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[LordSoth]

Hi all,

It's time again for me to start a new fortress but there is something that bugged me in the past. Usually I produce new clothes after a few years and my dwarfs were happy to pick them up. Unfortunately it seems that they get their paws on any new stuff when's soons as they get aware of its existence. So I rarely get them all equipped in one rush because they drop their brand new stuff and snap a newer me from my clothier. 

Sometimes more than one drops their shirt and run around naked because they came to late...
Well that's why I usually have to produce much more than actually  needed and have a lot of work to clean up my fort in the end.

Okay so my question is:
Can I somehow change their behavior to keep their clothes until e.x. Tattered X or XX?

Or has someone a modded a solution maybe?
It drives me crazy about all that owned stuff piling up in my fort.
Maybe I will draft them all but this means necessary micromanagement and of course feels cheesy...

Any good hints about that? Many thanks in advance!
(I play 44.12 with Mephs Tileset)

[OmahaMH]

I'll add on a question of my own that I wanted to ask on this subject:  what are some good ways to manage clothing production?  It seems wasteful to have clothing constantly being produced since it doesn't wear THAT quickly, so is the easiest way just to periodically produce 25 or 50 or 100 outfits and let them sort it out?  (That then leads into your question.)

[anewaname]

I don't know a way to change their behavior, but they are not competing for the same new shirt. When a dwarf drops their shirt and heads for a shirt, they already own the new one.

You can also set up a Refuse stockpile for Items (armor/headgear/footgear//handgear/leggings) and XX clothing will be sent there and degrade quickly. Combine this with some job manager jobs that produce 10 new trousers when there are less than 10 trousers available and they will always have enough to wear. Then, use stockpiles to collect all the unclaimed clothing in one place.

There are also some DFHack scripts for cleaning up clothing.

[LordSoth]

Okay, if they are not competing (anymore?) it was caused by something else.

Managed production is good but my problem was that they waste a lot of stuff because not the dwarf with the XX shirt gets replacement but the one just walking by with the xshirtx. And they keep storing their owned stuff in their room (as well as all earrings, rings etc. they can grab off my trade stockpile)

Dfhack is my only chance to handle this mess, but it just cleans owned items and doesn't prevent dropping xshirtsx when something new is available. That causes dwarfs on the same floor as the clothier to exchange their socks immediately while the poor miners on the lowest floors get no replacement in the worst case.

So I hoped for a way to change the parameter when dwarfs think about the neccessarity to replace their stuff.
It just makes me angry to see all the masterpieces slightly worn lying around just to fetch something new. Stick to it or get dropped into magma I say. Never heard of sustainability? 

[anewaname]

So, the dwarf with the xshirtx drops it to go claim a new item. Shortly after, the dwarf with the XXshirtXX may drop his XX to claim the x, but the value of the item to that dwarf matters. If the XX item is still worth 100* and the x item is worth 50*, the XX item might seem better to the dwarf, or maybe the XX item is very high value or made of a preferred material. I think XX is still worth 25% and I don't know how preferences effect the valuation.

[Sarmatian123]

Mechanic about cloths is too obscure. If we are to produce cloths or even automatize the cloths production, then we should know about the demand. Why DF is not showing us this information? We can learn about rotting cloths only from tantrums and those then lead to depressions and death. All this should be stupid easy to fix, but game is not providing players with required information. Also game keeps track on all cloths and their ageing and I hear it slowly with time kills fps on DF with repetitious cloth status checks (why not do it once per month or once per season? instead of daily, if it is set to daily.).

Stress same. Health monitor doesn't cover mental issues, which are as important now. Its listing also is filled for some mysterious reason known only to Toady with all fortress's tamed animals. Like... WTF?

Same with missing shearable and milkable animals information to automatize cheese making and yarn spinning in workshops.

I played DF at begining of this year and i wrote down a list of 200 issues I had with the game. Automation of alcohol production was a sheer horror before the patch, which allowed naming stockpiles and workshops. This is something I did post about in game suggestions. Still should allow particular plants or fruits to be recognized for brewing, but at least now setting it up works smoothly. It was an intangible horror before.

Sometimes it feels you don't play DF, but you fight with it to make it playable. It feels awful, because game is not bad. Maybe you should make a list of issues, like me. Then post it in game suggestions. The stress mechanics is not balanced. Prayer in temple still takes way way way far too long, or is not observed properly by devout dwarves, who need prayer not to fall into depression.

[PatrikLundell]

First a language issue: "cloth" is the fabric produced in a loom. "Clothing" is the stuff made out of "cloth" (or leather).

Clothing that's being worn (as in: "on the body" rather than "degraded through wear" [English is a linguistic train wreck!]) is reduced one level per two years. Thus, each dorf requires one replacement for each item once every two years, and there are 10 clothing slots that take items dorfs can produce (they don't make underwear or face covers), so you basically need one complete set of clothing for half of your dorfs every year (assuming they wear clothing and not armor). Dorfs generally replace clothing when it's degraded one level, although there's the mystery of dorfs grabbing stuff just to store it in their rooms.

When it comes to general complaints about other issues, I think it's better not to discuss those in this thread but in appropriate ones.

