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[Melting Sky]

By far the greatest enemy my fortress has faced to date is bins. Ever since I made the mistake of including them in my stock piles my fort's hauling labor efficiency has been absolutely destroyed. By micromanaging as many of the stock piles as I can I have reduced some of the damage its caused but I still end up with about one job cancellation every two seconds due to bin pathing problems. Apparently given the choice between picking up a single seed and taking it to a bin in the stockpile or dragging the 50 ton bin to the seed a dwarf will always choose the latter. Meanwhile while the dwarf spends the next month and a half dragging said bin across the fortress, every single dwarf that needs to store or plant a seed will cancel their job.

Anyway, long story made short I have a new problem which I am almost certain must be bin related. I have a ghost which I have been engraving slabs for over and over again. The jobs are completed but then the slabs vanish from existence. They cannot be found in the build menu under slabs or the fortress stocks display screen although when I go to engrave yet another replacement the workshop tells me the dwarf already has multiple slabs commemorating him.

My question is how can I get these slabs built without having to resort to individually dumping every single bin in the fortress?

It makes me wonder just how massive a hit my FPS takes for using bins. Given the endless stream of cancellation spam it must be significant.

[BoredVirulence]

You don't need to dump all of the stockpiles, if your book-keeper has the highest setting you can find that single slab you want in the stocks menu, and dump it.
Personally though, I've never seen this issue, only have problems with bins when it comes to the usual, seeds.

[Melting Sky]

You don't need to dump all of the stockpiles, if your book-keeper has the highest setting you can find that single slab you want in the stocks menu, and dump it.
Personally though, I've never seen this issue, only have problems with bins when it comes to the usual, seeds.

That is part of the problem. I do have my book keeper set to the highest precision but due to whatever bug is causing the problem the slabs vanish from all applicable menus including the stocks screen. The only menu I can find that insists that the slabs still exist is the menu in the workshop which tells me X number of slabs have already been engraved for this dwarf. Other than that there is no way to locate or interact with the slabs once they are made. I'm almost certain its another bin bug as it seems similiar to the problem with the ammo bins where despite there being several hundreds of bolts in the fortress the marksdwarves can't find any of them because they are lost in a bin somewhere.

[smjjames]

Uh, seed bags don't get stored in bins, they get stored in barrels, and slabs, being furniture, shouldn't even be getting put INTO bins in the first place.

Anyways, sounds like you'll love the quantum stockpiling method http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Exploit#Quantum_stockpiles I use it for most things and it really helps with bars and blocks since only 5 bars fit into a bin, so you'll end up with one or more huge stockpiles with hundreds of bins.

For the seeds, the solution is to just not store them in barrels, make a seed only stockpile and set the barrel count to 0, make sure you remove the seeds option from your other food stockpiles. You'll still get some cancellation, but at least they won't all be stored in one or two barrels.

As far as the ghost, I have no idea what is going on with the disappearing slabs, but it sounds like you might have a glitched merchant or caravan guard ghost.

You don't need to dump all of the stockpiles, if your book-keeper has the highest setting you can find that single slab you want in the stocks menu, and dump it.
Personally though, I've never seen this issue, only have problems with bins when it comes to the usual, seeds.

Again, they store seed bags in barrels, not bins.

[Melting Sky]

The ghost is of a dwarf that was burned to death in a magma accident. It's not that I can't engrave a slab for him, its that the moment I engrave a slab it vanishes from existence except on the workshop menu. In all other menus where you would normally be able to find the slabs they simply don't seem to exist anymore.

You are right about the seeds. Its actually smaller containers that the dwarves are dragging to the seeds rather than the bins. Although I see them dragging the damn bins around as well but it's probably for some other type of item they are storing.

Edit: Interesting the slabs just reemerged in the stocks menu. Maybe I was just being too impatient. I've never seen an item that couldn't be found in the stocks menu before, even for a moment.

