I suppose I could deliver a few more essays regarding various other industries. I might as well start with the glass industry, since that one is pretty easy.
For the glass industry: In order to have a glass industry, you will need sand in some form on your map. Not sandy loam, or loamy sand, or anything like that. Sand. Black sand, red sand, green sand, blue sand. Yellow Sand, white sand, or just sand. And shuddup, I know there's no blue sand in the game.
More than likely, you will also need magma. You can make glass without magma, but you'll need a piece of fuel. Since you will likely want to train glassmakers, this will require six hundred pieces of fuel to train a glassmaker from peasant to legendary, and if you want more, you'll need six hundred pieces of fuel for each additional glassmaker. As you can see, the amount of fuel required for the glass industry, which you may need to split with other more vital industries, like steel making and armoring and weaponsmithing, make glassmaking without magma infeasible.
So, you'll need several magma-powered glass furnaces. Four is a good number, or more, if you have a bunch of legendary glass makers, or want to train them. Surrounding these workshops or in an adjacent room should be a giant furniture stockpile that is set to collect only sand bags. You'll need all the quality and material modifiers in order for the stockpile to work, but the reason you'll need a big stockpile is because of this:
You'll need bags. Lots and lots of bags. More bags than you know what to do with, save for the glass industry. So if you have a powerful cloth industry, which you may or may not have set up according to what I've stated about the cloth industry, you can churn out several hundred bags or so easily.
Hopefully, several hundred should be all you need.
The 'brilliant' secret to having an efficient glass industry is to set up several dummy glass furnaces elsewhere, and a collect sand job set on repeat. If you use work orders, there should be ten jobs collect sand jobs set on repeat, so that the manager doesn't allocate any jobs to the dummy glass furnaces instead of your magma glass furnaces.
You can increase or decrease the flow of sand bags to your magma glass furnaces by suspending or unsuspending all of the jobs at the dummy glass furnaces. If your haulers cancel collecting sand because of a lack of bags, you increase the number of suspensions, thereby decreasing the flow of sand bags. If your glassmakers cancel making glass because of no sand bearing items, you decrease the number of suspensions to increase the flow of sand bags.
That's for creating green glass, the most basic kind. To make clear glass in large volumes, which is the only other kind of glass that can be built in large volumes (as rock crystals only appear in small quantities and can only be used rough, which means you must dig them out on-site), you'll need pearlash, and lots of it, to keep pace with your glass makers. Unfortunately, it's likely that you'll never have enough.
You'll need a heavily forested map, or extremely large and efficient tower cap farms, as you won't be able to make large amounts of clear glass with the amount of wood imported by caravans. You'll also need an efficient wood cutting industry, which is another essay on its own. You will also need to split your glass industry's demand for wood with all your other industries. This is one of the reasons why you probably won't be able to produce clear glass in large quantities.
Nearby, but not necessarily directly adjacent to, your magma glass furnaces, you should put a large wood stockpile. Adjacent to this stockpile, you should have several wood furnaces. Two, maybe four, depending on how fast you want to burn through all your wood. You should set these to produce ash on repeat. You may need to split the demands of your glass industry with the demands of your metalworking industry, as you can burn wood to produce charcoal, one type of fuel, which is necessary for any steel making. This is one of the reasons why you probably won't be able to produce clear glass in large quantities.
Next to your wood furnaces you should have several asheries, most likely matching the number of wood furnaces. If you're looking to train legendary potash makers and lye makers (who should probably have both labors enabled anyway), you should set your asheries to make lye from ash on repeat, and then potash from lye on repeat. This adds an extra step in making pearlash, which will slow down the rate at which you make pearlash, and if you want to make soap, you'll have to split your lye needs with your potash needs. This is another reason why you probably won't be able to produce clear glass in large quantities.
You'll need several magma kilns, probably the same number as your asheries and wood furnaces, and these should be built close to your magma glass furnaces. Magma kilns have one job, to turn potash into pearlash, so you should have that set on repeat. Surrounding the magma kilns, but not entirely necessary if they are close to your asheries, should be a bar/block stockpile set to accept potash. Magma kilns are operated by furnace operators, so you may have to slow down your magma smelters or train more furnace operators to meet the demands of your glass industry. Another reason why you probably won't be able to produce clear glass in large quantities.
Once you have all that set up, you can make clear glass. You can make raw clear glass as another decoration, or you can make other things, but whatever you make with clear glass, I recommend you decide well in advance, as you will have less clear glass than you will green glass, so you should prioritize what you want to make, and focus on that instead of idling about making raw clear glass.
Pah, I said this would be easy. If there's more demand for my essays, I can produce more.
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Topic: What are the best setups for various industries? (Read 1413 times)