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[Drakeero]

Normally I get bored with my forts quickly after about 2 years or 20-30 dwarfs and I'll re-embark.  But as my management skills improve I'm experimenting with pushing my forts longer and trying to develop self-sustaining industries.  Right now I'm experimenting with farming industry fortresses.  Problem is I'm at about 31 dwarves now [had 36 with some small bouts of fun] and this is perhaps the longest I've had any single fort.  Problem is half the works have stopped working.

The farmers are still producing plants and food by the metric ton and the sole woodcutter is still an ax-crazy homicidal maniac on the nearby forest, but everyone else has stopped.  I've checked labors repeatedly to make sure the right combinations are active but the kitchen remains empty, the brewery hasn't been touched in ages, and neither carpenter will even touch the barrel producing assignments in over a season meaning that food now goes all over the ground and even if someone tried to brew they couldn't.  And my miner... eesh.  He was doing real good expanding the storage rooms in the basement but then just kinda lost initiative and I have several partly dug out rooms that I can't use yet.

Is there any way to kick their asses back into gear before I get too bored/irritated with the fortress and re-embark with another farming experiment/practice?

[ThrowerOfStones]

Are they all on break or what?

[slothen]

are your dwarves idling with no job?  or are they all busy doing something else?  dwarves won't use stockpiles that have stone in them already.  This causes production chain problems.  Are you using the most recent version?  .12 or .14? 

The bottleneck in brewing is having spare barrels.  quarry bushes need free bags and to be processed at a farmers workshop.  Wheat flour, longland grass, and whip vines need to be milled at a quern and bagged before they can be cooked.  This requires the milling labor, the plant processing labor, and naturally cooking to actually get stuff cooked at a kitchen.  bags are easiest to obtain by buying cheap bins of leather from the caravan and making no-quality bags from a leatherworkers workshop.

One way to handle this is to identify a single thing that needs to get done that isn't getting done.  Then specifically find a dwarf that you want to do it.  Make sure he has the labor enabled, then see what other jobs he is taking or whats preventing him from working.  Sometimes that means disabling his other jobs.  going through this process step by step will let you see where your problems are coming from.

[Drakeero]

Several of them are idling with no jobs.  Others are doing massive amounts of semi-important hauling.  I'm using Dwarf Therapy to make it easier to see who has what going and I disable all other labors including hauling for dwarves who I want to be doing other stuff like making barrels.

I've got a quern up and working but its my first one ever so I'm a little rough with the whole get them into bags and sorted idea.  [Hence why I'm practicing a food production fort].  Seeing as how I'm having so many bottleneck problems I may start another farming-only practice fort and leave out the other sub-industries like cloth, dwarven flour and other milling plants, and just focus solely on sustennance and brewing plants until I can get a hang of clearing up bottlenecks.

My miner has actually begun to mine, but tiny little bits and peices at at time before going onto break.  He has no other labors at all assigned except maybe "cleaning" and "haul dead bodies" but therapist reports him as idle most the time.  Same with my carpenters.  [Hence the now critical barrel bottleneck] and I'm a little too overwhelmed right now to try to deal with bags and cloth and other stuff.

I'm seriously wondering if I bit off too much then I can chew with this fort since my management skills are still developing and I can't even resolve bottlenecks in the main industry yet, much less sub-industries.

[slothen]

no point in quitting now unless your dwarves are actually about to starve/die of thirst.  and if they are, you may as well watch for the fun of it.  switch farming production to pump helmets and pig tails only.  Plump helmets require no processing and can be eaten raw and brewed.  Once you get an extra few dozen seeds you can start cooking them too.  Once you get a few pig tails, they can be processed into thread at the farmers workshop, then woven into thread at a loom, and finally made into bags at a clothiers workshop.  This is a multi step process, but if your goal is to get 5-10 bags to expand your farming options, it can be done fairly easily as long as his labors are enabled and the workshops can get built.  Once you get a few bags, you can go nuts with quarry bushes. and milling.  For now, don't plant any dimple cups, since they aren't food at all.

[Drakeero]

Ok, refresh my memory, what use are bags to farming?  Other then to hold seeds?  [but for some reason my dwarves prefer to use barrels for seeds].