[smjjames]

You don't need to dump all of the stockpiles, if your book-keeper has the highest setting you can find that single slab you want in the stocks menu, and dump it.
Personally though, I've never seen this issue, only have problems with bins when it comes to the usual, seeds.

That is part of the problem. I do have my book keeper set to the highest precision but due to whatever bug is causing the problem the slabs vanish from all applicable menus including the stocks screen. The only menu I can find that insists that the slabs still exist is the menu in the workshop which tells me X number of slabs have already been engraved for this dwarf. Other than that there is no way to locate or interact with the slabs once they are made. I'm almost certain its another bin bug as it seems similiar to the problem with the ammo bins where despite there being several hundreds of bolts in the fortress the marksdwarves can't find any of them because they are lost in a bin somewhere.

Slabs get stored in the furniture stockpile, not bins, so it's not a bin problem there.

For the marksdwarves, yeah, just keep them out of the bins and use a quantum stockpile instead.

I have no clue what is going on with the vanishing slabs (or maybe the slabs aren't getting engraved in the first place?), but sounds like you've got a bugged ghost here. If you have DFhack, go to the units screen, highlight the ghost (putting the cursor over the ghost might also work) and do 'tweak clear-missing', if that doesn't solve the problem with the slabs, then use 'tweak clear-ghostly'

The ghost is of a dwarf that was burned to death in a magma accident. It's not that I can't engrave a slab for him, its that the moment I engrave a slab it vanishes from existence except on the workshop menu. In all other menus where you would normally be able to find the slabs they simply don't seem to exist anymore.

You are right about the seeds. Its actually smaller containers that the dwarves are dragging to the seeds rather than the bins. Although I see them dragging the damn bins around as well but it's probably for some other type of item they are storing.

I wish I had been aware of all the bugs with item storage before starting this fort. I would have designed my stock pile system completely differently from the get go. It's almost worth scrapping the fort and starting over.

Never heard of that bug with vanishing slabs before. Try the DFhack commands, it might not fix the slabs, but it should at least remove the ghost which is connected to the bug.

[Melting Sky]

Thanks for the heads up. I will definitely be designing my next fort very differently with the new things I have learned about storage in mind. This was my second fortress so I really had no clue how to properly design stockpile feeder systems. Even after spending an hour cleaning up the stockpile mess I have in this fort it is still running very poorly. It's almost worth scrapping the fort.

[EvilBob22]

Are you building the slabs after they have been engraved?  Like tables and chairs, you need to (b)uild them for them to actually be useful.

Another thing to watch for is expanding the list of slabs when you do build them.  For example: let's say you made 5 blank granite slabs and engraved one of them.  When you go to build it, you'll see "5 granite slabs" in the list of available slabs.  But, expand the list (I think it is "x") and you'll see something like:
  granite slab
  granite slab
  granite slab
  granite slab to Urist McGhost
  granite slab

Make sure you build the right one.

[Melting Sky]

I've used slabs many times before. (My poor dwarfs tend to fall victim to occasional magma accidents.) Either I was tripping for a moment or the slabs really weren't showing up in the stock and build menus due to some kind of buggy behavior. Either way it resolved itself when I unpaused the game for a moment and then checked the stocks menu again. I'm sill not sure where the glitch was, my brain or the computer but it resolved itself.

[Dirst]

I've used slabs many times before. (My poor dwarfs tend to fall victim to occasional magma accidents.) Either I was tripping for a moment or the slabs really weren't showing up in the stock and build menus due to some kind of buggy behavior. Either way it resolved itself when I unpaused the game for a moment and then checked the stocks menu again. I'm sill not sure where the glitch was, my brain or the computer but it resolved itself.

You're being pestered by a ghost and it surprises you that something unexplainable happened?

[EvilBob22]

You're being pestered by a ghost playing Dwarf Fortress and it surprises you that something unexplainable happened?

Fixed that for you.

[TruePikachu]

I've never had issues with slabs, excepting the issues caused by lack of slabs.

The slab shouldn't be vanishing. Try looking at the workshop with 't' if you don't see them anywhere else.