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[Hans Lemurson]

I want to chop down my entire forest and turn it into charcoal and furniture.  However, every tree produces many logs that require many dwarf-trips to retrieve, and wheelbarrows don't seem to speed things up all that much.

Minecarts can carry multiple logs at a time and can be moved fairly speedily, but require building a track and setting up hauling routes.  It seems appealing to set up wood gathering routes around my map, but I worry that building the long tracks would end up costing me more time and dwarfpower than just gathering the wood normally, and that all the efficiency would bring me is a bunch of surface tracks in areas that no longer have any wood.

Am I underestimating the power of proper hauling routes?  What is the best way to harvest mass quantities of wood?

[Sarmatian123]

11x11 receiver stockpile without any wheelbarrows and quantum stockpile for dumping. You could have couple quantum stockpiles. One for light wood for special uses, regular wood for burning into fertilizer and heavy wood for hunting bolts. Wheelbarrows will limit working dwarves to 3 dwarves on hauling on any stockpile wheelbarrows are assigned to, so don't assign any to receiver stockpile. Wood gets cleaned from surface very fast by 121 dwarves and if you do it 1st year, then for next 2 years there should be no trees on surface at all. Pity it does not stay like that for ever. You could send your miners to dig downstairs everywhere there is soil. This will show the level below (it helps if there is an aquifer) and it will stop trees and other growth on surface.

[Sarmatian123]

Oh and I would forget... Beware of lakes and rivers. You will need pumps to get logs from those.

[Hans Lemurson]

...I was asking about Labor Efficiency.

[anewaname]

- Logs are light enough that wheelbarrows may effectively slow the hauling (the dwarf needs to get the wheelbarrow first).

- I try to make all log gathering operations into "a mob of dwarfs or none at all". Animals will flee in terror when twenty haulers and their pets approach.

- When using minecarts over long distances, they are most efficient when there is a high volume of loading or none at all. When there is a high volume, the haulers often stay in the area, when there is a low volume, a dwarf will walk 100 tiles to put a log in a minecart, then walk back to the tavern, when he could have just hauled the log back.

- A minecart only holds 10 logs. It takes one job to put a log in the stockpile and another to load it into the cart.

Because of the above reasons, I usually have the dwarfs walk. There will be 300+ tiles of wood stockpiles inside the central fort so when trees are cut, all of it can be hauled inside at once.

On an embark where all the trees were in the corner of the map and surface travel was dangerous, the log-gathering operation had a small gatehouse in the middle of the trees, about 600 tiles of log storage below the gatehouse, and a double minecart track leading to the central fort. The main gate would be closed and the "wood gate" would be opened, haulers and woodcutters used the tunnel and "wood gate" to fill the stockpiles, the dwarfs would finish and came back inside, then the "wood gate" was closed and the minecarts would move the wood to the central fort. I don't know if this setup was more efficient than just having them haul the logs back, but it minimized the time that dwarfs were on the surface.

[feelotraveller]

Although it is debatable I do find wheelbarrows speed up the process somewhat.  Particularly with weak dwarfs.  But I keep my forts compact, so there's that. 

I haven't experimented with minecarts but I think the efficiency gains are questionable, especially since the system itself needs setting up.

My only real minimal tip is to micro the woodcutter(s) to the furthest point from your hauling destination so that when they chop the trees, apart from the first, they fall back towards the entrance.  Can save maybe half a dozen tiles per log this way on average. (I know that doesn't address the question but it might help speed things up a bit whatever approach is taken. )

[Hans Lemurson]

Interesting, good stuff.

My only real minimal tip is to micro the woodcutter(s) to the furthest point from your hauling destination so that when they chop the trees, apart from the first, they fall back towards the entrance.  Can save maybe half a dozen tiles per log this way on average. (I know that doesn't address the question but it might help speed things up a bit whatever approach is taken. )

I've read that dwarves build constructions in a "last in, first out" work order.  Do they chop trees similarly, or just go for the closest designate first?

[Bumber]

For the charcoal, you could just build a bunch of wood furnaces on the surface.

[PatrikLundell]

Interesting, good stuff.

My only real minimal tip is to micro the woodcutter(s) to the furthest point from your hauling destination so that when they chop the trees, apart from the first, they fall back towards the entrance.  Can save maybe half a dozen tiles per log this way on average. (I know that doesn't address the question but it might help speed things up a bit whatever approach is taken. )

I've read that dwarves build constructions in a "last in, first out" work order.  Do they chop trees similarly, or just go for the closest designate first?

