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[conty40]

I've been a bit confused about the best way to go about setting up a proper textile industry and I feel like no matter what approach I take it's not quite correct.

My general approach has been to set up pig tail farms (and dimple cups if I can be bothered) and then automatically process and weave the thread into cloth. Then using the manager I set the following jobs on repeat...

• Produce 1 shirt if there are no shirts in the stockpile
• Produce 1 sock (producing 2 socks?) if there's less than 2 socks in the stockpile
• Produce 1 trouser(s) if there are no trousers in the stockpile

Sometimes I'll get a leather worker producing shoes too. (I try to avoid making cloth shoes for personal taste reasons)

The thing is there still never seems to be enough even with a small population, and I'm finding dwarves will often take fresh clothes from the stockpile even though none of their clothes are worn out. And sometimes they'll leave fresh clothes just lying around various places in the fortress instead of bringing them back to their rooms. The manager also seems to get slightly confused about how many clothes I actually have in the stockpile. What am I doing wrong?

[Bumber]

The manager doesn't count items in stockpiles. It counts unclaimed items that aren't being hauled.

In a previous fortress I set my orders to keep 20 of each item on hand, and it worked well enough. I'm not sure if something changed. Maybe your dwarves are trying to fulfill a need by getting new clothing?

[Stench Guzman]

I usually embark with a couple of pairs of sheep, llamas and alpacas, then set up automated shearing and spinning jobs.  Each shearable animal can be sheared several times a year and each produces 7-13 units of wool.

An herbalist working underground can probably collect more pig tails than a farmer at a moderate sized farm.  Above ground you are probably going to have at least one of rope reed, hemp, cotton, kenaf, jute, flax, or ramie.  Be careful that your papermakers don't use up all of these crops.

Dwarves only need to wear something on their upper body, lower body, and feet in order to avoid unhappy thoughts from being uncovered.  You don't need both socks and shoes if you don't want to make both.  Dwarves will have unhappy thoughts for having rotting clothing in other positions, so it's up to you if you want to keep making new gloves and mittens or just have the one time morale penalty for having their worn gloves rot away.

The best way to get leather in bulk is to buy it.  It's dirt cheap.  You can even skip the whole cloth making process and have a few cooks make prepared meals and buy out all of the cloth and leather from every caravan.

If you play with sieges and invaders, you can just take the clothes off of the dead.

[Naryar]

I usually buy of cloth/leather bins from caravans (they usually have tons of it), and just set up leatherworker and clothier workshops. (When I can be bothered with a textile industry, I do as you do and set up some pig tail-only field for processing into thread and then cloth. Although I just do repeat orders instead of "up to X" and end up with more clothes than needed. And screw dimple cups. Alternatively, the outside textile crops are fine too.

I mass produce the same clothing than you do, along with hoods and cloaks.

But mostly I used to recycle goblin clothing quite a lot. Now that sieges are no longer as frequent, I feel I will have to develop textile industries more.

If you want, you can set up a silk farm with a GCS. Not only is GCS silk clothing quite good for trading value, but it's also light and has good mechanical properties for cloaks/hoods/etc. for soldiers.

You can also have a dog leather industry... it also gives various other byproducts, though a pig tail farm has a much better productivity than a dog leather farm.

[kaijyuu]

For mass producing your own leather, last I checked the most efficient animal to use were turkeys. Large number of eggs, quick maturation, and decent butchering returns.

Using turkeys I was able to make a tower comprised entirely of soap.

[anewaname]

The thing is there still never seems to be enough even with a small population, and I'm finding dwarves will often take fresh clothes from the stockpile even though none of their clothes are worn out. And sometimes they'll leave fresh clothes just lying around various places in the fortress instead of bringing them back to their rooms.

This is avarice. They believe the new item looks better so they drop the old item, run over to the new item, put it on. Usually the old item will be moved into the bedroom or the stockpile within a month. There will always be dwarfs dropping old clothing onto the floors when new clothing becomes available.

[Hyndis]

I've found that having all clothing stored in one stockpile (with bins) that is also a refuse stockpile (but does not accept any items) resolves the issue.

All clothing items in this stockpile will slowly rot away to nothing. They'll vanish. So I have seasonal repeating work orders to make new clothing. I'll have a farm growing pig tails as often as possible and a food stockpile that only store pig tail plants (and nothing else). Then I'll every season have work orders make 25 cloaks, 25 shoes, 25 socks, 25 hoods, 25 gloves, 25 pants, and 25 robes. I'll also set up a seasonal work order to process plants, which looms then auto-spin into thread.

Dwarves can take what they need from the newly produced clothing. Everything else gets hauled to the finished goods/refuse stockpile to rot away. Siege debris also ends up there to rot away.

One thing to keep in mind is that dwarves may sometimes fill a bin with other items despite it being in this stockpile. You don't want them filling one of these bins with masterwork steel helmets which will rot away because its a refuse stockpile. Unfortunately dwarves will put armor in these bins even if armor is forbidden. First, they fill the bin, then they move the bin. Problem is, the stuff rots away while the dwarf is filling the bin.

