is daily, shearable is seasonal; no spam with milkable but occasional shearable jobs are cancelled

[mikekchar]

The was I tend to deal with these things is to:

• Create a farm
• Add a seed stockpile next to the farm
• Add a plant stockpile next to the farm.  Allow all plants in this stockpile
• Some distance away, create a 5x5 room with a still in the middle.  Designate the surrounding tiles to be stockpiles (see below for details). Take from the plant stockpile
• Similarly create a 5x5 room for the farm workshop, surrounded by stockpiles for plants, hair, etc.  Take from the plant stockpile and the farm workshop that shears sheep (I have a farm workshop in my pasture for shearing and milking)
• Finally create a 5x5 room (or even 3x3) for the quern (querns only take up 1 tile, so that gives you 8 squares for inventory, which is enough in my fortress)

The key is to keep the rooms physically separated to a certain degree. The work flow is that the plants are harvested and deposited in the plant stockpile.  Then when there is space in the stockpile near a workshop, it gets hauled there.  When a brewing or milling or whatever operation is set up, then the dwarfs will almost always select the correct plant.  You can "give" from the stockpile to the workshop, but I actually find it to be unnecessary.

I actually have several stockpiles around my still (and kitchens!).  In a 5x5 room containing a workshop, the stockpile will contain 16 squares.  So I will have say 4 for fruit, 4 for random grains, 1 for pig tails, etc.  If a particular booze is popular, I'll make sure to reserve a square for it.  When brewing, the dwarfs will pretty much randomly select from that list (with a tiny probability of selecting something else).

If I have a population of 100 dwarfs, they go through 200 booze in a month.  If I can brew 20 units (a stack of 4 plants) per brewing session, then it means I need to brew once every 3 days.  If I have 1 space for pigtails, then they will make pigtails 6% of the time (1 in 16), or basically less than 1 stack a month.  So it's using less than 1 farm square of output.  You can avoid it almost altogether, but I think variety of booze is important.  (Note, with kitchens you can make roasts with great variety by splitting up the food stockpiles into 4-5 categories).

For milling flour, what you can do is set up 2 workshop orders.  One mills when you have dimple cups.  The other mills when you have *no* dimple cups, but a certain amount of grain.  Then prioritise the dimple cups over the grain.  When you have finished milling the dimple cups, then it will mill whatever amount of grain you wanted to mill.  The only downside to this is that you either have to make sure that you have capacity to dye thread/cloth quickly, or you need to set up a large enough stockpile for holding milled dye.

Earlier someone was asking about brewing.  I completely automate my brewing (and prepared food preparation).  There are a couple of tricks.  First, you need to keep in mind that when a dwarf drinks from a pot, the pot is considered unavailable.  So if you set your production limit to "at most 100", for example if a dwarf drinks from a pot containing 20 booze you will dip down to 80, potentially causing you to make more booze.  If you brew 20 more, then you will end up with 120 booze.  This can be exasperated if multiple dwarfs drink at the same time.  I tend to only stockpile 1-2 weeks of booze.  This ensures even production, but it often means that I end up with up to twice as much booze as I expected to have.

For prepared food, you can mitigate this problem by *never* storing prepared food in pots/barrels.  Also, generally speaking, anything you store in bins should be produced in small quantities, for the same reason.  I once decided to make 8 toys for the 8 children in my fortress.  So I had a production size of 8.  And I thought, "Why not" and made it repeat if the number of toys dropped below 8 (thinking that as children took toys, I would make more).  Of course, all the toys were stored in the same bin.  When a child took one, it triggered me to make 8 more.  When an adult returned the toy to the bin it triggered me to make 8 more.  Luckily it stopped when the bin was full (60, I think).

[Libash_Thunderhead]

Is there a way to add skulls as materials?
There's "body parts" it seems, but that's all.

Never mind, found in traits as totemable.

[Libash_Thunderhead]

Amount of melt-designated items
   available is at least 1

For some reason, it is always "Not satisfied for next check", any ideas?

[mikekchar]

When I get that problem it's almost always because they are being hauled somewhere or carried/used by someone.  If they are in bins, that's often the source of the problem.  If they are armour or weapons that dwarfs are using now, you need to get them to use something else first so that they drop the item.

[Libash_Thunderhead]

I don't think so, because they can do the job if I assign the job to a specific smelter, or remove the condition.
Those are goblinite(copper weapons and armors), it is unbelievable if none of them are available.

[Qev]

Maybe a silly question, but when a work order says (for example), "Restarts if completed, rechecked daily", does this mean that if the work order completes in less than a day it will start over again?  Or will it only complete the work order once and then wait for the next check (ie. the next day)?

[Libash_Thunderhead]

Literally, I think it means just the conditions are checked daily, otherwise it works like a normal repeative workshop order.
For example, if you have 100 plump helmets, the order requires at least 100, then the manager will assign jobs to the workshops, if the dwarves eat 20 of them after the check is done, the jobs are still assigned anyway. But the next day the manager will find the problem and stop assigning new jobs.

Edit* Maybe most jobs require at least 1 day to finish.

By the way, the topic just reminded me.
I had charcoal making order(refined coal at most 50) which went wrong for no reason, the dwarves keep making new charcoals despite there were alredy 1400 of them.
I had to delete the order and create a new one, that fixed the problem. I don't know if it was a bug or I accidentally changed daily to yearly.