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[jei]

How do you deal with the carpal tunnel syndrom inducing depot trading?

I got loads of crafts to sell and I have to designate each and every one of the items to bring to the depot separately, and yet again to sell or offer them. Why not have an option to EXCLUDE items or "select all"?

Can't this be made more healthy? If there ever was an award for bad interface design, this game deserves it.

[Silverionmox]

Doing queries like "All stone crafts AND wooden crafts AND all (clothing with value<20)" would be divine.

But that's not the worst aspect. The worst is that you have to indicate all the stuff you want in the depot, and then, when it's there, you have to select it AGAIN... And then, when you're down, they start kicking you by hauling every trade good BACK OUT of the depot... so you have to do it all over again FOR EVERY SPORESPAWNING CARAVAN. (Good runner ups were the broker that is always off hauling silk socks when you need him, and the trader that selects the goods you don't want to sell and then hides them between the other trade goods so you have to comb the whole list AGAIN.)

All this could be simply solved by making the broker a sort of specialized bookkeeper that maintains a list of trade goods, and meets his counterpart in his office, where they discuss the lists of trade goods with a good barrel of ale. The goods meanwhile remain in their stockpile until they are sold, and then it's time to haul them to the caravan (whose servants should assist in the hauling, by the way). Particularly distrustful traders could insist on inspecting some goods, in which case they tour the stockpiles.

How do we distinguish between trade goods and other goods? Simple: a Trade good tag, similar to the Melt, Hide or Dump markers. You can indicate them in the same way, or alternatively as an option in a workshop: "Mark all products of this workshop as Trade good". That opens other useful options: a stockpile that only accepts items marked as Trade good, or a manager command that, for example, says "decorate all Trade goods with bone".

In the eternal voting list as "Persistent trade good tags"

[rephikul]

For now you can sell whole bins. Up to 20 times less hauling and clicking.

[ZebioLizard2]

Except sometimes goods you don't want sold are in those. Like cut gems, and rope, and crutches for some reason. I found buckets being sold in my finished goods bin before!

[rephikul]

Except sometimes goods you don't want sold are in those. Like cut gems, and rope, and crutches for some reason. I found buckets being sold in my finished goods bin before!

cut gems are in gem bins. Only gem crafts and large gems produced by cutting gem are in finished goods bin and you want to sell them off anyway. bucket are furnitures and they dont ever go into finished good bins. Either you saw it wrong or it was a horrible glitch. Crutches can be disabled from stockpiles and just stored in your hospital. The only issue here is rope. You can opt to put them on a seperate stock pile so they arent easily mixed in with other goods.

Maybe cause i never do stone/wood/clothing crafting so i cant see your pain. The closest integration to what you probably want is something like the import / export screen and settings can be saved between season. That or a "bring to depot" designation...

That's it, bring to depot designation

[nickbii]

I try to play DF like an ethical dwarf. This means no stealing from caravans, and lots of trading because trading = money. At least half of the RL time I spend in my fort is dedicated to trading micromanagement.

I have to micromanage my broker's labor settings or he'll refuse to trade. This includes keeping a close eye on precisely how many Take to Depot jobs remain undone, because if there are still 50 screens of those no broker will trade regardless of labor settings.

My main trade goods are stone, and every year I queue up 150 crafting jobs in the manager. Which means years I produce mugs I make 450 of the goddamned things. I have to individually designate all 450 goddamned mugs to be taken to the depot.

I have to individually designate all 450 goddamned mugs AGAIN to actually trade.

The stuff I trade for is pretty specific, but it's all mixed in on the trade goods list. Like any good dwarf, for example, I need every drop of booze the caravan is carrying. I do not need, and do not want Ant Ichor, Cow Blood, or gnomeblight so I can't just go to the barrels section and buy everything.

The trade screen isn't smart enough to show me the trade goods with wood in them. Last night I had to restart multiple times because something in the depot had wood in it. I don't know what. Best guess is a gobbo shirt with wood decoration got mixed in with the other crap. After sending all 450 goddamned mugs to the depot, and proposing to trade all 450 goddamned mugs twice, I was not about to let the Elves get away without selling me a grizzly bear and a bunch of booze.

I have to micromanage the entire fort's labor so that trade goods will actually be taken to the depot. Otherwise they take one thing two steps to the depot, then turn around and walk 150 steps to replace said one thing on the stockpile. Last night I had to suspend every single job in the fort AND eliminate all my Finished Goods stockpiles before the little dummies would do their jobs. Which means I have to unsuspend them now. More micromanagement.