To fix this, make sure your armor stockpile does not use bins. A quantum stockpile for your good armor has an added benefit of not locking out all your good armor because one dwarf is trying to put one gauntlet into one bin.

[Mohreb el Yasim]

You could also have two stockpiles. The refuse one as mentioned and an other for new clothes that takes from links only, linked to your clothier shop.
So only used ones get hauled to rot away and you keep the new-but-not-claimed ones.

[cyrohound]

Make it a seasonal order. Also, I use rope reeds in an enclosed above ground farm, because I dislike that I cannot gather pig tails year round. There's also some minor vegetables up there for dwarf taste preference reasons.But it's like 70% rope reeds.

[Bumber]

If you're going to have humans in your fort, size your clothes for cougar/hyena men. One size fits all.

[UristMcPea]

Clothing gets one "tick" of wear every two years, so for simplicity I assume that every dwarf replaces every piece of clothing after two years. That leads to the following formula:

x = (number of dwarves in fortress) * (number of pieces per dwarf) / (number of production orders per year) / (2 years)

So for 120 dwarves that makes 15 of everything per season (30 for socks, shoes, mittens, gloves) that are produced without any conditions. Production orders are tied to a specific workshop that accepts no other orders, has one or two clothiers assigned to them and a dedicated pig tail cloth stockpile and a dedicated pig tail clothing stockpile that only accepts from links. (Sometime I make stockpiles for every type of clothing.) If that stockpile starts accumulating too many of a particular type of clothing, I simply change the number of production orders from seasonal to yearly.

While this is a rather simple approach, any level of complexity can be implemented once other goods can be produced (or bought) in the same abundance as pig tail cloth. Depending on the situation I start replacing some materials:

Seriously, shoes, cloaks, gloves and caps should be made out of leather - not cloth, so I create a similar setup with a leather workshop to produce those. Socks and mittens should be made out of wool, so there's another setup with a clothier's shop dedicated to wool or even multiple ones for different types of wool. (I prefer to employ clothiers/leatherworkers that have a preference for either a type of raw material or a type of product that is produced there.)

Excess clothing is stored in a finished goods stockpile (that accepts from everywhere) near the trade depot.

[Bumber]

Clothing gets one "tick" of wear every two years, so for simplicity I assume that every dwarf replaces every piece of clothing after two years.

They can also get torn in fist fights, etc.

[UristMcPea]

Clothing gets one "tick" of wear every two years, so for simplicity I assume that every dwarf replaces every piece of clothing after two years.

They can also get torn in fist fights, etc.

True, but theoretically clothing only needs to be changed after two ticks of wear, so I'm producing a little more than twice as much as needed anyway, which should easily compensate things like that.

But there's another question:

After setting up a decent leather industry I start producing some leather clothing instead of cloth/yarn/silk clothing. Thinking about brawls, maybe light combat and other ways of possible injuries - which type of clothing should be made out of leather?

I was thinking about shoes, caps, gloves, hoods, robes and trousers. Anything wrong with that?

[Schmaven]

Leather is tougher than cloth, so an all leather kit would certainly be best if you expect fights.  For some reason, in my latest embark, not a single caravan has brought leather or cloth.

Just pig tail farms can easily overproduce cloth for your dwarves.  I set up 2 clothiers shops with production orders between them for 10 of each type of clothing, to repeat when done.  A clothing stockpile next to them, taking from links only.  Then next to the trade depot, another clothing stockpile that will take from anywhere. 

The result is that the stockpile next to the depot fills with 95% worn out items.  I trade away even that other 5% because it's simple, and there are more than enough clothes in the fort.

Any dwarf that dreams of creating a masterwork gets a year or 2 either working in the looms or the clothier's shop and before too long, all those dwarves have realized their dreams.  The downside of this however is you end up with a lot of artifact pigtail clothing.  Good for trade, but bad for combat.

Every so often, I trade away several bins of new clothes from the stockpile linked to the clothier's shop to free up stockpile space.  It's an industry after all, so producing enough extra for trading makes sense.

If you're instead looking to produce just what is needed for the fort with minimal excess, then I'm afraid that's uncharted territory for me.

[Seolferwulf]

Caravan access has been shut off for most of my current fort's existence, so trading away excess clothing isn't an option.
I'm running a few pig tail fields for cloth.
A clothier stores clothes in a clothes only stockpile, which only accepts items from said clothier.
My refuse stockpile also accepts clothes to dispose off of ownerless items.
This way new clothes are stored in the clothes stockpile while old ones rot away.
I've also set a dumping zone on top of the refuse stockpile for times when I use the "cleanowned x" dfhack command.
For work orders I've set a limit up to which they produce (10 per item type atm).
When I notice the population is mostly wearing worn out stuff I run "cleanowned x" but in general it works quite well.