Dwarf Fortress > DF Suggestions
Excessively lumped-together item types for stockpiles &a
Aquillion:
Someone noted, before, that dwarves will never drink from a well if there is alcohol somewhere in your fortress. This has a two important effects:* Wells become pretty much obsolete once the player has a decent drink-production line set up. In fact, since a well represents a vulnerability, I'd say that it's a bad idea to build wells, ever.* It is impossible for the player to effectively choose where they want dwarves to go in order to drink. They can place food stockpiles; but placing those carelessly is a bad idea, since they're also used for food, seeds, lye, fat, tallow, inedible things like sweet pods, and number of other essentially unrelated items. This is actually a fairly serious issue... dwarves drink a lot more often than they eat or sleep. Normally, the player would be able to place wells in various places throughout the fortress to let them drink easily; but as soon as you start brewing drinks, that breaks and your dwarves are running all the way back to your food stockpiles.(In a related issue, caretakers delivering a drink to wounded dwarves will never bring alcohol, only water, and will only collect it from rivers. But that's a known thing, I guess.)There are several issues here, but the root of the issue is really the excessively-lumped-together food stockpile. Why do fat and tallow go into the food stockpile, for instance? They're not edible. Similarly, sweet pods and other inedible items would be better placed in some sort of harvest stockpile or whatever... they need to be brought to a processing plant, not to a stockpile near your dining room and kitchen. Lye, I don't even know where it should go, but it doesn't belong in the food stockpile.The bar/block stockpile has a similar issue. Why would the player ever want to put metal bars, stone bars, and glass bars in the same stockpile? They serve different purposes and are produced in different workshops; and since there's no workshop that uses them, there is no advantage to having them all in the same place. And why are ashes, potash, and charcoal brought to this unified stockpile? Having charcoal next to your stoneworks is a waste of time.Also, bags of sand are kept in the furniture stockpile. Both useful and useless refuse is put in the refuse stockpile.I know, of course, that a more detailed system of stockpile controls is in the plans, but what I'm getting at is that I think that some of these should be looked at for potential division into two stockpiles completely. I can't think of any real reason why the player would want a unified stockpile for metal bars, stone blocks, ashes, and potash, for instance....on a related note, there are many lumped-together jobs on the job list that use multiple different skills. This tends to be annoying for the same reason... craftdwarves have three skills, and I don't even know how many metalworkers have. Granted, the player will be able to control this using the new workshop interface and careful job selection, but the manager could still end up assigning a job to the wrong workshop. Why not just divide crafting into three jobs on the job list, divide up metalworking, and so forth, until each job on the job list represents exactly one skill? Right now, there isn't any reason why the player would want a single dwarf to handle all three types of crafting... and even once planned skill-synergy bonuses are in, the player will still probably want to have one dwarf dedicated to one type in some situations.[ September 16, 2006: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
bbb:
i suppose it's also tied in with the nobles... (houses/guilds/etc) though i've no idea where mechanics go in there.. (am i on the wrong track here?)even stranger is wood burning.. you get to be a carpenter for that?.. or was it farmer? (whatever)3 skills only? weave clothesmaking craftmaking (all 3 of those) all go towards being a craftsdwarf..
sod knows where you gain the dissecting skills.. pretty sure not butchering or fishcleaning---as an aside.. do you gain skills from hauling food/stone/furniture? (i'm suspecting that some of my dwarves might have.. maybe i just toggled the wrong thing somewhere though)[ September 17, 2006: Message edited by: bbb ]
qalnor:
In terms of the job end of what you're talking about, my personal preference would be to leave the default as is but create an interface to create custom job categories.The effect of placing a dwarf in a custom job category would have the following effects:1. Change the dwarf's color to whatever color is designated for that custom category.2. Overwrite current job selections with defaults for the new job type3. Give the dwarf a new -default- title
I totally agree with your points on the stockpile situation, though. The only thing I might add to it which is only tangentally relevent but important enough that it bears mentioning is in reference to adding some mechanism to deal with containers which hold a certain type of thing but which are not on an appropriate stockpile. These things are, unfortunately, permanently nailed down and produce some of the same results you've mentioned in reference to food stockpiles.
Aquillion:
I think I was misunderstood about the jobs part. I didn't mean the titles; I don't care about those. Their impact on gameplay is relatively limited. I was talking about "work assignments", the things the player can set directly from the dwarf's jobs menu. Currently, for instance, if you set a dwarf to metalworking, they'll do all of metalworking, armorsmithing, and weaponsmithing. If you have a legendary weaponsmith and he's constantly wandering over to make barrels, this is a problem...I think that all the work assignments should correspond to one specific skill.
bbb:
ah that.. at the moment, the only way to get around it is to have multiple workshops assigned to do different things with assigned dwarvesmaybe they should split the workshops into the corresponding workshops.. eg armorer, weaponsmith, bonecrafts, stonecrafts? (though you'll have to find or make a few more anvils) or should they simply be merged into the corresponding single skill?it seems to me to be a bit silly to have 1 shop with a bunch of dwarves with different skills queuing up to work there
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