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[Walshy]

Hey guys.

I thought I'd throw this out there since I know that in all my years playing DF, I've wasted many hours because of this.

The ability to create workgroups would cut down the huge amount of time wasted looking for dwarves with specific professions when you are wondering why a specific task is not getting done. It would also allow you to more easily keep track of dwarves who are skilled in another, relatively useless profession (e.g, milking), whom you want to pursue brewing or some other more useful skill.

The workgroups would be created, named, and staffed entirely by the player.

For example, you create the workgroup 'Brewers', you assign your two skilled brewers to it. All is well until booze stocks slump under the increasing population, so you assign Urist McHighMasterMilker to the 'Brewers' workgroup and activate brewing in his labour. Done. So now, when your booze stocks are low, and you are wondering where the hell your brewers are, you can open the workgroup and instantly see what all your brewers are doing, rather than having to track them down one by one from a massive list of dwarves.

Also, if you scan the 'Jobs List' and see that Urist McHighMasterMilker is idle, you could see his workgroup name in his 'view character' profile, and you wouldn't need to check his labour list to see if you've got him doing something useful yet.

[greenskye]

I like this idea but I think it could be even better if it were more generic as well. Why not be able to assign work groups to burrows, or to squads, or multiple squads to work groups. Adding any type of grouping feature that would show up in unit lists to apply certain actions en masse would greatly reduce micromanagement in older fortresses.

[JanusTwoface]

I do agree that something like this would be a nice feature, but for the time being, have you ever tried Dwarf Therapist? By assigning and sorting by custom professions, you get pretty much exactly what you're looking for. It really helps with overall dwarf management as well.

(It does work with the newest version of DF, the OP is just a little old. When a new version of DF is released DT is usually updated within a day or three.)

[Tharwen]

Honestly, I think you just need to use Dwarf Therapist.

It solves most of the obvious inaccessibility problems with labors/military skills.

[RabidAnubis]

Hey guys.

I thought I'd throw this out there since I know that in all my years playing DF, I've wasted many hours because of this.

The ability to create workgroups would cut down the huge amount of time wasted looking for dwarves with specific professions when you are wondering why a specific task is not getting done. It would also allow you to more easily keep track of dwarves who are skilled in another, relatively useless profession (e.g, milking), whom you want to pursue brewing or some other more useful skill.

The workgroups would be created, named, and staffed entirely by the player.

For example, you create the workgroup 'Brewers', you assign your two skilled brewers to it. All is well until booze stocks slump under the increasing population, so you assign Urist McHighMasterMilker to the 'Brewers' workgroup and activate brewing in his labour. Done. So now, when your booze stocks are low, and you are wondering where the hell your brewers are, you can open the workgroup and instantly see what all your brewers are doing, rather than having to track them down one by one from a massive list of dwarves.

Also, if you scan the 'Jobs List' and see that Urist McHighMasterMilker is idle, you could see his workgroup name in his 'view character' profile, and you wouldn't need to check his labour list to see if you've got him doing something useful yet.

Sounds sort of preemptive to a guild.  Guilds would be formed by the dwarves, Toady said he would put them in.  I thought about this idea also though.

[Walshy]

Cheers for the responses.

I'll definitely give Dwarf Therapist a go, all that job micro does my head in.

[zwei]

Hey guys.

I thought I'd throw this out there since I know that in all my years playing DF, I've wasted many hours because of this.

The ability to create workgroups would cut down the huge amount of time wasted looking for dwarves with specific professions when you are wondering why a specific task is not getting done. It would also allow you to more easily keep track of dwarves who are skilled in another, relatively useless profession (e.g, milking), whom you want to pursue brewing or some other more useful skill.

The workgroups would be created, named, and staffed entirely by the player.

For example, you create the workgroup 'Brewers', you assign your two skilled brewers to it. All is well until booze stocks slump under the increasing population, so you assign Urist McHighMasterMilker to the 'Brewers' workgroup and activate brewing in his labour. Done. So now, when your booze stocks are low, and you are wondering where the hell your brewers are, you can open the workgroup and instantly see what all your brewers are doing, rather than having to track them down one by one from a massive list of dwarves.

Also, if you scan the 'Jobs List' and see that Urist McHighMasterMilker is idle, you could see his workgroup name in his 'view character' profile, and you wouldn't need to check his labour list to see if you've got him doing something useful yet.

Sounds sort of preemptive to a guild.  Guilds would be formed by the dwarves, Toady said he would put them in.  I thought about this idea also though.

I do like player formed grouping thou.

Key idea here is that such group should have "leader" or "manager" which should take some responsibilities - i.e., consoler duty from mayor, ability to process relevant work orders instead of manager.

[Cespinarve]

Many people, i.e. anyone who uses a Mac, can't use DT while running Dwarf Fortress in the native Mac environment (yeah, I have bootcamp, but when I play DF I usually run it in the background while I do my Mac related things). Either Tarn bites the bullet and official incorporates DT into the DF framework, or we deal with these suggestions at face value, and discuss what we'd want in a non third party using DF game.

[loose nut]

Well, as a Mac user who can't use Dwarf Therapist, my thoughts are:

- it is actually worse for me in youngish fortresses than older ones, because of the randomly-skilled immigrants (which is one of the things I hate most about the current version, and keeps me playing .40d along with .031.25; master craftsmen show up far too often) – it's hard to remember that I've put high-master-beekeeper number one on masonry duty, number two on brewing, and number three's learning to be an axeman. As the fortress ages, the dwarves start to have professions that reflect what I actually have them doing. Also, I'd rather many of my off-duty soldiers show up as soldiers because they usually do individual combat drills and there's no point worrying about whether they are busy or not.

- so yes, organizing your dwarves by group ("Masons", "Smiths", "Kitchen Staff", other custom names) and having the unit list organized by workgroup would be very useful. I'd even prefer that the group name precede the dwarf's profession name in most functions, i.e. when you hover over units with "v" or "k" even.

[greenskye]

As a side suggestion it'd be nice if we could manually reclassify a dwarf to a different profession. Sometimes you get a legendary cheese maker #37 and you don't NEED another cheese maker!

If we could reclassify this dwarf to masonry and have the game recognize that this dwarf is now a mason (complete with color coding properly) I might actually use the color coding features.

I don't use many of the built in organizing features due to the fact that they assume (wrongly) that highest skill = profession. Perhaps just a simple check for the highest activated skill would solve these problems?