This post is here primarily so that non-trading players can feel my pain. Hopefully this will convince some of them to vote for the Trade Designation thing on the eternal suggestions thread. Right now it's 84th with 9 votes. This is not something that will monopolize Toady for months. He's already got code that creates jobs from a designation. He's got a functioning job (take to depot) he can connect the Trade Designation with.

I'd really like to keep playing DF. But if running a trading post doesn't become a lot easier in the next few months I'll have to stop. It's just too much work. The Trade Designation wouldn't get rid of all that micromanagement, but it would help a lot.

Nick

[Fancy Admiral]

Yeah, it's a pain.  One design element of your fortress I can recommend to help trading go a little smoother is to place stockpiles with clearly marked lists of things to sell at caravan times.  I generally have a few, all in close proximity to the depot.  I re-designate one every year after the trade liason tells me what mountainhome wants with the things I expect to make to sell them.  This way when trading time comes, dwarfs will have already moved the goods relatively close.  It makes for quicker depot loads.

This however, does not help your actual entry to the menu any.  For that, I donno.  Some people advocate scripts, which will help on your end a little (sell the next 10-20 lines worth of goods, all similar), but not much.  I've never used one, though.  I just use bins to move stuff, and sell it when appropriate.  Elves would take longer to trades, but they also bring fewer goods I want to buy.  Tame animals, and booze is all I usually care about from them -- sometimes seeds.  They can stuff the wooden shoes, and why would I want to buy three hundred bolts of hemp cloth?  I can make my own if I cared tyvm!  Bring me more bears!

[vogonpoet]

All of the above, and a "Remember last year's trade agreement" button.

[thijser]

I mainly miss the option of beeing able to select all items of a certain times (for example all crafts). It would take away a lot of work.

[nickbii]

Yeah, it's a pain.  One design element of your fortress I can recommend to help trading go a little smoother is to place stockpiles with clearly marked lists of things to sell at caravan times.  I generally have a few, all in close proximity to the depot.  I re-designate one every year after the trade liason tells me what mountainhome wants with the things I expect to make to sell them.  This way when trading time comes, dwarfs will have already moved the goods relatively close.  It makes for quicker depot loads.

This however, does not help your actual entry to the menu any.  For that, I donno.  Some people advocate scripts, which will help on your end a little (sell the next 10-20 lines worth of goods, all similar), but not much.  I've never used one, though.  I just use bins to move stuff, and sell it when appropriate.  Elves would take longer to trades, but they also bring fewer goods I want to buy.  Tame animals, and booze is all I usually care about from them -- sometimes seeds.  They can stuff the wooden shoes, and why would I want to buy three hundred bolts of hemp cloth?  I can make my own if I cared tyvm!  Bring me more bears!

I'm using the Mac version, so I'm pretty sure I can't use scripts.

I have stockpiles near the depot. My Gatehouse has a basement with lots of room so I can store crap there. The problem was that I only had 20 working-age dwarves, and they wasted a lot of time refilling the stockpile. ie: they'd take an instrument 3 squares to the Depot, notice there was room in the stockpile for more crap, and decide that some random mug deep in the bowels of the fortress absolutely NEEDED to get put in the stockpile. My ordinary solution is to send damn near everything to the depot, but I couldn't do that because then the Broker would be distracted from trading by bringing items to the depot. I ended up eliminating the stockpile completely.

[harborpirate]

Except sometimes goods you don't want sold are in those. Like cut gems, and rope, and crutches for some reason. I found buckets being sold in my finished goods bin before!

Set the entire bin to be sold, then go into the bin and un-designate any items you don't want to trade. The trade screen could stand some serious improvement, but there are a few ways to make it slightly less of a pain to use. (I always sort by value when looking for items to bring to the depot as well - distance is useless in my forts.)

[alfie275]

Ideally I would want some sort of auto trade feature based on book keeping and broker level, so there is a demand level designated on each thing, negative demand means we have an excess and positive means we need more. The auto trader would sell off things with negative demand and buy things with positive deman. You could also set an amount you want stockpiled, and the autotrader will try to keep it as close to the demand + those amounts as possible.

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[Fayrik]

I'll admit that trading isn't fantastic, but can't you select individual items from bins?

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carpal tunnel? we're doomed.

[Uristocrat]

I'll admit that trading isn't fantastic, but can't you select individual items from bins?

Yeah, but I usually want to trade just the items.  Why would I want to give away my bins!?  I think someone had a macro that pressed down/enter 12 times or however many it is.

This can also be annoying when you're trying to buy up all the elven cloth, because page down goes two spaces too far.  Yeah, I realize that the fix is to have a reservoir-connected trade depot, but...