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[mattg63]

I have been trying to make potash to fertilize my farms and have not been able to make it work. I have a Wood Furnace with a dwarf making ash, a Carpenter making wood buckets and barrels and an ashery that should be able to make the lye/potash.

The lye is in the cue first, the askery dwarf gets a bucket and the "A" shows up next to the lye making task. He will go through several lye assignments. When the potash task starts I always get a cancel job message saying the dwarf needs a lye-bearing item. Am I missing something or is this a bug?

[bbb]

it's not a bug.. as it stand at the moment, you need someone to haul the contents of the lye bucket into a barrel and then someone else to haul the lye barrel to the shop to make potash..

tedious isn't it. it's been mentioned that in future it might be possible to do it in 1 step as an option

[mattg63]

We're probably in the wrong forum then, but how do you have them haul the buckets? I don't see any way to actually make that a task.

[Satyr]

Lye(propably) counts as food, at least lye barrels are stored in food stockpiles. So the way to speed up potash production is activating food hauling for lots of dwarves.
Which, by the way, you should do anyways, as it's the only reliable way to prevent your dwarves from starving.

[mattg63]

This is definitely a bug. I have 8 buckets of lye in the ashery and many empty barrels. All my dwarves have had all hauling tasks active and I cannot make potash.

[bbb]

whereas mine just made potash and its derivatives last night. whilst leaving food on the floor

it depends on how many store in barrel jobs are queued... before the lye are added to those hauling jobs.

all you can do is pray and hope that they don't rot before they are hauled (never seen it happen.. but someone mentioned that they rot)

alternatively.. forget fertilizers and just find some decent growers to plant instead

[Toady One]

People have reported them not putting lye from barrels to buckets, and others have it work fine.  I'm not sure what the issue is if you have food haulers and no active food hauling tasks.  If there are other food hauling tasks on the [j] screen, it won't set more after a point until the current ones are completed.

[Toady One]

I've put in the direct ash to potash job.  It's not satisfying because they only get skill in potash making -- they get no lye making skill, and lye is not mentioned.  I think it would be preferable to eventually have something like two lye making jobs, one where the lye is allowed to evaporate and one where it is stored for things like soap-making, if that's how it would work.  I'm not sure "potash making" should even be a skill if all you do is leave lye water around to evaporate.

[Mud]

Wikipedia says:

quote:To create potash, take an open-bottomed barrel, and place it on a stone base with a groove cut into it, which will direct the resulting liquid into another container. Then place a layer of straw at the bottom, covered by a layer of sticks. This filter layer will prevent the ashes from contaminating the solution. Then fill the barrel with wood-ashes and pour water over it. The water will leach out the potash into the receptacle. This product will be of variable quality. Historically, it was measured by seeing how high an egg would float in the solution. The liquid may be boiled away to give a black, impure potash.

While it definitely makes more sense to have potash produced from the lye resource as this was the typical process, this sounds like a process in which the lye-making step is skipped. So while having potash produced directly wouldn't be representative of how potash was usually made, it's certainly possible to have two completely seperate processes for lye-making and potash-making. This direct ash-to-potash method was apparently a later development, because just like the dwarves, 18th century people apparently got confused (or at least frustrated) if they had to make lye, then turn it into potash.

Maybe having seperate workshops for making potash and lye would make more sense? Or hell, why not one workshop for all your ash-related needs (minus kilns of course)?

[bbb]

sounds more like they don't bother isolating the lye rather than skipping lye.

i suppose to keep things simple.. just do ash->lye for soap.. and ash->potash and ignore the lye to potash as a separate process

combine lye making/potash making and just call it ashery operater or something..

[Maximus]

Perhaps ash->potash should give lye making skill, since it's just making lye and evaporating it.

[ctrlfrk]

Okay, the new ash->potash thing is in... but it doesn't seem to give you any potash  

Has anyone gotten it to work?

[Toady One]

I just got it to fail over here, so I should be able to solve it today.