Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

Author Topic: Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter Work Orders  (Read 390 times)

rhavviepoodle

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Spring/Summer/Autumn/Winter Work Orders
« on: November 24, 2016, 01:50:28 pm »

Currently we can set work orders to be completed on a seasonal basis, which is very useful for shearing or milking livestock, but it would be nice to be able to set a job to be completed on a daily basis, but only during a specific season. For example, a fort that relies mostly on underground farming might choose to grow dimple cups during autumn and sweet pods during the spring. If a player wanted his or her dwarves to mill dimple cups but not sweet pods, then autumn and winter would presumably be the seasons to do so.

Yes, it is possible to set up draconion give/take relationships with stockpiles but those are fairly klutzy and don't always work (an empty bag needs to be in the exact right stockpile before being claimed for a task, and so on). Another use case might be when the player doesn't mind plant stockpiles being used faster during production seasons but wishes to preserve plants during off-seasons. For example, if a player has a fairly large farm and their autumnal cave wheat harvest is late, they may not be able to grow another batch at all during that season. This means that they could be running a booze deficit and might not want all of their autumn wheat milled into flour (or pig tails turned into cloth and paper).

I have seen a suggestion that certain plants be marked as millable on the kitchen menu (or whatever menu it becomes overhauled in the future), which would potentially address this issue as well. They don't need to be mutually exclusive, though. It could be useful to designate a given plant be used one way in one season and another way in the following season, depending on a fortress's supplies and demands. Sure, it would contribute to the (already daunting) amount of micromanagement involved in automating tasks, but the nice thing about the current job orders and self-sufficient fortresses is that once you've figured it out you really -don't- need to touch it again (except for minor tweaks and troubleshooting). In essence, it's a lot like a puzzle, where you not only have to figure out a functional fortress layout, but functional interactions between the labors involved.
Logged