Did anyone notice how dwarves are likely to drop their clothing everywhere? It seems that every time a dwarf has his clothes showing wear, and a replacement is avaliable, he will drop the old clothing either in his room or, worse yet, somewhere randomly. This can be countered by making sure each dwarf has a cabinet or two in his room (he will store old clothing there), but there are three other problems which are much more difficult to deal with.
Firstly, when a dwarf dies and his body undergoes burial, the clothing loses its ownership and becomes noone's, so it can be dumped away (unless a dwarf had a personal tomb, in which case his belongings will be stored there). But there seem to be special cases when items continue to lie around with the dead dwarf still marked as their owner. They can't be dumped, and the only way to get rid of them (short of magma-purging) is to hide them and pretend they aren't there.
Secondly, most invaders wear clothing too, and it seems to be vastly outlying its owners. While bodies decay, hundreds of socks and loincloths still lie, only hardly subject to rotting. And it is extremely tedious to mark all there rags for dumping, even with the help of the stocks screen. Needless to say, you will also have to secure the area before sending in your civilian dumpers. And after ten game years, these cleaning missions become epic.
Of course, all the garbage in this particular case is lying somewhere outside, not in your halls, and unless you have "claim other death items" option enabled, it just sits there and makes no problems except maybe for some more lag. Modding goblins to be wearing no clothes seems to reduce the hassle, but I still experienced some problems when goblins destroyed a human caravan, leaving lots of junk in the wilderness. And when I managed to dump it all off, the humans invaded. Uh-oh.
Third, when a soldier is sparring in barracks, he will eventually lose several articles of his clothing. While it is realistic that a fighter removes any excess garment because of hard training and sweat and the like, but unlike civilians they never pick it up again. The only good news here is that only the barracks will suffer, not the whole fortress. But it still injures my aesthetic sense. I don't mind having blood spatters all over the place, it's kinda cool. But not dirty socks!
Alas, I suspect there are no good solutions for this problem. I mostly find myself countering it by avoiding to run large fortresses with dense population. Just wanted to know people's opinions on the whole thing.
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Topic: A complete mess with clothing - partial solutions (Read 1000 times)