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[ShadowDragon8685]

Okay, here's my thing. First off, I don't want to hear any blab about cheating. You have fun your way, I'll have fun my awy.

Anyway, I brought along several thousand of both Tower-Cap, Granite and Steel bars, anticipating a potential problem finding wood, metal, flux, and to a lesser extent, wanting to have a lot of supply of stone suitable for construction handy, so I didn't have to halt my grand castle creation in the middle just to go dig some more pits.

Anyway, I want to reserve my wood for the construction of beds, burning for charcoal (at least until I find the magma), and the like. I don't want to see floors or (heaven forbid) walls built out of the damn stuff. Unfortunately, it seems to be random which of these materials is "nearest" to any given work site, and as a consequence, I just assigned about 40 floor tiles to be made of tower-cap.

Is there any way I can blanket-forbid the use of steel and wood as a construction material, taking them off the construction menus for walls and floors, or at least pushing Granite to the top no matter which is nearest, so I can just hit F - Enter - Enter - Left - F - Enter - Enter and so forth and so on?

[Derakon]

All you can do at this point is to forbid your wood and steel outright (preferably from the stocks page).

[Solara]

It's not really random, as long the materials are on the same level as the wall that's being built, the closest ones will be on top of the list. (things only get weird when you start dealing with separate z-levels, it's the same problem that leads a mason to travel five levels up to grab a stone instead of using the one that seems to be right next to him.)

[Yourself86]

Story of my life.

I'm a big constructor myself and the only way to avoid this problem is to build your wood stockpiles (or any other stockpiles for materials you don't want to use for construction) a few z-levels deep underground and making a stone stockpile of the desired stone right next to the construction site (or a bar/block-stockpile, if you like to turn your raw stone to blocks before constructing things of it - this way you will get more material in fewer space, the walls/floors will be worth more and you train your masons).

The other way would be to forbid every other single piece of material that could get in your way - though with a few thousand pieces of wood and steel bars that would be too arduous a task.

[Karpatius]

Remember: dwarfs ( and the game ) go for the nearest source, "nearest" taking into account Z-levels...

Meaning that if you have materials on two levels, the one that has fewer direct steps through the floor will be handled as the "nearest one, no matter what path actually goes to the source.

Calculating the paths to each piece of stone, wood or whatever would choke any processor for a while, while "steps" is still a reasonably functional way to do it.

[ShadowDragon8685]

quote:Originally posted by Karpatius:
<STRONG>Remember: dwarfs ( and the game ) go for the nearest source, "nearest" taking into account Z-levels...

Meaning that if you have materials on two levels, the one that has fewer direct steps through the floor will be handled as the "nearest one, no matter what path actually goes to the source.

Calculating the paths to each piece of stone, wood or whatever would choke any processor for a while, while "steps" is still a reasonably functional way to do it.</STRONG>

It would be nice if there was a way to (a) restrict to the same Z-level, or (b) If the number of steps in the found path is > 250% (or whatever) of the total "steps", disregard that piece and find another one in a different area.

Even so, I'm not so much angry about the time it takes them to get the material as I am the fact that when I'm constructing a long line of stuff (walls, floors), and I get into a keyboard-jamming, I get wood and metal used instead of @^*)@^ing stone!

[ June 13, 2008: Message edited by: ShadowDragon8685 ]