[LordSoth]

@PatrikLundell
Curiuosly I always run into the situation that when I start my clothing industry the cluttering of old clothes begins.
I usually have about sixty dwarves and make work orders for a complete set of clothes (shoes, socks, trouser, shirt) for them.
By doing easy math there is one item for each dwarf to replace. But I always end up dwarf being partly unequipped, new clothes lying around and not being picked up because their have an owner and of course all the tattered clothes everythere. Last thing is okay but what causes the rest? I have usually some cancelation messages, so maybe two or more dwarf run for the same item? I tried to make more sets than I actually have dwarves but the outcome wasn't better. The more I make the more items are lying around cluttered and owned. So real replacement management isn't working for me.
Dfhack gives me a few options to collect old clothes and cleanowned can help to stop dwarves from blocking 5 trousers e.x.

I may be wrong but the main issue comes along with the situation when more than one dwarf want to replace his tattered clothes. There is no priority and that wrecks the whole process to the mess I mentioned before.

Even more when I try to give leather hoods and cloak to my military. I have to produce them in a separate section of my fort with a squad locked in. Otherwise every dwarf possessing none runs for the new hood *sigh*...
Otherwise I have to produce a lot of cloth cloaks to stop them grapping the military equipment 

[PatrikLundell]

Most of my caravan exports are worn clothes... I produce a full set of clothes for my dorfs, and the military dorfs just get cloth cloaks like the civilians. DFHack's cleanowned is definitely very handy, although it takes an excessive time to gather and dispose of the worn stuff.

[Sarmatian123]

I do not have DFHack. I never used DFHack. I play simple vanilla DF. So, what I have is fps death to my fortress instead. Time after time. Because _CLOTHING_ _SYSTEM_ _IS_ _BROKEN_.

Until 0.44.12 I let Dwarves wear their cloths until they rot off from them. I produced 10 new cloths of almost each type (no shirts, no shoes, no tunics, no leggings) every year. But this new psycho system from 0.44.11 system sends Dwarves into spinning depressions, tantrum and insanity because cloths rotting off them. Now, I learn all the clothing needs to be replaced every 2 years to just maybe have some luck for most Dwarves to not experience a clothing rot.

Why clothing industry was not fixed from the very beginning? Why 2 year periods instead of 5 years? Why none complained about too short 2 years length of wear of clothing for all those years to Toady? Why this broken clothing system was linked and connected to yet another well known, unbalanced and still broken psycho system to cause total fortress depression mayhem? This is not only dead bodies there. Even stupid prayer to some god gives same psycho issues. So you give Dwarf time off work and what it does? Does it pray? No, it idles in depression time after time without successful communion.

How about replacing clothing every 5 years instead of 2? It would let fortress live longer and maybe we could get some higher fps as well. Is playing for 12h in one day just to progress Dwarf Fortress for 1 season, a very exciting? You can do those speeds for 1 month at most, before game gets too boring and too unresponsive. Those things directly are impacting play-ability of Dwarf Fortress. Maybe when we are getting patches for bugs with new versions, then maybe some time Toady could spent on actually looking on existing already features and improving their balance and polishing those already existing systems? It surely wouldn't hurt play-ability.

How about letting leather clothing last 2x longer then silk, cloth and yarn clothing? Leather clothing adds +1 in defense checks for a reason. Let leather clothing last 10 years before getting x-x, then next 10 years before getting X-X and next 10 years before getting XX-XX. Does it sounds better, for the clothing industry, to everybody or is it just only me alone utterly harrowed by this nightmare and sinking slowly into dark, deep, bottomless depression...

[Hans Lemurson]

Broken?  Broken would be if Dwarves were unable/unwilling to replace their clothing and then throwing tantrums about being naked.

Clothes wearing out after 2 years is just a balance issue, creating a much higher demand on your fort's industry than expected.  It's more noticeable than keeping your dwarves fed because of the numerous different types of items that must be produced, the longer production chains, and the fact that the "consumed product" (tattered clothing) doesn't simply disappear like a mug full of finger-millet beer.

The Job Manager system works pretty well at keeping the clothing industry running.

[LordSoth]

How about adding a function to dfhack cleanowned that affects only items which are not actually weared by a dwarf?
Then only stuff stored and lying around would be dumped. That would help a lot...

[feelotraveller]

I have usually some cancelation messages, so maybe two or more dwarf run for the same item?

I think it more likely this is a result of stockpiling jobs interfering.  Do you use bins for clothing?  That would make it worse.  Try it without - personally I leave new clothing in the workshops until later in the game (need a hell of a lot to clutter) and then set up QSP's.

[snip] is it just only me alone utterly harrowed by this nightmare and sinking slowly into dark, deep, bottomless depression...

Yep, that's about it. 

Clothing can be a bit fiddly, as we all have found out at one stage or another.  Just need to work out a way of dealing with it.

[anewaname]

I don't use the job manager to automate clothing, I just keep the dwarfs over-supplied. There are currently 40+ bins of unused stuff.

I buy all of the cheaper clothing from the the caravans (except robes, shoes, and mittens, because I want dwarfs to wear their mail shirts, high boots, and gauntlets). The various dead donate clothing. And the thread/cloth/dye the caravans bring is used to occasionally produce 120+ of some type of item, so that each dwarf can have a few exceptional items, usually cloaks, gloves, and socks. The stockpile of unused stuff gives to a refuse stockpile accepting XX clothing items. The plan is to sell off some of the excess but it rarely happens.

[Bumber]

How about adding a function to dfhack cleanowned that affects only items which are not actually weared by a dwarf?
Then only stuff stored and lying around would be dumped. That would help a lot...

Isn't that what cleanowned scattered does?