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[Gwythur]

I've noticed some people have posted troubles getting enough goods for trading early on.  I present my starting set-up for critique and suggestions.

The premise is that well-woven, well-dyed plant crafts sell for upwards of 200 each, and weigh 1 to 4, so you can sell quite a few of them.  The are even acceptable to elves.  They can be created with a minimum of raw materials, and little enough labor that your starting dwarves can provide it.

(1) Proficient Miner with social skills (expedition leader)
(1) Proficient Carpenter/Proficient Wood cutter
(1) Proficient Brewer/Grower/Herbalist
(1) Proficient Thresher/Grower/Herbalist
(1) Proficient Weaver/Grower/Novice Herbalist
(1) Proficient Clothier/Grower/Novice Herbalist
(1) Proficient Miller/Proficient Dyer

Sell the anvil, one axe, and one pick.  This gives plenty of points for just about anything you could want.  I usually buy up a bunch of dogs (for later defense) and a couple cows (for later meat/leather/bone industry) so that they can start breeding while I'm busy doing other things.

I bring along
(1) plump helmet spawn (for the bag)
(15) pig tail seeds
(15) dimple cup spawn
and 3-5 of the other seeds (in case I want them later)

(5) dimple dye
(5) thread - either pig tail or cave spider silk

around 20 miscellaneous booze

(10) plump helmets
(1) of each of the 2 cost meats (for the barrels)
(5) turtle, so shells and bone are available in case of strange moods

So far, I have chosen heavily forested areas with lots of vegetation, but I'm starting to think that may be overkill in this version.

Upon arrival, the miner starts digging downwards to find stone, and digs out some indoor farming space in the local soil.  The woodworker begins chopping trees at a furious pace.  Wood is my primary building material.  Everyone else starts gathering plants.  The goal is to find  rope reed (wet areas), hide root (dry areas), and blade weed (dry areas).  Once enough wood is available, everyone builds their respective workshops and I lay down both indoor and outdoor farm plots.

Indoors, I create 3 plots: plump helmets (which can be eaten raw or brewed), pig tails (which can be processed to cloth or brewed), and dimple cups (for dye).  Outdoors, I create 3 plots:  rope reed (which can be processed to cloth or brewed), blade weed (for dye) and hide root (for dye).  The advantage in this system is that the plump helmets, dimple cups, and all 3 outdoor crops can be planted and harvested year round, in all 4 seasons.

For workshops, I need a brewery (wood), farmer's workshop (wood), loom (wood), clothier's shop (wood), craftsdwarf's shop (wood), carpenter's shop (wood), dyer's shop (barrel and bucket), trade depot (3 wood), and quern.  The quern needs someone to be given the masonry skill long enough to make a mason's shop and make one out of stone.  The craftsdwarf's shop says it requires no special skills to make, but seems to require a dwarf with either wood crafter, stone crafter, or bone carving enabled.

Food is not a problem.  While looking for the 3 outdoor plants, you will come across tons of prickle berries, fisher berries, and wild strawberries.  Drinks are not a problem.  If you bring a small amount, and you make some barrels, you can brew longland grass or excess plants.  You will need to make extra bags for dye (and seeds), but you should have plenty of cloth.  And trade goods are not a problem since you can create plant cloth crafts at the craftsdwarf's (set your 'o'rders 'W'orkshop orders to only use dyed cloth to make sure you get the best value).

I had to do some micromanagement when the workshops first came on-line, to make sure that there were no backlogs in processing and that everyone was still planting crops.  But my first wave of immigrants all became farmers and I set everyone to doing their respective tasks exclusively.  At this point, my clerk is a hoardmaster and I'm deliberately buying anvil imports to melt down for steel.

[RPB]

Seems to be overkill, as trade goods aren't actually that difficult to produce, but sounds fun. You may elect to skip hide roots if you want to maximize profit, though, as their dye is only worth half as much as the other dye plants.

[Wahnsinniger]

Interesting setup. I actually don't know how the dye-ing stuff works, since I stopped playing before the dyes were put in (and haven't tried them since the new version).

In what is partly a sandbox game, its good to choose a theme when making a fortress. My most recent one is a dwarven fishing village (I would have made it human, but couldn't remember where to change the raws). With lots of fisherdwarves, cleaners, and cooks, I can sell barrels of high-quality prepared food for average of 300 per full barrel (10 prepared meals). Its definitely a simpler process than your cloth one, but as I said: themes. At least one advantage to your economy being based around Food goods is that you don't have to worry about running out of them (as opposed to importing lots of plants, drinks, or whatever)

Based on the title, I figured you'd mean you'd buy large amounts of cloth then dye, sew, then sell them. Sort of a middle-man (dwarf?) economy then.

[BurnedToast]

Clothing is a TERRIBLE way to make trade goods.

