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[tiresius]

Hello everyone I checked the wiki and didn't see much on this so I thought I'd ask.

How do I encourage the scholars to write new books?  I have a library with all the materials available, and I have accepted 20+ scholars to join my civ.  I have about 4-5 scholars/scribes from my main fort population.   Are the travelling scholars likely to write a book or just there to talk?

How often do you guys get new books?  Are they announced as artifacts?

Also all the travelling scholars I've accepted into the population are assigned as scholars for the location of my entire fort, and not for the location of my library.  I can't seem to switch them over.

Thanks for any help!

[Madrigal]

With that number of scholars, you should be getting plenty of books... On the library's location screen, have you set the "number of required writing materials" (or something like that; I can't check the precise language right now) to be a high number? I usually set it to several hundred.

Also, have you checked to see if there are any bugged books that are stuck in the middle of being copied?

I have noticed that different scholars can have vastly different working speeds. In one fort (in 43.04), my first scholar cranked out something like 20 books in a couple of years before slowing down, but my second scholar wrote only a few books over many years. (But then, in a later fort in the same world, that second scholar arrived as a migrant and wrote several books per season.)

And I've never seen an announcement when a book is written; I just look on the artifacts screen for unfamiliar titles.

[tiresius]

A few have been written but this for has been running for years and years so I should have more.  I did move to a new library (tower structure) and something I noticed is that my chests are not getting filled with sheets.  Is there a trick to that?  I do have the writing materials set to 999.

[PatrikLundell]

There's a bug causing book writing to stall, and I don't think it's fixed. I think it's caused by someone starting to write something, gets interrupted, and then never returns to to. If I understand it correctly, forbidding and unforbidding all writing material could cause that to be resolved.

If your old library is still defined and has chests, it might be the preferred location for storing new writing material. Another guess is that if your new library is a different library entity (i.e. a new location name defined for a new location) I wouldn't be surprised if those quires allocated to the old library buggily might be assigned to it even if removed.
A bunch of wild guesses:
I'd try to forbid/unforbid the quires in the old library, and if that doesn't work, I'd recreate the old library (a new library entity with exactly the same name as the old one), paint a meeting zone over the old library and assign it to the revived entity, and then remove the zone again, while still keeping the entity as a ghost (i.e. defined, but without any zones or rooms). This is based on experience with a bugged up tavern where visitors tried to visit the no longer existing single tile zone tavern that was resolved only by recreating the tavern and fixing the zone issue before the old tavern could be retired.

[tiresius]

Interesting theory I will try that out.  i have had multiple sieges where I had to stick everyone in the lever room so perhaps someone was interrupted writing.

[tiresius]

Ok so the problem was .... I didn't make any quires or scrolls. 

I thought dwarfs wrote on sheets then collected them and made quires... yikes.

quires/scrolls are filling my chests and I've gotten more books now.  Sorry for the runaround.

[edit]  While I'm asking dumb questions.  Will books put on pedestals be able to be read or copied?

[TheBeardyMan]

There's a bug causing book writing to stall, and I don't think it's fixed. I think it's caused by someone starting to write something, gets interrupted, and then never returns to to.

Are you sure that's a bug?

[Isher]

Ha, yes it was a dwarf from Porlock.

But yeah this does have bugs (though it also requires scrolls/quires) and will be fixed in the next release: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/changelog_page.php

Just wanted to mention this since the OP will probably be back wondering why there are still bugs.

[LordPorkins]

YOu see, the hard part about making them right is that suddenly they'll stop writing to take a "hiatus" and then disappear forever! Weird huh?