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Author Topic: Two simple features to handle mineral clutter  (Read 1737 times)

Lars M. Nielsen

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Two simple features to handle mineral clutter
« on: December 29, 2007, 05:16:00 am »
An option on the
  • ption menu I would think to be valuable and simple at the same time, would be the ability to auto-forbid freshly mined minerals. That way you could easily designate->reclaim an area if you wanted it cleaned up.

    Of course, if you don't care if your dining hall and sleeping areas are cluttered with rocks, this isn't very interesting. But i certainly mind, and don't want to babysit my miners with designate->forbid to prevent haulers running into my exploration shafts deep in the mountain because they want to fix up the place.

    Another feature, also related to clutter would be a designate->dump. Self-explanatory, I think. It would be really nice to have.

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Goran

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Re: Two simple features to handle mineral clutter
« Reply #1 on: December 29, 2007, 06:47:00 am »
1. Designate - dump

2. Stocks menu: we have 'dump' and 'melt', but if we had 'forbid' and 'reclaim' there as well it would be so much easier to manage various types of common rock.

3. Managing detailed list in the stocks menu. Add some way to mark stones for 'dump','melt','forbid',reclaim' faster and less tedious, like holding shift key and scrolling down via cursor keys or pgup,pgdn and asterisk. Instead of a thousand keystrokes, you could manage a large pile of stones with just a dozen.

My two copper coins

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Lars M. Nielsen

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Re: Two simple features to handle mineral clutter
« Reply #2 on: December 29, 2007, 08:21:00 am »
quote:
Originally posted by Goran:
<STRONG>
2. Stocks menu: we have 'dump' and 'melt', but if we had 'forbid' and 'reclaim' there as well it would be so much easier to manage various types of common rock.

3. Managing detailed list in the stocks menu. Add some way to mark stones for 'dump','melt','forbid',reclaim' faster and less tedious, like holding shift key and scrolling down via cursor keys or pgup,pgdn and asterisk. Instead of a thousand keystrokes, you could manage a large pile of stones with just a dozen.
</STRONG>

Sounds like great ideas.

It occured to me that the natural place for a option like "Forbid mineral" would be in [z]->Stone. If Toady could expand it to show all mineral types including rough gems, then you could choose forbid/dump by type. I'm thinking something like this:

code:
  
Rough gems          Sandstone
Metal ore           Siltstone       F
Economic            etc...
Other
 
d: Dump  f: Forbid

The important thing is that this shouldn't be an overriding dump/forbid order. Merely a way to start out certain minerals with a certain designation.

If it was an overriding order, it would be impossible to use designate->reclaim to clean up the clutter when you needed it.

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Lars M. Nielsen

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Re: Two simple features to handle mineral clutter
« Reply #3 on: December 29, 2007, 08:57:00 am »
Thinking some more about it, this is probably an overly complex feature (then again, this is Dwarf Fortress).

A simpler, more to the point version would be something like this

code:

Economic stones        DUMP  FORBID
Non-economic stones    DUMP  FORBID  
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Paul

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Re: Two simple features to handle mineral clutter
« Reply #4 on: December 29, 2007, 03:35:00 pm »
You can already forbid things from the stocks menu, although not directly. You have to use v to view the item, then f to forbid. So it's 3 key presses to forbid an item and get back to the stocks menu instead of 1. It might be nice to have a forbid option directly from the stocks menu, though.
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Draco18s

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Re: Two simple features to handle mineral clutter
« Reply #5 on: December 29, 2007, 08:31:00 pm »
quote:
Originally posted by Paul:
<STRONG>You can already forbid things from the stocks menu, although not directly. You have to use v to view the item, then f to forbid. So it's 3 key presses to forbid an item and get back to the stocks menu instead of 1. It might be nice to have a forbid option directly from the stocks menu, though.</STRONG>

That's also, notably, PER ITEM.  Try forbidding the 200 stone your legendary miner just mined out in the last 30 seconds.

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Entropy

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Re: Two simple features to handle mineral clutter
« Reply #6 on: December 30, 2007, 01:51:00 am »
Why dont you just set your dwarfs to ignore minerals if you want to keep them from hauling freshly mined stone?
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Lars M. Nielsen

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Re: Two simple features to handle mineral clutter
« Reply #7 on: December 30, 2007, 06:59:00 am »
Because i don't want rocks cluttering up my glorious dwarven halls of course    :)

And then I would have to manually select all the rocks I wanted dump. Which is a hassle. Also, I would have no way to deal with mined ore and gems that I want to put in stockpiles.

[ December 30, 2007: Message edited by: Lars M. Nielsen ]

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