And yes, I have decided to start a new fort.  I've learned a LOT from this particular expedition so much of the farming process is clearer and more organized in my head.  I'm going to see if I can focus exclusively on growing plants that can be made into basic dwarven alcohols and making sure I have enough of carpentry support to make sure I don't start running out of barrels ahead of time.  [And making sure I can make furniture for all my dwarves since I'm kinda doing this map stone free].  Once that's established I'm going to start to gather plants and work on more exotic crops and alcohols for the fun of it.  IF I can get a stable system running, then I might try to get some migrants [or start a new fort] with cloth, dyeing, and clothesmaking and I'll see if I can't get the hang of a pig tail clothing industry.  [But I'm debating whether or not I should try a clothing industry next, or dig deeper and see if I can't start learning how to cultivate cavern plants]

The first two-three dozen forts I played where very conservative, and followed a very simple pattern that never seemed to work in the long run and a lot of the issues I had were micro-management issues with farms and workshops and organizing industries which is why I'm doing these "purist" forms solely dedicated to a narrow industry.  Its nice playing variety to keep things interesting and I figure that when I'm done learning individual skills I can go back to trying to build super-successful mega-forts.  And then come mega-projects, and then comes all the insane fun all you lucky people seem to have.

Edit: Oh yeah, and starving/dehydrating is unlikely.  I have over 1000 edible/brewable plants and I forgot to count how much alcohol but it was definitely up in the several hundreds.

[Zaerosz]

Ok, refresh my memory, what use are bags to farming?  Other then to hold seeds?  [but for some reason my dwarves prefer to use barrels for seeds].

And yes, I have decided to start a new fort.  I've learned a LOT from this particular expedition so much of the farming process is clearer and more organized in my head.  I'm going to see if I can focus exclusively on growing plants that can be made into basic dwarven alcohols and making sure I have enough of carpentry support to make sure I don't start running out of barrels ahead of time.  [And making sure I can make furniture for all my dwarves since I'm kinda doing this map stone free].  Once that's established I'm going to start to gather plants and work on more exotic crops and alcohols for the fun of it.  IF I can get a stable system running, then I might try to get some migrants [or start a new fort] with cloth, dyeing, and clothesmaking and I'll see if I can't get the hang of a pig tail clothing industry.  [But I'm debating whether or not I should try a clothing industry next, or dig deeper and see if I can't start learning how to cultivate cavern plants]

The first two-three dozen forts I played where very conservative, and followed a very simple pattern that never seemed to work in the long run and a lot of the issues I had were micro-management issues with farms and workshops and organizing industries which is why I'm doing these "purist" forms solely dedicated to a narrow industry.  Its nice playing variety to keep things interesting and I figure that when I'm done learning individual skills I can go back to trying to build super-successful mega-forts.  And then come mega-projects, and then comes all the insane fun all you lucky people seem to have.

Edit: Oh yeah, and starving/dehydrating is unlikely.  I have over 1000 edible/brewable plants and I forgot to count how much alcohol but it was definitely up in the several hundreds.

The seed barrels contain seed bags. Some of the mods around have more types of plants - the Genesis mod is the only one I've played recently, but it has a fair few that aren't in vanilla DF. And thank you, I now have to start a farming-industry-based fort.

[Vehudur]

Well, I know that if my dwarfs stop listening to me, they tend to have a critical existence failure instead of a critical labor failure.  Usually the existence failure is magma related.

[Rastaan]

Well, I know that if my dwarfs stop listening to me, they tend to have a critical existence failure instead of a critical labor failure.  Usually the existence failure is magma related.

All of your forts must be incredibly short lived, in that case.

[Vehudur]

Well, I know that if my dwarfs stop listening to me, they tend to have a critical existence failure instead of a critical labor failure.  Usually the existence failure is magma related.

All of your forts must be incredibly short lived, in that case.

Actually, I don't have that issue.  I regularly hit 20 years.

[blue emu]

Other common causes of "labor problems" are :

(1) accidentally forbidding the workshops... use 't' to check;
(2) accidentally setting the stone-type that the workshop was built from to "Reserved for Economic use"... check on the stone menu under 'z';
(3) setting up a burrow that excludes the workshop or its stockpiles