First you need to grow the plant. Then you need to process it twice (plant -> thread, thread -> cloth) then you need to make it into a craft. that's 4 labors, all using a different skill.

Or you could just get 3 mugs from a stone with 1 task. The value modifier for pig tails is 2, so it is equal to that of light/dark stone and half that of grey stone. So even making double the amount of mugs to make up for it, thats only 2 labors instead of 4. Also crafts make 1 - 3 items, while mugs always make 3, which evens the value out alot for grey stone and puts light/dark stone ahead.

I'm not sure how much value dying adds (does it even add any?) but I don't think it's worth the extra 3 tasks (grow, mill, dye). I'm not totally sure about this, I don't bother because milling things is a pain (can't select what you want milled, bags get stuffed full of 1 seed).

If you just want to make a cloth factory fort for the heck of it, yeah that's fine - but rock mugs are better in every way until you run out of rocks (which won't realistically happen on most maps). The only disadvantage is rock mugs weight alot more but that's not really a problem - caravans can carry a TON of stuff this version.

The only map I would recommend it for is no tree, no animal (for bone crafts) no water (for fishing for bones for bone crafts) no magma (for smelting metal crafts) maps.

[Shades]

quote:Originally posted by Wahnsinniger:
<STRONG>I can sell barrels of high-quality prepared food for average of 300 per full barrel (10 prepared meals). </STRONG>

I'm tending to get between 2 and 4k per stack of prepared food (30+ in a stack) does the contents of the meal change the price?

[Wahnsinniger]

Oh, I keep the prepared foods in barrels, to prevent them from going bad. Barrels can only hold 10 prepared foods max, and you're more likely to get >10 stacks if you do fine/lavish meals.

And I don't use the bones for crafts, I use them to decorate and make the bone armors (I'm on a sand/aquifer map. Metal isn't going to be an option)

[ November 06, 2007: Message edited by: Wahnsinniger ]

[RPB]

quote:Originally posted by BurnedToast:
<STRONG>Clothing is a TERRIBLE way to make trade goods.</STRONG>

Actually, they're not shabby at all. See, you're taking lots of jobs, but most of those jobs are in effect decorations which have value as trade goods in their own right. Woven cloth is a trade item and its value (including quality) is added to any finished product made using it. Same thing with dye (that is, dye applied to cloth; raw dye doesn't have quality). In effect you're getting three "items" per item: woven cloth, dye, and finished product. And--here's the good bit--you're getting that per item. Cloth crafts does not reliably give you multiples, but shoes give you a guaranteed 2 and have the added bonus of having a higher base value than most trade goods. A pair of exceptional quality shoes woven from exceptionally quality cloth dyed exceptionally well with dimple or emerald dye is going to have a net value of over 600*. A trio of exceptional rock mugs is 120*. Not counting farming, the shoes take one workshop job + one loom job + one mill job + one dye job + one clothier job, whereas an equivalent value in stone mugs take 5 jobs. So stone requires less work to produce raw materials, but an equal amount of work (per unit value) to process. But the raw materials for stone are slower to haul, and tend to be less convenient--you can just put up a farm plot right where you need it and get your raw textile/dye plants right there for as long as you want.

In the end, yes, stone crafting is better (primarily because you can choose to use higher-value stones, including mineral veins, in which case your value production blows cloth stuff away). But textiles are hardly "TERRIBLE".

   

quote:Originally posted by Shades:
<STRONG>

I'm tending to get between 2 and 4k per stack of prepared food (30+ in a stack) does the contents of the meal change the price?</STRONG>

You realize that the price listed is the price for the entire stack, right? If you look at a stack of 20 and it says value: 200*, that's not the price per unit, it's the price for the stack.

[ November 06, 2007: Message edited by: RPB ]

[Align]

Well, what will you buy with all this money?

[RPB]

quote:Originally posted by Align:
<STRONG>Well, what will you buy with all this money?</STRONG>

Whatever you want, obviously. Considering how easy it is for a fort to subsist on its own, 99% of what you do in the game falls under the category of unnecessary luxuries.

Also, some more accurate numbers: I misstated the value of exceptional rock mugs; you get 150* per stonecrafting job. However, I also lowballed the value of the shoes. Now that I've figured out accurate value calculations, an exceptionally made/woven/dyed cloth craft is 320* and a shoe of the same qualities is worth 370* (740* per pair).

Oddly, cloth items have an extra 20* added at all times, which receives no quality multipliers. I'm not sure where this comes from. Possibly it's the value of the raw plant (8* for pig tail) and the thread (12* for pig tail) being added on top of everything else. This means that cloth production has its highest relative advantage when dealing with low quality goods, but loses relative value at higher qualities. All-base-quality dyed pig tail shoes are 180* per pair, six times a set of three base rock mugs; all exceptional quality dyed pig tail shoes are 740*, just barely under five times a set of three exceptional rock mugs.

