As the goblin sieges hit, I notice that they leave hundreds of items behind, including clothes(mostly troll fur, etc).
It seems that once I set these piles to be reclaimed(they seem to be forbidden by default), dwarves drop any tattered clothing and loot what they want from the goblins.
I understand from the wiki that this is normal behavior. It also keeps me from having to make tons of outfits myself.
Correct. Thats usually how my cloth industry works.
You can change how invaders items are treated (forbidden/unforbidden) in
My question is how do the pros deal with the tons of tattered clothes left in the fortress? I'm hoping there is an easy way to specify a pile for them. I see that stockpiles can be set to only accept certain grades of items, including clothes. I was hoping that tattered would be among the list(if not, I would LOVE to see that in the future). Alas, I can't find any such option.
Unfortunately you can't set up stockpile for tattered cloth. Also dwarves will keep a lot of worn cloths as their possessions effectively rising fortress total item count (and thus lowering FPS). Some tattered cloths will be hauled into garbage dump.
Here is my setup for this problem from v34.11 (did something change in 40.xx?).
1. Get a healthy cloth industry. Let it be goblinite, imports (cloths or materials) or actual full-scale industry.
2. Once you are sure nodwarf will be left without their socks:
3. Setup garbage dump, connected to waste disposal system (magma, atom smasher, more magma)
4. Use dfhack to periodically mark worn cloths for dumping. I think proper syntax is:
repeat time="1 months" command="cleanowned scattered x"
If you are making your own cloths, workflow plugin for dfhack is your best friend. Just build 1 clothworkshop and make it construct 10 types of cloth (there are 11, you can skip mittens if you make gloves and everything else). Set everything to [r]epeat. Now using workflow plugin (use gui/workflow) order to keep trousers made of any material at 5-10 units. Do it for every other cloth type you are making. This will save you from a lot of micromanagement.
Random thoughts about this setup:
1. If you are producing cloth from more then one material (eg. from wool and plant fiber) build clothmaker workshop for every material. If you setup workflow to count "trousers of any material" it will indeed count trousers made from wool, plant fiber, leather, etc
2. Workflow will auto suspend construction in all clothmaker workshops once you hit the limit. It will also autounsuspend when there are too few trousers in your fortress.
3. 5-10 units limit means: stop production once there are 10 units, resume once there are less then 5 units
4. Imported items (bought from caravan, goblinite) count towards limits
5. If dwarf claim item ("Must have socks!"), workflow will be aware of this. 5-10 means "5-10 unclaimed items".
6. Items that can't be worn by dwarves (which usually means that those items are to large, eg. made by humans) will count towards limits. I learned this the hard way. I had entire fortress running without pants for several years (temper tantrum included) and I couldn't figure out WHY my dwarves didn't wear pants despite workflow showing there are around 100 of them. Those were leftovers from human siege and some goblins. Workaround: check advanced stocks menu (if you are using dfhack: z-status screen->stocks->press "e") and search for large items and manually dump them.
This setup is self-sufficient. All you need to worry about is getting enough cloth materials, which can be done using another clever applications of workflow plugin, or ordering from caravans. Those can bring a buttoad of "cloth bins" if you order so.
As I said before, an awesome idea would be to add a new filter for tattered items, separate from quality. So you could have a pile set to hold masterwork tattered clothes so they don't get atom smashed by accident.
Yeach, that would be great.
Advanced stocks menu (as well as inventory menu for stockpiles) can filter worn cloths.