I like playing the "dwarfish mother" - If you don't pick up your clothes, they are going in the magma!
But really, once you have a clothes industry, it makes sense to upgrade to new fashion liberally. Each dwarf has about 6-8 pieces of clothing. Clothing does not wear out for a couple of years. With 100 dwarfs, you only need something like 2 pieces of new clothing a day -- it doesn't even keep a single clothier busy.
As Fleeting Frames said, the key to automating the clothing industry is linked stockpiles. I keep the "Work In Progress" (WIP) fairly low (because you only need 2 pieces of cloth a day...). So I have a dyer's shop with a thread stockpile. The thread stockpile gives to the dyer's shop. The loom has a thread stockpile that takes from the dyer's shop and takes only from links (this ensures that the stockpile only contains dyed thread). That thread stockpile gives to the loom. The clothier's shop has a cloth stockpile that takes only from links and takes from the loom. Again, that ensures that the stockpile only contains dyed cloth.
With manager orders, I usually set a condition of having 2 days of stock in the intermediate stockpiles. So if I think I'm going to be using 2 pieces of cloth a day, the `p` condition on the dyer will be at most 4 dyed thread and the `p` condition on the loom will be at most 4 dyed cloth. You also need to make sure that all of the job sizes are the same. So if you are doing 2 clothing checked daily, you will need a dye job of size 2 and a weaving job of size 2.
Because there maybe something like 8 different clothing types that you want to make, you probably actually want to have 8 different recurring jobs (checked daily) and you can use your inventory levels to limit production. So if you only produce 2 dyed cloth a day, then you will only be able to produce 2 pieces of clothing a day. This let's you specify a single job for each, checked daily, but not be making 8 pieces of clothing a day.
There are lots of things you can do after you get the basics set up. For example, you can reject intermediate products based on quality. If you are picky, you might want to only use masterwork cloth, for example. If the input to the clothier only accepts masterwork cloth, then that's all you will use. The rest will pile up in the loom. You can then add a "reject" stockpile for other cloth and dump it occasionally, stick it in bins and sell it, or even use it as an input for sewing images later down the production line.
There are limitations. Never use bins or barrels in intermediate stockpiles (unless you know what you are doing, and even then it usually isn't a good idea). Every point in a production line needs it's own workshop. You can't reasonably have loops because it usually breaks the stockpiles (unless you are careful). It's easy to make mistakes with linked stockpiles, so you have to watch it like a hawk while you are setting it up.
But all in all, setting up the production line is quite fun. I enjoy this part of the game more than anything else, actually.
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Topic: production orders with conditions (Read 1174 times)