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[muldrake]

I can build a magma kiln, a glass furnace, a smelter, and every other magma item.  Dwarves just completely ignore my request to build a forge though.  The site says "needs metalsmithing." 

Even when I confine every single dwarf with metalsmithing skill to a burrow containing every item necessary to do the building, and turn off all their other skills, they just wander around like morons with no job.

[Akoto]

Dumb questions, but just trying to help ...

Do you have all magma-safe materials for the forge, including a magma-safe anvil?

Is the magma beneath the forge's openings consistently at least 4/7 depth?


If it makes you feel any better, I've been having similar issues, just a different area. I tell my dwarves to chop trees, they don't chop them. Not in any of my save games. Some people think it has to do with the prioritization system.

[PatrikLundell]

You don't need magma beneath a magma facility to build it, but you do need the magma for it to operate (and losing power for even an instant when claimed by a mooding dorf will result in instant insanity).

You'd have to have access to the material to allow the ordering of the construction, so existence of such material should not be the issue. It can be noted, though, that availability of the correct type of items isn't sufficient for the building to be constructed: you need access to exactly those items that were selected when the building was ordered. If, for instance, the magma safe stone lies in the now magma filled tunnel beneath the workshops the job will never be taken up (dorfs are incredibly stupid, but not even they will path into magma to pick up items, even though they readily take shortcuts over areas where magma sloshes up...). Thus, I'd try to remove the building designations and recreate them, to see if they select material that's currently available.

[Bumber]

Magma forge is shaped differently from the others. Can they reach the center tile of the workshop? The tiles to the east and west of the center are impassible.

[PatrikLundell]

Magma forge is shaped differently from the others. Can they reach the center tile of the workshop? The tiles to the east and west of the center are impassible.

Would that block the construction of the building, though, rather than potentially lock the builder in and/or make the finished forge unreachable (and cause you to inadvertently place the magma power tile where it can be stepped into and out of)? It's still an important consideration, though.

[muldrake]

Dumb questions, but just trying to help ...

Do you have all magma-safe materials for the forge, including a magma-safe anvil?

Is the magma beneath the forge's openings consistently at least 4/7 depth?


If it makes you feel any better, I've been having similar issues, just a different area. I tell my dwarves to chop trees, they don't chop them. Not in any of my save games. Some people think it has to do with the prioritization system.

Yes.  It's all 7/7.  I'm building them against a northern wall, with the hole for the magma on one of the two impassable tiles.

The materials are magma-safe.  One has a steel and another an iron anvil, and I've tried a number of the materials in the magma-safe materials list.

The route to get down there is pretty convoluted, though, with lots of pointless excavation increasing the length of time it takes to get there, so I'm building a "grand staircase" that goes directly down there while bypassing all the caverns and other nonsense (there's a nasty fire-breathing forgotten beast in one of the sets of caverns).  Maybe if the path is shorter they'll prioritize it.

I guess my next steps will be trying a slightly different location, confining everyone necessary to a burrow again and putting the exact materials I want into stockpiles in that burrow.  I've already got the anvils coming but they're apparently heavy and the dwarf carrying them is moving very slowly.  At this rate the grand staircase will be done before he gets here.

[Werdna]

The labor to enable on the dwarves is actually Blacksmithing I think.  A common mistake I make is to accidentally enable Metalcrafting thinking it is Metalsmithing.

Edit: looks like that doesn't matter, building the Forge should be satisfied by any skill from the Metalsmithing profession, which includes all the metalworking labors + Furnace Operator. 

[muldrake]

I tried other locations, that didn't work. 

At least not until about eight months later, when the grand staircase directly from the surface (well one layer under the surface) all the way down there was finished.  Then a lot of tasks finished relatively quickly, including the ludicrously dumb task I had assigned to take a bunch of silver tables down to the dining room for the burrow.  This task was absurdly ridiculous and had taken months, but was done very shortly after the staircase was finished.

I actually think that one single task was bottlenecking everything else, because once it finished, the next thing that happened was one of the new location magma forges finally got completed, followed soon by the original ones.

I think it was just a general bottlenecking issue rather than anything specifically related to magma forges.  Why the other magma-related workshops completed first, I don't know.

My theory is that extremely long, convoluted paths to a task may somehow deprioritize them or cause them not to happen until after others do, because the grand stairway project being finished (vastly decreasing the length of paths to tasks) caused a lot of other tasks elsewhere to start proceeding, too.

[Dunamisdeos]

You mentioned a burrow. Are all your dwarves assigned to burrows? If so, this almost certainly prevented the task from completing.

Also, I recall hearing somewhere that jobs are often completed in order of their location from top left to bottom right. Maybe that was related?

[PatrikLundell]

It used to be that there was a significant top left bias, but the jobs rewrite changed things to be significantly more proximity based (according to a dwarf's perception of proximity, which doesn't take paths into consideration).

[Dunamisdeos]

One thing I do is make sure that one dwarf of each profession (metal-smithing, masonry/engraving, etc) has hauling turned off. This means they are generally on standby for a job I want done or started sooner rather than later instead of hauling thread first for a year.

[muldrake]

You mentioned a burrow. Are all your dwarves assigned to burrows? If so, this almost certainly prevented the task from completing.

Also, I recall hearing somewhere that jobs are often completed in order of their location from top left to bottom right. Maybe that was related?

They were.  One of my original attempts to get the task to complete was to assign all the dwarves with necessary skills to a burrow, put stockpiles containing everything necessary in that burrow, give them all living quarters and amenities in that burrow, and then wait.  All the other magma-related workshops and furnaces got done nearly immediately, but the magma forges for some reason didn't.

When the magma forges did complete, I had unassigned from the burrows and done away with that burrow, although I'm probably going to reestablish it with the master class artisans whose quarters are assigned down there, to make sure they actually use the workshops there.

I actually think my problem was simply the fact that I stupidly decided to furnish the dining hall with silver tables, which were ridiculously heavy, and the weird, convoluted path through mostly useless exploratory mining passages caused this to take an absurd amount of time (8 months or so), and that once I completed a grand stairway (3x3 up/down stairs for well over 100 levels), all the tasks bottlenecking everything cleared up.

Also there was a goblin siege in the middle of this and the scramble to the safe burrow caused everyone to drop the tables and everything else they were doing while we fought it off.

It's funny to think I may have nearly lost a fortress because of an error in hauling furniture.

[Dunamisdeos]

Only in dwarf fortress!

[Loci]

You mentioned a burrow. Are all your dwarves assigned to burrows? If so, this almost certainly prevented the task from completing.

They were.  One of my original attempts to get the task to complete was to assign all the dwarves with necessary skills to a burrow, put stockpiles containing everything necessary in that burrow, give them all living quarters and amenities in that burrow, and then wait.  All the other magma-related workshops and furnaces got done nearly immediately, but the magma forges for some reason didn't.

When the magma forges did complete, I had unassigned from the burrows and done away with that burrow, although I'm probably going to reestablish it with the master class artisans whose quarters are assigned down there, to make sure they actually use the workshops there.

The "necessary skills" are completely different for forges vs. furnaces. All the furnaces require architecture (for design) and construction skill matching the material (usually mason/stone). Forges require only a metalsmithing skill. If you assigned your glassmaker and smiths to a burrow, the magma glass furnace would have been designed by an architect who wasn't burrow-hindered and built by any available mason. Meanwhile the metalsmiths might not have been able to access the building material or anvil thanks to your burrow (both are invisibly marked "in use" when you select them for use in the building, and cannot be stockpiled in the burrow afterward).