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Author Topic: What industries and activities are the most overlooked?  (Read 9322 times)

knutor

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Re: What industries and activities are the most overlooked?
« Reply #45 on: July 30, 2020, 01:55:10 pm »

I don't use wax
Ive a wax figurine industry going. Only thing I make with wax is little action figurines. Stuff them into display cases, in the action figures' bedroom. No idea if its got a repucusion, but it helps me memorize the many bedrooms, for juxtapositioning.
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"I don't often drink Mead, but when I do... I prefer Dee Eef's.  -The most interesting Dwarf in the World.  Stay thirsty, my friend.
Shark Dentistry, looking in the Raws.

Bumber

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Re: What industries and activities are the most overlooked?
« Reply #46 on: July 30, 2020, 03:21:41 pm »

In all my forts, never once have I had a military.  To much work.
How do you do Justice?

If you want justice, I would recommend a lever and a drawbridge, not a CotG.
« Last Edit: July 30, 2020, 03:24:18 pm by Bumber »
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Reading his name would trigger it. Thinking of him would trigger it. No other circumstances would trigger it- it was strictly related to the concept of Bill Clinton entering the conscious mind.

THE xTROLL FUR SOCKx RUSE WAS A........... DISTACTION        the carp HAVE the wagon

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FantasticDorf

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Re: What industries and activities are the most overlooked?
« Reply #47 on: July 30, 2020, 03:37:33 pm »

Public bathing, a clean source of water to have dwarves wash themselves if not done via a shower like system is invaluable, and also promotes the use of soap for good moods. Pump water in, plughole it out to the caverns.

Stops them frolicing around rivers.
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bucketsofbuckets

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Re: What industries and activities are the most overlooked?
« Reply #48 on: August 11, 2020, 01:40:35 pm »

Pottery is the most unused. Not overlooked, but ignored with a good reason. Clear glass furniture and tools are more valuable and faster to make. You can glaze anything really. It works like encrusting. Metal industry can provide even more valuable products.
If you embark with fire clay, pottery is awesome. If you have to glaze it, much less so.

Quote
Automation is the most overlooked, as people think about mine-carts and quantum stockpiles, as an exploit, then a manager's options extension. I automate everything from very start of embark.
What is your process for automating so soon?
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FantasticDorf

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Re: What industries and activities are the most overlooked?
« Reply #49 on: August 11, 2020, 02:39:45 pm »

In all my forts, never once have I had a military.  To much work.
How do you do Justice?

Its possible to play the game entirely pacifistically like some sort of janky cities skylines as a exercise in building and tavernkeeping by settling somewhere quite tame with invaders turned off from init options, which also in turn forgoes sieges & megabeast intrusions. Even so, crime and civil defence against typical natural creatures will probably still mean you want a small contingent of soldiers nearby to keep the peace.
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Wilfred of Ivanhoe

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Re: What industries and activities are the most overlooked?
« Reply #50 on: August 20, 2020, 07:27:25 pm »

I tend to completely overlook the crime/interrogation system, but I generally haven't experienced vampire intrusions and stuff, and my people tend to be OK with the occasional visitor getting stabbed to death by my soldiers when I see an "intelligent undead" on my units list. I will look into it with this next fort, though.
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(1) You grab your golf bag and take out your gun. But then an Orc comes over and sensually gives you a massage. You decide to marry the Orc and live together. Unfortunately, the Orc walks over a slime mine and blows up. You commit suicide, unable to bare the thought of living with out your one true love.

PetGreySquirrel

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Re: What industries and activities are the most overlooked?
« Reply #51 on: September 02, 2020, 07:12:09 pm »

I tend to overlook Glass and Clay industries. In a fort that hasn't set up for magma furnaces yet, I typically don't bother with them at all, because almost all the wood on my map usually goes towards supporting a thriving metal industry, and whatever is left over ends up beds, barrels, bins, splints, or crutches.
I will occasionally use them once I have magma workshops and furnaces set up, and they're no longer competing for resources with the (to me) much more important metalworks.

I also find burrows to be too fiddly for general use, and overlook/avoid them. It seems like any time I assign a dwarf to a burrow, within a season (if not immediately) I end up with "Urist McAnnoying cancels Job he shouldn't be taking up anyway: Item/dropoff inaccesable x60" sorts of things, as my dwarves try to bring things to stockpiles outside the burrow, or take up jobs outside of it
... So I tend to only use burrows as way to get my dwarves inside when goblins, forgotton beasts, or megabeasts show up, and otherwise do the same thing I did in older versions to keep my dwarves where they should be -- lock the doors behind them and make either self-sustaining pocket forts with a specific focus (eg. I often have one down in the magma layers), or use various means of getting my dwarves to drop food, drink, and clothes into the locked-off section.
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Vyro

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Re: What industries and activities are the most overlooked?
« Reply #52 on: September 05, 2020, 06:21:37 am »

Hoo boy, where do I even start.

