Like everyone else here I've had issue with Dwarves rushing out of the fortress to loot the dead of their possessions either after a caravan ambush or a fine goblin massacre. That stuff is often useful for its metal content and illogically high resale value. But as soon as you let them go outside and set collect refuse every single idle dwarf will rush out to grab those items. Often real work gets neglected or dwarfs with valuable skills are over-exposed in the wilderness ware their subject to more ambushes.
Currently the only way to get a Dwarf to refuse these haul jobs is to remove "Item Hauling" but this will prevent them from doing ANY useful hauling inside your fortress. Thus we should have a differentiation of Hauling inside & outside the Fortress (ideally with the ability to define space as explicitly inside or outside as has been suggested many times already). The outside Item Hauling skill would be called Scavenging and the indoor equivalent "Delivery" or "Mover" something to that effect. This job would cover a broader range of item types as theirs much less point in differentiating between hauling stone, food, animals, wood and items when inside the fortress, the common factor is that the start & end point of the hauling job and everything in between is inside the fortress.
The current Stone, Wood, Refuse, options would change to meaning to refer to jobs that bring an item from outside the fort inside or visa-versa. Wood and Stone Collection might also become part of the WoodCrafting & Mining skill groups as their so closely associated with them. Scavenging becomes a catch all for collecting any item from outside the fortress and might also have an Herbalist like ability to generate items when their are no known items to collect, the items generated in this manner would almost always be worn, broken and dirty, more scraps then items, bones and shells would be common. But their might be some vanishingly small chance to find almost anything like a Ring of Power.
The main idea here is that the end-points of a Hauling task are probably in the end just as important too us as a method to classify and assigning the tasks as is the item being hauled.
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Topic: Scavenging Skill (Read 497 times)