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[Veroule]

There is no simple or easy solution to getting dwarves to work.  Dwarves should be lazy enough to frustrate a player.  A few minor things though that are currently just plain too dumb...even for dwarves.

I have 8 perfectly agile dwarves and they make this stand out quite nicely.  With nothing much else going on other then harvesting for my farm they will harvest, stockpile, and then walk away with no job.  There are 25 other harvest jobs pending though.  My perfectly agile dwarves run off until the right tick causes the jobs to look for available dwarves.  Then they have to run back.  A huge boost in efficiency could be gained for players by having the dwarf check for another job immediately on finishing one.  Make them take breaks more often if necessary, but that little back and forth eats huge amounts now.

Very few thing are worse right now then a massive harvest.  In my most recent harvest I was pushing my plant stockpiles up by about 200 each item using simultaneous farming and gathering.  I had a problem though, my stockpiles were approaching capacity.  Even with nothing to do but harvest, gather, and replant; my dwarves couldn't keep up.  The problem was simple, only one barrel would ever be brought in for a stockpile at a time.  Furthermore, bringing that barrel in seemed to be the last thing any of the dwarves wanted to do.  Small fix in logic.  Dwarf says, "Oh shit! We need more barrelS."  Yes, think stockpile full.  How many barrelSSS need to be brought in to put all of that stuff away, add 1 and that is how many bring the barrel jobs to make. If possible make that number else make the most that the stockpile allows.  I literally was disgusted watching things rot while many dwarves watched 1 bring in a single fresh barrel before anything more could be put away.  Same goes for bins.  When there are plenty waiting, assign them all to be brought at once.

Another really irritating one I happened to watch recently.  I had recently moved 1 category of item out of a stockpile and into another.  As it happened, most of the bins got left behind in the old stockpile.  As items were produced for that older pile that still went into bins those bins became reassigned from free to the pile.  This of course meant a dwarf had to move them from the spot they were sitting at to the first open spot from the top left corner of the pile.  They are already sitting in the pile!  One IF is all it takes to figure that out, and look that makes it so they can be immediately stored into.

Again just a few thing that falls into the category of "even a sober dwarf should be able to figure this out."  Actually I think I need to make that my signature on another forum.

[Core Xii]

quote:Originally posted by Veroule:
<STRONG>A huge boost in efficiency could be gained for players by having the dwarf check for another job immediately on finishing one.</STRONG>

Amen. Kinda like miners, after mining out a tile, they check for more work in the adjacent tiles. In the same way, for example a farmer planting seeds should, after planting one, check if there are more to be planted (e.g. in the same plot, or even just nearby squares), not run off 20 steps and then realize there's more work!

There's more than that, I think the tasks system should be revised so that dwarfs pick jobs, not the other way around. The way I'd do it is have a data structure of jobs that the stockpiles and workshops and whatnot push their tasks into, then have dwarfs look for jobs from that list.

[slMagnvox]

More Item Haulers will keep barrels and bins in their appropriate stockpiles.

And here you are cursing your dwarves for failing to harvest your massive crop while your dwarves are cursing you for asking such a massive crop be planted in the first place.  And shouldn't those barrels be reserved for booze production?  That always helps clear up space in my plant stockpiles.

Gathering the harvest is only a time sensitive task if you have too large a harvest or too few dwarves to gather it.  See which is the problem in your fort.  Optimizations will be nice, we are all looking forward to them, but this shouldn't be giving you game-breaking trouble unless something in your fort is out of spec.

[Veroule]

Yeah my fortress is out of spec.  It is a 10 dwarf fortress, in its 15th year.  They are all legendary and then some.  The problem with the barrels and bins is that 1 gets brought in.  Then an item has to be put in it before the next barrel is called for.  This is normally fine for most things.  Plants however can be produced fast enough to fill 40 spots in a stockpile before a barrel can be brought.

I guess it just means I need to make 10 seperate piles sized for 20 instead of 1 sized for 200.

[Tamren]

thats odd, when i make large booze stockpiles i set them to max barrel capacity.

Any spare barrels are automatically put into the empty space, even though they have nothing in them.

Whats wierd about it is it seems that particular hauling task is very low on the importance scale.

[Core Xii]

Hmmmmmm, I just thought of something. What if you adjust the food stockpile to also be a barrel stockpile? Then ALL excess barrels would automatically end up there!

[Jeon]

quote:Originally posted by Core Xii:
<STRONG>Hmmmmmm, I just thought of something. What if you adjust the food stockpile to also be a barrel stockpile? Then ALL excess barrels would automatically end up there!</STRONG>

That's brilliant!

I think I'll have to try that out sometime.

[Funkadelic Jive Turkey]

That's what I had done, though mostly for space efficiency than to combat food rotting. Then again when you've 10 dwarves total, and are making enough food to feed 100s, regardless of cause it makes sense for there to be waste. I believe there is a Bloat for food hoarders to be punished in the future. (Vermin plagues? I dunno what Toady has in mind.)

[TerminatorII]

nah just make it rot after a while. (like 2 years) then we could add refregeration to combat that!  

(of course that would mean we would have to have wind and wind dirrection too.)