Dwarf Fortress > DF Suggestions

Shops, commissions, and free trade

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Furious Fish:
So, I was messing around with my clothier's shop and going through the time-consuming process of making dozens of different items of clothing, and I wondered if there might be a more efficient way of doing it. My idea is, instead of making the player manually order hundreds of items just to satisfy your dwarves' needs, why not let the dwarves themselves automate production?
Here's how it would work:(note: this would all be for economy-enabled fortresses only, of course)Stage 1: You have a clothier's workshop that you're not using, so you select it with q and press shift-F (or something). This sets it to Free Trade mode. From now on, any dwarf who has clothesmaking abilities - and is currently idle - can walk in and use it for whatever he likes. First though, he has to buy the raw materials, so he goes to the cloth stockpile, gets some pig tail cloth, the cost of which is deducted from his money account. He then goes to the workshop and makes a tunic, which he then owns himself. Meanwhile, of course, if the player decides he urgently needs some cloth items, he can interrupt the dwarf by setting the shop back to Command Economy mode, ordering 10 bags to be made (or whatever), then setting it back to Free Trade when they're finished.Stage 2: He now has two options: he can either wear the tunic himself, or he can sell it to another dwarf. He either puts it in his cabinet and walks around looking for a buyer, or, more efficiently, he can buy a shop, and stock the shop with what he's made, and sell it to the general dwarven public.Stage 3: But, I hear you cry, what if the clothier doesn't own a shop, and can't afford one? Here's where the more advanced intra-dwarf trade comes in. A rich dwarf who does own a clothing shop sees that he doesn't have much to sell, so he goes and finds a skilled clothesmaker and chats to him. He then commissions a certain amount of work: for example, he might say "I want 12 pig tail cloth tunics of finely-crafted or higher quality, and I'll pay you 800 for them." The two dwarves will use their Negotiator skill (and other social skills, like Flatterer, Intimidator etc.) to agree on a price. The clothesmaker then buys the pig tail cloth, makes the tunics, comes back to the shop owner, and sells them to him. The shop owner then takes them to his shop, hikes up the price a little, and sells them to other dwarves, for a tidy profit. Now your dwarves are clothed, two hard-working dwarves are richer, and the player hasn't had to micromanage anything.Stage 4: But I don't want my capitalist dwarves to use up all my stock of pig tail cloth while I'm not looking! They won't, because the player gets to easily set how much stock is used, by simply going to the stock screen and setting a yearly quota of how much of each material is allowed to be used for free trade. In the previous example, the player could choose to either manually produce a certain amount of cloth and then set a quota on cloth (50 pig tail cloth per year available for free trade), and just set the clothesmaker's shop to free trade mode, OR he could make the economy work all the way down, by putting a quota on pig tail plants instead of cloth, and setting the farmer's workshop, the loom (maybe the Dyer's shop as well), and the clothesmaker's shop all to Free Trade mode and letting the dwarves work it all out for themselves. It could work for anything, too - if weapon shops get introduced, you could build several different Metalsmith shops, set one of them to Free Trade, and set a quota of 4 steel bars per year. That way your dwarves will make a few weapons to sell amongst themselves, but they'll leave most of your precious steel untouched so you'll still have plenty left over to arm your military.Thoughts?

Kagus:
Well, it sounds good to me, but there might be a few problems implementing it.It does, of course, only affect a fortress that has the dwarven economy in  full swing, but it would actually give it something more to do than just make life hard on haulers.Got my vote.  Always fun to have a little extra mayhem for your dwarves.

Rooster:
my vote too

Fedor:
That sounds really, really cool.  It also sounds tough to implement correctly, but, hey, Toady's the man.   :D

Armok:
Seconded.

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