Minecarts will probably top the list. They are borderline impenetrable at the first glace and ultimately pointless too. As intended they are used to haul shit around, except they still require dorfs to load up, so wheelbarrows are ultimately more efficient unless you run some overly elaborate specific setup. As not intended they make for ballistic weapons of mass destruction via exploiting physics bugs, something that does not sit well with me being purist and all. I used them for some time in automated quantum stockpiles, then branded it heresy as well.

Clay stuff. Normally uses fuel, which immediately robs it of any purpose whatsoever (you can achieve more with just a log). With magma set up it is just... not needed anymore.

Beekeeping. A whole bunch of fiddling for a little mead and wax. Yeah, what do you even do with wax?

Bower's. Situationally priceless, but most of the time a Weaponsmith outdoes it in his spare time.

90% of the revamped Craftsdwarf Workshop. Seriously, making cheap useless crap and decorating it with more cheap crap? Bone bolts and Nestboxes it is. Maybe some rock trinkets to trade before metalworks get up and phase them out.

Siege engines. Sorry, these are just... unfinished.

Animal-related programs. They generate food (something the game absolutely showers you with), bones (eh), leather (only if you exploit the way game handles leather; seriously, would you trust a -chicken leather helmet- with your life?) and disposable combat units (war dogs, which kinda lose the competition to migrants, unless rng blesses you with giant grizzly bears or something, which is highly unlikely; cave critters are great but bugged as hell, you can't breed those).
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Vyro

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Re: What industries and activities are the most overlooked?
« Reply #53 on: September 05, 2020, 06:57:34 am »

And now for the Honourable Mentions.

Paper and books. I freaking love books, they are so much flavour, and something tells me my libraries are the thing that keeps half the population from flipping their lid immediately. Paper is pretty easy to setup and automate. Unless you count parchment, parchment is bloody dreadful.

Glassworks. Kinda like Clay but slightly more fiddly, they, however, hold one true gem - green glass large serrated disks, an unlimited supply of trap components that quickly and reliably separate anything with uncovered meaty bits from said bits in spectacular fashion. Oh, and free magma-safe screw pumps are useful. If you manage to overcome bearded buggers stuffing all the bags full of seeds.

Jewelcrafting. Pretty damn pointless for the amount of busywork it requires. Still, useful when you need an 'artificial artifact' planepacked-style to inflate the value of a small room. Metal variety is much harder to achieve.

Clothing and Dyeing. Whatever anyone says, cloth production is really basic. Integrating dye in it has always been my dream for extra fluff points, but milling always gets in the way. Yes, we can make a figurine from a choice of 50 different types of rock but can't tell a blue mushroom from a wheat ear without separate stockpiles. In a game that now simulates undercover organisations in medieval societies. Right.

Soap. A dozen jobs will keep the fort happy while it stands, nuff said.

Military stuff. Fiddly, buggy, bad interface. That's the one. Eventually you get over it and start having fun with Schedules, which let you automate fort defence as well as everything else. Or you can just pasture dozens of war dogs absolutely everywhere. Burrows can be very useful if done right and sparingly.

Justice. Cumbersome and unneeded. Avoid unless you hate yourself (I do), although shoving the occasional psycho in a brig is kinda fun. Crime stuff is broken as hell right now. Usually 'Dwarven Justice' is the way to go (it has military command squad instead of the sheriff and magma and drawbridges instead of cells).
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Leonidas

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Re: What industries and activities are the most overlooked?
« Reply #54 on: September 05, 2020, 12:52:42 pm »

I'm surprised that so many people don't use glass. It has a big strength in that it produces objects out of nothing. Stone and metal are finite resources, and mining them increase the number of exposed tiles, which drains FPS. A magma glass furnace allows you to make as many objects as you want without expanding your fortress. Green glass gems, in particular, are handy for training up gem cutters and setters. And glass is an easy way to make magma-safe pumps.
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Dracko81

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Re: What industries and activities are the most overlooked?
« Reply #55 on: September 06, 2020, 01:23:07 am »

@HungThir: The Manager does round robin for as long as you have the material, but once you're out of material the job allocation will start at the top, so you produce one cloth, one pant order is generated, and there's nothing for the others. Once you've produced a second piece of cloth the allocation starts at the top, i.e. pants.

The manager orders can PRODUCE different sizes, but it cannot base the production on the same size, so if you have 11 ogre sized pants from the last siege, the check will say that you have more than 10 pants, so your humies won't get any new ones.

Once I have 10 non masterworks pants production stops producing pants. There will be a short production spurt after you've sold off the garbage, typically consisting of 1 masterwork and 9 sub par quality ones.

Workshops: Exactly. The moronic manager will split the stone crafting jobs over all of the stone crafting, wood crafting, and bone crafting craftdwarf shops, resulting in all crafting grinding to a halt once a crafter gets a mood, gets to sleep, or goes on a socialization/prayer bender, because his type of job sits at the top of the list in all the workshops.

