I've been enjoying pretty much feeling out the game on my own, but I have some questions that haven't had obvious answers in my gameplay.
1. Is there a list for what is required for various cooking? My chefs are quite productive, just wanted to know.
2. Is there any way to sort food storage for just "prepared meals"? As I said my chefs are productive and I'd like to send the barrels of meals to the back of the cave and keep the ingredients up front.
3. (There doesn't seem to be) but is there a way to sort stockpiles of just "narrow, large, small, etc" goods/armor? Its a pain trying to sort through for the worthless goblin stuff to trade when the merchants arrive.
4. Do roads actually do anything other than waste my time and look nice?
5. Is there any reason not to keep "outdoor" animals indoors for raising meat? (Horses, cows, etc)
6. When I tell my jewelers or bonecrafters to decorate things, how do they select which pieces of furniture or goods they are using?
Thats all for now, thanks everyone
1. You can go to the Stocks menu (z) and then the Kitchen menu, and choose what can be cooked and what can be brewed etc. I tend to only let them only cook meat and useless alcohol, or an abundant resource, because they all turn out insanely priced anyway, and my dwarves enjoy anything. Don't let them cook plants, unless you have loads of it, because cooking destroys the seeds, whereas brewing doesn't.
2. Set a food stockpile down, then go to it's settings (go over it in q mode and then press s) and go to the food menu, then disable all of the sub menus, like meat, plants etc. then just make sure the
u - Prepared Meals is highlighted, that way only prepared meals will be stored in that stockpile. As with the ingredients, just make another food stockpile at the front, go to its settings, turn u off, then put whatever ingredients you want by only highlighting them.
3. No. The most you can do about sorting armor and weapons out is to just set the quality (the caravan guards always have normal quality, sieges tend to have lower end quality weapons with some high level stuff) to whatever your weapons are, or just set the material type, like steel, iron etc.
4. Roads are only there to stop annoying plants and trees growing on the path to your fortress, which could end up blocking up the trade caravans! I usually just use a soil path, then once i'm a flourishing fortress, I add stone paths.
5. Just keep all your animals inside, doesn't make a difference to how much meat they produce. The easiest animals by far to raise are dogs, simply because they are cheap and don't pose an adoption threat like cats do! Just cage all the dogs you don't want walking around the place (usually stray dogs, war dogs are good to have wondering around) but be sure to let them out in spring / summer to let them get pregnant again. Just rinse and repeat as many times as you want, then cage em up when they've done their business. Caging them up just reduces lag and stops the dogs causing unneccesary traffic. Plus they annoy me when they fill up my dining room..
6. Not sure. Like the other guy said, just lock the items you want decorated in the room with the craftsdwarf or whatever.
Other than that, good job
You laid your questions out nicely, unlike most new guys do here :p Good to see someone else enjoying the game