So, more specific numbers. Let's assume that you're using dedicated farmers with a modest amount of skill (proficient/talentedish). They're averaging a stack of 3 plants per seed. So, your shoe production takes:

1 Plant Pig Tail Seeds (=3 pig tails)
1 Plant Dimple Cup Spawn (=3 dimple cups)
1 Mill Plants (=3 dimple cup dye)
1 Process Plants (=3 pig tail thread)
3 Weave Thread into Cloth (=3 pig tail cloth)
3 Dye Cloth (=3 dyed pig tail cloth)
3 Make plant fiber Shoes (=6 dyed pig tail shoes)

So if you have 1 dedicated worker for each task, 13 dedicated workers form a self-sustaining production unit which produces 6 finished shoes per job cycle.  Compare to 13 dedicated stone crafters producing 39 stone mugs per job.

If all workers are dabbling, the shoemakers are producing a total value of 540* while the stonecrafters are producing a total value of 390*. With skilled workers consistently producing exceptional quality output, you're looking at 2220* for the shoes and 1950* for the mugs. For masterpieces, 4440* in shoes vs. 4680* for mugs. Since even legendary-plus crafters only produce masterpieces about a quarter of the time, though, the net value advantage always stays with shoe production--even if we're working under the assumption that the stonecrafters have an infinite supply of conveniently located stone (without needing to dedicate any time to mining/hauling/dumping), which does not actually hold true for mass production.

So, without dipping into supplies of flux materials/obsidian/ores, a dedicated textile operation outputs greater wealth than stonecrafting does. If you're willing to use up more valuable stone and ores for producing stone goods, then stonecrafting takes the lead again. Textiles still have the advantage that you can produce them almost anywhere (possibly truly anywhere, since people have figured out how to get underground farms in glaciers) and you can effectively never run out, though.

[Fedor]

quote:Originally posted by Gwythur:
<STRONG>I've noticed some people have posted troubles getting enough goods for trading early on.  I present my starting set-up for critique and suggestions.

The premise is that well-woven, well-dyed plant crafts sell for upwards of 200 each, and weigh 1 to 4, so you can sell quite a few of them.  The are even acceptable to elves.  They can be created with a minimum of raw materials, and little enough labor that your starting dwarves can provide it.</STRONG>

For the same reasons as others have given, especially quantity of labor and number of jobs required for a given value, I wouldn't recommend clothing as a trade method for a newbie or a powergamer.

But I'm not either, and I like pretty things.  And it has to be said that dyed clothing and rope are awfully pretty!  One of the things I'm enjoying most in the latest version is the ability to make your own red and green dyes; I've got quite the little industry going.  

[Mad Jackal]

I have not gone the dyeing route. Nor whole hog like this start.

But I have taken to trading in cloth goods.  I had found the cave spider silk mittens to be a great value $$ per weight unit in the previous version. How-ever the cave spiders are not as common in this version so I've gone to pig tails.

I know that the new version weights of pig tails mittens had gone up and the value down (from my cave spider sild mittens), so I was going to branch out and try other items to see if I could increase those profit margins.

Shoes is the way to go you think?
I like this.

Nice idea for a start by the way.

[BurnedToast]

Yes, I'm sorry, I guess terrible is an overstatement. It just seems silly to me to start a complicated cloth industry when you can easily slam out grey rock mugs fast enough to buy caravans out. The mugs also unclutter your fortress, while the clothing industry clutters it up (I remember having a massive problem with 1 seed bags the one time I messed with dye).

[Wahnsinniger]

Well, it may not be optimal, but finding the "best" system in a single-player sandbox-ish game is rather pointless. It would be just as fine trying a build where all you export is high quality Shell armors. Cool too.

Though at the moment some things definitely are NOT worth trading. You wouldn't export alcohol, since the price of it is so low and can't be improved. Same with things like metal bars and such. It should probably be changed a bit to justify the fact that you can IMPORT things like alcohol, since why would OTHER cities export such unprofitable items.

[hactar1]

If you you're on a map with a Giant Cave Spider, you've got one of the game's most profitable trade goods.  GCS silk cloth, chitin, and meat, are all worth much more than their weight in platinum, probably owing to the GCS's rightfully legendary status as a vicious dwarf-eater.  You'll need a seriously buff military (marksdwarves are best) to harvest the silk safely.  I try to use my military only enough to keep the beast at bay, not to kill it, so it can continue to spin its valuable webs.  Plus, it's hella fun.

Rope reeds are easy to grow outdoors, and worth more than pig tails, I believe.  You can buy the seeds from the elves pretty often, if you can't find them by gathering.