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Author Topic: How to assign a specific stone for coffins?  (Read 1171 times)

SilasG

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How to assign a specific stone for coffins?
« on: February 10, 2016, 10:55:26 am »
Hey guys, my embarkation point seems to have a lot of hematite and bituminous coal but not a lot of flux stone. I found a bit of marble about 19 z levels down and put a small stockpile for just the marble beside my smelter to be used exclusively to make pig iron/steel, right? Well, that was working ok but then a were-rhinoceros? (seriously?) showed up and killed a bunch of animals and like 3 dwarfs that were outside. I had my masonry workshop near my smelter and it insists on trying to use the marble instead of the super-abundant rocksalt to make coffins. I tried to go into the settings and specify but it will only let me pick "any stone" or "any rock". I'm not seeing how to specify?

Can someone point me in the correct direction, please?
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Dozebôm Lolumzalìs

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Re: How to assign a specific stone for coffins?
« Reply #1 on: February 10, 2016, 11:11:11 am »
Go to the stones menu in the z screen. Find marble. It's green. Press enter over it. It's now red. It will not be used for "worthless stone" reactions.
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SilasG

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Re: How to assign a specific stone for coffins?
« Reply #2 on: February 10, 2016, 11:16:12 am »
Yay! Thanks so much  :D
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Immortal-D

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Re: How to assign a specific stone for coffins?
« Reply #3 on: February 10, 2016, 11:39:18 am »
Ah, the first time learning about the Stone menu.  Always enlightening :)
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khearn

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Re: How to assign a specific stone for coffins?
« Reply #4 on: February 10, 2016, 02:57:16 pm »
Another way to handle this sort of thing it to set up your stone stockpiles to give to specific workshops. So you can select your marble stockpile and tell it to give to the smelter (or to each of the smelters). Then have a non-marble stone stockpile and set it to give to the mason workshop.

I typically have my mason shop with 3 stone stockpiles nearby. One is for marble/chalk/limestone (which have value of 2), one is for magma-safe stone, and one if for non-magma-safe, low value stone. If I'm going to have him make a bunch of cabinets/coffers for bedrooms or tables/thrones for dining rooms, I have the marble pile give to the shop and the others not give to it. If i'm about to make a bunch of floodgates for my magma project, I'll turn off the marble give, and have the magma-safe pile give instead. And if I'm just making stuff for dealing with water, I'll use the non-magma-safe (or I'll just go ahead and use the magma-safe stuff, depending on how much I have and which is a shorter haul for the haulers). This assumes I have plenty of marble/chalk/limestone so that I don't have to worry about flux shortages like the OP.

Another advantage of having piles give to shops is that if your mason is halfway across the fort when he decided to go make a table, he'll select the closest stone that he can use at the time he accepts the job. If there is no stockpile giving to his shop, then he'll probably select a stone right next to him and slowly drag it across the fort to his shop. But if a pile is giving to the shop, he'll walk briskly across the fort to the pile, and then drag the stone a short distance to his shop.
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PatrikLundell

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Re: How to assign a specific stone for coffins?
« Reply #5 on: February 10, 2016, 05:03:00 pm »
Be careful with using linked stockpiles, though. It's quite easy to screw things up with things apparently ceasing to suddenly work because linking isn't done properly (the classic case is to link a plant stockpile to a still, but no stockpile carrying barrels).

If you're using DFHack there's a plug-in that allows you to select the material for your jobs (alt-a). That's only useful when you want exceptions to your standard operation, though (I may e.g. specify the usage of Gabbro for two rock grate production orders, because I need them to be magma safe, but for everything else I don't really care what stone is used). It seems like Toady is working on/considering material selection in vanilla DF since that is conceptually fairly similar to the process of specifying details of e.g. statues (and the fact that not being able to select which metal instrument parts are made of is rather bad).
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FantasticDorf

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Re: How to assign a specific stone for coffins?
« Reply #6 on: February 10, 2016, 05:49:53 pm »
Personally. Having a dump zone nearby for a particular layer composition stone (granite layer, gabbro layer etc and everything contained within those to different mason-shops) is useful for specific stockpiles (pause the game before assigning else dwarves will run to get random stones) with up to three wheelbarrows between them so its a hard job hauling them all en-mass to the dump zone, but a easy wheelbarrow job to collect.

This works better with more workers naturally.
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