I strongly disagree about the quality of the Manager. It's got a number of elements for a powerful system, so the potential is there, but there are too many parts missing for it to actually work decently. Many of the problems lie in the input criteria (it doesn't know how to figure out if you have any shearable animals, for instance, resulting in a steady stream of cancellation reports if you try to use it), but you also have production deficiencies (want your still to top up your stocks of Swamp Whiskey? You're out of luck, unless you think producing random types of (plant based) booze until you've happened to produce enough Swamp Whiskey is rational). There is no support at all for time of year (fruit ripens during the summer, so you might want to cut down on some jobs and ramp up on others, for instance). Size, wear, quality: all missing. There's also no support for dedicating workshops to particular tasks, although you can work around it to some extent with skill limits, as mentioned. However, you'd want your web processing loom down by the cavern to handle web collection and processing, not the "ordinary" ones, for instance, and I want my Farmer's Workshop by the pasture to handle shearing/spinning, not the one down in the workshop area. Note that DF itself has the functionality for ordering the production of e.g. a particular type of booze, but neither the UI nor the Manager supports it. I've mentioned the lopsided handling of production orders on supply shortages: there's a need to be able to group production so round robin production is performed within the group even when the supply dries up: when supplies become available again production should continue where it was broken off. There's a need for multiple use input to be split into different production chains rather than have the production being random based on in which order dorfs happen to take the jobs (in particular if you're short of dorfs, so they have multiple hats). Try to use the Manager to split Pig Tails into cloth, booze, and food, for instance.

Sorry but you don't seem to know that a lot of what your issues are can be done with planning and tweaking.

Firstly if you are running out of cloth for making clothing, this is not your managers fault.  It is the lacking of planning to ensure there is enough cloth, either you need to process plants/animals faster or you need more farms/animals.  Has nothing to do with the manager.  Not sure how you're using pig tails in food either, but if you don't have enough pig tails just make more farm orders for them.

With craftdwarves workshops you can set these to handle specific things, so your stone craftdwarves workshop will not take orders for wood.  If you set these up as you build your workshops, it is never a problem.

As for Booze, it is a little more complicated and requires that you set up small stockpiles for each plant you what you make booze for with a linked workshop and make repeatable workshop orders in the workshop profile for each still when supply is low.

You have multiple farmers workshops for different tasks, this is fine too.  Set the one you want to handle shearing and the others to not and your done.  Or just use the Workshop Profile to limit it to the single farmers workshop.  The later you can do for web collection looms too.

You can definitely dedicate workshops to particular tasks with minimal effort and without any additional work once set up.

The manager is very powerful for automation of tasks.  I rarely give workshops orders after the first year, just tell the manager to build things I want for expansion plans and they deal with the tedious parts.

I know this post was a few months old, but since there is some misinformation that wasn't corrected...


For me Soap/Bees/Pottery.

Pottery just doesn't have a use that can not be done by something else, usually better.

Bee keeping just isn't profitable enough to make it worthwhile.  If I have a need for mead on multiple dwarves, I'd do it, but otherwise it is a waste of dwarves time.

Soap, not so much that it is hard, just that it is rarely needed.  The dwarves can live without it and they don't mind.
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Salmeuk

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Re: What industries and activities are the most overlooked?
« Reply #56 on: September 06, 2020, 06:49:50 am »


Sorry but you don't seem to know that a lot of what your issues are can be done with planning and tweaking.


Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is not so much an industry but a trade good, but I specifically request large gems from the traders. At 500 - 3000 dwarfbucks a pop, these act as a 'wealth sink' that lets me actually USE all my gold and silver. I find them to be interesting objects as well. They are often decorated with interesting images, or unique configurations of other materials. For any player that likes to visualize these kinds of objects, I highly suggest requesting emeralds, diamonds, or other rare gems from the traders. It's a joy seeing what wondrous Arkenstone-esque jewels are up for sale!

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TheBeardyMan

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Re: What industries and activities are the most overlooked?
« Reply #57 on: September 06, 2020, 08:19:46 pm »

None that I overlook entirely, but a few that I tend to start very late:
  • Wool. Because there's no "auto shear" standing order, and shearable animals aren't "reagents" for the purpose of controlling shearing work orders.
  • Milk / Cheese. Because there's no "auto milk" standing order, and milkable animals aren't "reagents" for the purpose of controlling milking work orders.
  • Meat / Prepared Meals. Because the products are perishable and there's no "do now" for hauling items to a stockpile.
  • Milling / Glassmaking. Because bags are involved and chests interfere with conditions for work orders for making bags.
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Bumber

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Re: What industries and activities are the most overlooked?
« Reply #58 on: September 07, 2020, 12:03:34 am »

  • Meat / Prepared Meals. Because the products are perishable and there's no "do now" for hauling items to a stockpile.
  • Milling / Glassmaking. Because bags are involved and chests interfere with conditions for work orders for making bags.

Given the time it takes to rot, something's seriously wrong if your food isn't getting getting to the stockpile in time.

Use "sewn-imageless" trait for bags.
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Reading his name would trigger it. Thinking of him would trigger it. No other circumstances would trigger it- it was strictly related to the concept of Bill Clinton entering the conscious mind.

THE xTROLL FUR SOCKx RUSE WAS A........... DISTACTION        the carp HAVE the wagon

A wizard has turned you into a wagon. This was inevitable (Y/y)?
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