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[Nite/m4re]

My fortress is cluttered with single bolt piles! It's annoying as marksdwarves will just fill their quivers with a single bolt! There should be an labor setting for item stacking.

[Nanor]

Definitely! This annoys me to no end! Also, you should have to mark what type of bolts you want quivered.

[Sean Mirrsen]

How can it be cluttered with single bolt piles if all fired and thrown objects are auto-marked as forbidden?

Anyways.

Do what I do and sell all the 1-bolts to the traders. However cheap, there is just no better use for them at the moment.

[Tamren]

There is a sort-of way around this. The way I do it is to use the pit trap to maintain bolts. Then gather those up and take em to a different archery range. This one is another pit trap but unlike the first the pit is filled with magma.

Its set up in such a way that the dwarves are locked inside with food and water and they stand on top of the bolt stockpiles. So even though they are firing them one at a time, its not *too* slow. And it lets me get a second shot out of each single bolt.

Oh and BTW I only do this on maps where wood is VERY scarce.

[Forumsdwarf]

Seconded.  There are numerous "hooks" where stacking could take place.

Collecting bolts into a quiver is one such place where stacking could easily be added.  Putting food into a stockpile or barrel is another.

[Sean Mirrsen]

That gives me a VERY nice idea...  about that quiver markup, and a simple way to implement it right about now...  I'll go post in my thread.  

[Capntastic]

The way DF handles items makes stacking complex.   It'll happen eventually, of course.  Imagine how DF handles coins; each made of different metals, by different civs, and even places within the civ, in different years.  It makes abstracting a pile pretty tricky.

[Whiskey Bob]

I believe improved stacking (recombining/dividing/etc) is already in the works.  It should solve a lot of the current problems with stacks - and possibly cause some new ones  

[Sofaspud]

Capntastic: I'm not so sure it's as tricky as you think.  I don't know what model Toady is using (obviously), but if it's anything like, say, a relational database, then each individual coin only needs to retain an ID number that 'points' at the description.  To stack them, you create a new object that consists of X number of coins with the same ID, and destroy the coin objects.  A quick bit of walk-the-tree will clean up references to those original individual coin objects, if any exist.

But that all depends on how Toady manages objects in-game.  I mean, *I'd* handle it like the above, but that's not the only way it can be done.

(To sum up: stacking is trivially easy as long as the objects are abstracted properly.  When they are not is when you run into complications.)

[Align]

The whole point was that they are often unique but very similar.
Now, if you could make stacks of the main category regardless of details, like stacks of "roasts" or "coins", then the whole problem would be solved.

[Paul]

You wouldn't necessarily need stacking to fix the bolt issue. Just make it so that quivers accept X number of bolts instead of 1 stack, and then dwarves will gather up a whole bunch of stacks if they are separated into singles. This would also help with the problem of making bone bolts out of the smaller animals, since even if you make a bunch of 5 bolt stacks the dwarves will gather them and use the same amount.

[penguinofhonor]

.

[Keldor]

What about mixed stacks?  Then a stack would just be a list of items, with various constraints on when dwarves can add to it (max stack size).  The dwarves could then treat the entire stack more or less like a container.

[Bricktop]

quote:What about mixed stacks? Then a stack would just be a list of items, with various constraints on when dwarves can add to it (max stack size). The dwarves could then treat the entire stack more or less like a container.

I think this would be a great idea! If the dwarves just created a 'stack' item whenever they needed to combine the coins. It could hold them in the same way that a barrel holds stuff (so you'd have a coin stack in the same way you have a meat barrel) and whenever a stack is empty it destroys itself.

[numerobis]

quote:Originally posted by Nite/m4re:
<STRONG>My fortress is cluttered with single bolt piles! It's annoying as marksdwarves will just fill their quivers with a single bolt! There should be an labor setting for item stacking.</STRONG>

Another lame work-around for now is to train your forge operator by melting all the single metal bolts (select the bolt; 'f' to claim it back, 'm' to mark it for melting, then set a forge to melting).  Occasionally it seems you even get a metal bar out of it, but I don't know when or why.