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Author Topic: Specific labor preferences?  (Read 504 times)

RPB

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Specific labor preferences?
« on: August 14, 2006, 02:01:00 pm »

Maybe it's a function of one of the later nobles or something, but is there any way to tweak a dwarf's labor preferences within the broad categories used on the [v][p][l] menu? Some of these like "craftsmaking" are particularly annoying because you can't tell your skilled stonecrafter to work at the workshop with stone crafting orders instead of the one with bone crafting orders. But even for things like carpentry and masonry it would be nice if you could toggle preferences for individual tasks. I always have a problem when I start getting immigrants coming in, where for example I want to make a bunch of fancy tables and doors to keep up my expanding living/dining areas nice, but I also need blocks--but I can't find any way to make my skilled mason work on the fine furniture, so half the time he ends up wasting his talents on blocks while my stupid immigrant mason churns out cheap crappy doors and tables at the other workshop.

If it's not possible to tweak labor preferences this specifically, there should be--the [v][p][l] menu certainly doesn't need to get any longer, but it would be great if there was a way to "zoom in" one level more detailed and turn off individual task preferences within each of the categories on the labor preference menu. So for example if you have someone skilled in stone crafts but not bone crafts you could go to the craftsmaking selection on the labor preference menu, press... something... and go to a menu for individual crafts preferences and turn off crafting of bone, wood, etc. If you need your stonecrafter to do something else you could just turn off "craftsmaking" from the base [v][p][l] menu and they wouldn't do any crafting, and then when you were ready for them to get back to work you could turn craftsmaking back on and it would remember his settings for each sub-preference of craftsmaking so he'd go back to doing stone and only stone. A system like this would also make it easy to clean up the [v][p][l] list a bit by categorizing some types of jobs under a broader heading--for example, if I need someone to work on something really importantI turn off preference for all hauling jobs so they won't waste time carting useless crap aronud, but then it's awfully inconvenient having to turn all hauling preferences back on when they finish and are just standing around idle. If there was a base "hauling" preference you could toggle on/off as well as individual preferences for each type of haul job it would make things a lot smoother.

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Toady One

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Re: Specific labor preferences?
« Reply #1 on: August 14, 2006, 03:47:00 pm »

That sounds reasonable, although I suppose that because there's some overlap between various types of jobs, no one grouping is going to be good for everybody.  It wouldn't increase the number of presses to nest them though, since you have to scroll like a fiend as it is now.
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Aquillion

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Re: Specific labor preferences?
« Reply #2 on: August 14, 2006, 04:14:00 pm »

I keep trying to use pageup and pagedown in that menu and accidently moving the cursor diagnonally as a result...
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