They did assign building orders based on the construction designation order before the job rewrite halfway through 0.40.X, but currently construction jobs are assigned using some version of "closest" (which may not be that close to the entrance, if the tavern was underground close to the edge and the builder was in the tavern at the time the job was taken). I suspect wood cutting jobs are assigned using a "closest" approach, but wood cutting (as opposed to construction) can be controlled using priority designations, so you can control where they start by making the starting point tree a priority 1 designation. Tree cutting after that definitely uses some kind of proximity (assuming all priorities are the same, of course).

Note that tree cutting can be interrupted by other activities (such as harvesting and sleeping), and returning to wood cutting will select a tree based on where the dorf is at the time, not where wood cutting was broken off last.
In that vein, my wood cutter doesn't cut any wood unless I disable all hauling activities on him. If they're not disabled, hauling takes priority, and no trees are felled (and when hauling has been cleared away there's still harvesting hauling interrupting the logging).

[FantasticDorf]

Wood hauling has a higher priority than all other hauling, so above or slightly below ground wood depots are required to stop dwarves en-mass requiring more time than nessecary hauling availible wood. To be efficient, id recommend using a minecart & a vertical channel shaft to quickly qsp wood to another storage depot further underground or lead it via minecart track which is more intense but less chance to crush a dwarf under falling logs.

If you're not beelining far underground and ignoring the surface, this wood hauling behaviour is definitely going to space out the layers you are present in for initial farming & collection activities, so a solution of a stone block laid track will eventually be required with the transition periods of your fortress if required.

Cavern wood being stored and industrially used seperately of course closest to its source for similar reasons even though cavern wood can't be differentiated atleast besides being linked to a named workshop with adjacent cavern wood enabled stockpile.

[feelotraveller]

Woodcutters chop the closest - when they take the job - designated tree.  The next cutting job is taken quickly enough that in practice they have not moved from where they cut the last one.  I don't use job priorities (although that is certainly one way to do it) but rather just designate the furthest tree and wait until they take that job to designate the rest.

I disable all other labours on my woodcutters so that won't interfere but they do still break at times for food and drink (and 'only farmers harvest'). When they restart chopping it is the nearest tree to their current location, regardless of pathing, that gets chosen.  With a single woodcutter it is easy, assuming you notice their interruption, to undesignate all but the furthest tree again.  With more than one it can still usually be manipulated by making an educated guess about where they will be when they resume chopping and designating a tree closer to them than any of the designations the other chopper(s) are still working on - sometimes a repeat may be necessary to get to the furthest again.  But I am generally happy to have only one dwarf chopping at a time, even if I tend to skill up 2 or 3.

[Sarmatian123]

I just enable woodcutting on carpenters. Same guild yellow color. I try to end up with 3 legendary carpenters. Redundancy in legendary craftsmen is useful. 3 low skilled woodcutters also start faster on chopping those trees, then 1 legendary skilled. Difference in cutting speed is not very noticeable either.

[Xyon]

Well here's a few things I tend to do.

1) I set up a stockpile near the surface entrance, then a minecart that hauls the wood to where i have workshops set up in the fort, which then dumps into a minecart quantom stockpile.

2) I have a dumping pit on the surface and dump the wood I cut down down a shaft into my fort, which then gets reclaimed and moved into a nearby stockpile which has a minecart that dumps into a quantom stockpile near my workshops. it uses appropriate security and doors to keep invaders from coming down the pit and to keep random dwarfs from getting struck by falling wood.

General thoughts behind this are: I want wood collected quickly, but I want the dwarfs on the surface to not have a long hauling distance from the surface to deep in the fort where I might want my wood. So dwarfs have generally short distance to haul wood from the surface to a main gathering hub for the wood, where the wood can then be hauled in larger quantities from the main hub to where I want it.

[Stench Guzman]

You can always buy wood, charcoal, coke, and lye.  It might be easier to have all that stuff delivered to your trade depot than chasing it all over the map.  It's also dirt cheap.

Generally it's best to stop being dependent on wood since most of what you can make with wood you can make with something else.  You'll need maybe 200 or so beds.  You'll need charcoal at first for smithing but every map has magma on it.  Ash is needed for glazing, lye is needed for soap but these are mostly vanity projects.  Same with siege engines.