Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Halo]

About what % of time does a dwarf spent working? I'm asking because I'm working how many dwarves I should assign as furnace operators to make sure I'm smelting at 100% capacity 24/7. For 4 furnaces, should I have 6 dwarves manning them? 8? I have an ungodly amount of ore, and I want to get caught up, as there's more and more coming in constantly from mining out the rest of the fortress.

[Hyndis]

You usually need to have about double the number of dwarves needed to ensure that its always staffed.

So if you have 5 workshops, 10 dwarves means they will always be used. This is conservative, but erroring on the side of reliability.

Similarly with your military, of each 10 man squad, assume that 5 will be on duty at any given time. This means if you want a roving army of 20 dwarves at all times, you need 4 squads.

[o_O[WTFace]]

I usually just have 1 dedicated dwarf per smelter and make more smelters as needed to avoid furnace operators sitting around with no furnaces to operate. 

I may be wrong but I feel like it depends on your FPS too.  At 100 fps everyone is usually working, with brief intermissions.  At 30 fps its half work half goofing off.  Could just be my impatience combined with everything moving slowly though. 

[Hyndis]

Most of my dwarves are general purpose dwarves. Farmers and furnace operators. In most fortresses I'll have 80+ of these guys running around, which means there will always be plenty of dwarves to farm, process plants, cook roasts, brew booze, and work the furnaces.

The specialist dwarves are few in number, but perform no hauling tasks.

[Greep]

Well if you have specialists I literally just make a workshop for each specialist.  4 furnaces = four dwarves, if I find I am not smelting enough, the 5 furnaces and 5 dwarves.  Putting your factory complex over several z levels cuts down on space tremendously, so more workshops is not very inefficient.

[Hyndis]

Well if you have specialists I literally just make a workshop for each specialist.  4 furnaces = four dwarves, if I find I am not smelting enough, the 5 furnaces and 5 dwarves.  Putting your factory complex over several z levels cuts down on space tremendously, so more workshops is not very inefficient.

I put my storage above or below the workshops, but the workshops tend to all be in about the same place. There is very little travel time between the workshops and the storage.

There is usually one or two large, subdivided rooms that house all of the workshops, with stairs leading up or down to storage. This puts all of my production in the same place. The workshops do not have profiles set, but each dwarf has only a certain set of jobs he can do. This means that I usually only have 2-3 metalworkers who perform metalworking, but no other jobs. Not even cleaning or hauling. Then I have about 80 other dwarves doing work where skill is unimportant, like smelting. I usually build around 15-20 smelters so if I need to get something done I just queue it up, and swarms of worker dwarves flock to the smelters and start smelting stuff. This gives me the ability to very quickly get an urgent task done, or if its a long term, ongoing thing I can just put repeat on a task on a few smelters, like melting goblinite or smelting a particular type of ore.

You can see an example of the layout I use:
http://mkv25.net/dfma/poi-17398-factoryfloor

Its a very flexible design. Works above or below ground, and storage can be above or below the factory floor.

[Lord Darkstar]

But the appropriate smelting skill affects yield rates from melting objects, doesn't it?

[Kazang]

That's a nice fort Hyndis, Interesting above ground layout, magma moat is nice too.

I also use the same layout for factories and storage, to keep stockpiles as close as possible to the workshops so the skilled dwarfs don't waste time moving stuff around.  I even use mini stockpiles right next to the forges set only to whatever they are working with, ie i have steel forge, bronze forge, etc with piles of the appropriate bars only one tile away.

[Urist Imiknorris]

But the appropriate smelting skill affects yield rates from melting objects, doesn't it?

No.

[Hyndis]

But the appropriate smelting skill affects yield rates from melting objects, doesn't it?

It only effects the time it takes to complete the smelting job, not the yield.

And I get around the time factor by having 15-20 magma smelters all going. 15-20 dabbling dwarves do something faster than a few legendary dwarves, and they are far more flexible. When they're not smelting they go and farm, or they cook roasts, or brew booze, stuff like that.

[Oglokoog]

I've never thought of it that way. It's true that for jobs like this, that do not have any sort of difference in quality of the output, it really is more efficient to prefer quantity over quality of workers, especially with unlimited fuel provided by magma. Will have to make moar magmeh furnaesis.

[Hyndis]

I've never thought of it that way. It's true that for jobs like this, that do not have any sort of difference in quality of the output, it really is more efficient to prefer quantity over quality of workers, especially with unlimited fuel provided by magma. Will have to make moar magmeh furnaesis.

Even if you have no magma, its the same thing. Its still 1 unit of fuel per job regardless of the skill of the worker.

For things like cooking and brewing, skill does matter but not to the degree that I care about. I just let all of the workers cook and brew so the elite dwarves can continue on with their specialized crafts. I tend to have about 15-20 specialized dwarves in a large fortress with the rest being generic workers.

I then dwarf these workers into my military as I need them. They're pretty much interchangeable, thus, expendable.