Note : This turned into a pretty damn long rant that veers off and on-topic. I do apologize and don't mean to thread-jack, but this turned out to be highly therapeutic as I was about to start my own tantrum spiral when I last shut my game down. I'll try and spoiler the off-topic and overly ranting parts for those who don't want to hear about the best fort ever. EVER.
As a new player I've been pretty well flabbergasted and infuriated by the hauling/stockpiling thing. Things work okay at first, but every time I try to specialize and expand an industry beyond "grab everything from everywhere and do stuff to it" things get all wonky. Barrels seemingly glued to the ground in one stockpile, dwarves picking up containers and running off with them (Really? A seed barrel with a bajillion seeds to pick up the one seed under the still?), stockpiles that should be snagging things but sit empty, etc.
I lost one fort to a starvation-induced tantrum spiral, and I'm barely keeping my current one afloat. One bullseye and the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate. I spent a year and a half holding up my food and drink industry by hand while trying to get the stockpiles and workshops to play nice with each other. I finally gave up and just told all my fields to grow plump helmets and strawberries, de-linked all the stockpiles and set my brewers to work full time with the dwarves eating whatever plants are sitting on the ground. It's working okay so far, but it's not the ideal situation.
Thought I was done for sure when a goblin ambush showed up. I had a good portion of my military dwarves picked out, but they were completely arms and armorless because there is no metal industry yet. All my run-time has been devoted to keeping my dwarves from starving or thirsting to death and following them around to see where the hell they're going with that seed barrel, if they ever pick up that empty barrel in the drink stockpile, etc. Along with setting up and attempting to de-bug a labyrinthian plumbing system and power-supply so they can have pretty waterfalls to look at (it's also in front of the entrance/exit to every z-level, so it should work as automatic decontamination too!) and wells to drink from and bathe in.
As soon as the spring thaw came I flipped it on and it promptly began flooding my fortress from the bottom up. And the lowest in-use level of my fortress are the low-rent bedrooms. Good news! I've been so pre-occupied that the bedrooms aren't assigned, though there is an injured military dwarf recuperating there. At least my mayor went nuts, dragged a corpse to the butcher shop and made a coffin out of him. Handy! Anyhow, I -think- the problem is water pressure coming straight off the river, so I need to put a wall in and change it to a diagonal flow right where it comes off the river. Or perhaps I can't have an indefinite flow from the river 12 z-levels down without it flooding everything in between, though I thought for sure I'd done it successfully before.
I just can't seem to get barrel and bag management straightened out. I'm getting closer at least. Small stockpiles and staging stockpiles seem to be key. That said, there are a lot of nuances of the system I still can't figure out. They're not adequately explained in the wiki (at least to the depth or simplicity I apparently need), and I can't readily find an explanation or solution on the forums. Such as empty barrels can be stored in furniture stockpiles, or various food stockpiles. The food stockpile barrels are what the max barrels setting is for, though how all these interact with one another and when workshops and other stockpiles can take from them is fairly "spooky action at a distance"-y for me.
Obviously both stockpiles can't take from each other or there'd be a never-ending job list of moving barrels back and forth. So do the furniture stockpiles and workshops take empties from the food stockpile (assuming they're not prevented by linking)? And is there some method for preventing all my bags being used to hold one seed? I think this is where the staging stockpiles come into play, though I'm hazy. I'll have to re-read this thread. Again.
One more rant since I actually do feel a lot better about my fortress after venting a bit here.
Levers. I spent a couple of months constructing hatches, linking them to levers, pulling levers, and repeating in various orders trying to get one lever to act as fill and drain for various parts of my plumbing system. Seems it just can't be done. Lever to on is always open for floodgates and hatches, so I can't have off be an open hatch and closed gate (drain system for maintenance/expansion) and on closed hatch and open gate (fill system and prevent drainage). This doubles the number of levers I'll need to run my fortress. Because the river and all surface water freezes in winter I built in some redundancies in case of emergency. Here are the levers I'll need if my plan comes to fruition :
reactor fill (straight from river)
reactor drain
backup reactor reservoir fill (cistern capable of filling the reactor 2-3 times or so during winter months)
backup reactor reservoir drain (into the reactor!)
cistern fill (too big and deep to easily have a backup reservoir, or I'd have one!)
cistern drain (in case any dwarves fall into the well or manage to take out a grate and fall into a waterfall or something...or if it starts to flood my damn fortress)
jail reservoir fill
jail cells 1-5 flood (these will have to be individual since I only want to flood one room at a time, so 5 levers)
jail cells 1-5 drain
entry reservoir fill
entry-way flood
entry-way drain
I think that's 20 levers. I'm going to need a control room, and hopefully I get a vampire to lock in there with some supplies in case of nuclear winter or whatever. Though that will probably mean two more levers so I can feed him children from the top and drop their corpses out for burial. Why would I want to feed a vampire dwarven children? I'm glad you asked! I'm thinking I can pin the murders on moody dwarves that can't find the materials they're looking for. That gets them into the jail cells which I can then flood, drain, retrieve corpse and bury. No berserk dwarves interrupting the forward march of civilization! May not work. I've never kept a fortress alive long enough to fully explore the justice system, or if moody dwarves can even be taken to jail. Worth trying though!
Is this system overly big and complex? Perhaps. Needlessly so? Could be. I just wanted some damn waterfalls and wells and came up with more and more things to add to it. I took the Keep It Simple Stupid philosophy and threw it right out the window.
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Topic: The new stockpile behaviour is very helpful, except when it's not. (Read 8478 times)