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[CptFastbreak]

So I've been min-maxing my starting builds recently, and this got me thinking about which skills are more or less difficult to train. So I tried to draw up a list of skills categorized by training difficulties. It's also relevant when considering which dwarves are expendable of course.

Any input on this is appreciated.

Not included in ranking:
Butchery, Tanning, Gem Cutting, Wood Cutting, Dyeing, Soap Making, Wood Burning, Potash/Lye Making, Milling, Threshing, Herbalist, Cheese Making, Milking, Pressing, Bee Keeping, Weaving, Strand Extraction, Pump Operating - IMO these skills are not worth being trained explicitly. If they are used frequently enough for the training to make a difference, it's usually frequent enough so the dwarves train easily by just doing the job.
Dyeing, Hunting, Trapping, Animal Dissection, Training, Caretaking, Glazing, Wax Working - I don't know a lot about those skills and how they train.
Consoler, Pacifier - I don't really know how it trains.

Very Easy:
Melee Weapon Skills - train by barracks
Mining - obviously
Stone Detailing - smooth large amounts of stone surface
Book Keeping - trains itself by Highest Precision setting
Flatterer, Conversationalist, Comedian, Intimidator, Persuader, Negotiator, Judge of Intent - train by inactivity

Easy:
Gem Cutter - Since you can cut regular stone now.
Mechanic - create mechanisms / stone is everywhere
Stonecrafter - create stone crafts / stone is everywhere
Mason, Cooking, Brewing, Farming (Fields) - train themselves by frequent use
Fishing, Fish Dissection - if you have good fishing grounds of course
Siege Operator - build a catapult in an area with lots of stones and fire at wall
Appraiser - may be more difficult if not all civilizations are trading

Medium
Bone Carver - easy if you have a bountiful animal industry
Leather Working - see above
Gem Setting - since you can set regular stone now.
Glassmaking - sand is an infinite resource / easy if you have magma
Carpenter - used a lot, but requires wood cutting which is in an unsafe area

Hard
Weaponsmith - create bolts, they can be melted with good yield / Medium if you have magma
Metalcrafter - easier with magma and lots of gold
Armor Using skills - Very Easy with a danger room
Crossbow Making - Medium if you have a good bone industry

Very Hard
Armor Smith, Blacksmith - need lots of bars and fuel, bad yield when melting
Siege Engineer - product needs lots of wood
Doctor skills - Medium with a danger room I reckon

[Rude]

Gem cutting/setting should be easy now. since you can cut and set regular stone.
I don't think armorer blacksmithing is that hard, not nearly as hard as doctor skills.

[CptFastbreak]

Ah right, I forgot about regular stone cutting. Edited post to reflect that.

Also you're right about the doctor skills, so I moved them to very hard. But I maintain that Armoring is right in that category, since you need fuel, and lots of metal to do it, it takes a long time, and you can't recover the metal that well.

[Flying Dice]

Weapon/Armorsmithing is incredibly easy if you have any sort of weapons-grade ore on your embark. The only reason it would be difficult is if you are limited to goblinite and what the merchants bring.

[slothen]

the materials for various smithing jobs can be labor intensive.  Especially since i think it takes multiple bars for most blacksmithing jobs.  Generally I rely on moods/migrants for these jobs.

Siege operation takes absolutely forever to train I hear.

butchery can take awhile, although maybe not anymore since workshop clutter has changed.

teacher/student/concentration/observer takes a while to skill up.

biter/kicker/striker/misc object user takes a lot of fighting and sparring to get trained up.

Also imo its very worth it to have a trained weaver/dyer.  Mostly weaver though.

[Rude]

I can see how you could argue that any metal working should be in easy or hard. because it totally depends on whats available. if you are short on ore, then its hard, but if you have magnetite and marble, then even a booming steel industry is easy to setup (assuming you are comfy finding/ using magma).
Teacher is not too crazy hard to get, but it does take a bit of micromanaging and several recruits. I've almost gotten to legendary a few times.
Student is decidedly harder bc there just aren't that many skills to learn.
I don't know what concentration does or how to get it. Its kinda elusive. I think it has to do with marksmanship.
Observer is pretty hard to get even if you setup things (init files etc.) to only allow ambushes instead of sieges. Also, it's dangerous.

I agree about weaver/ dyer. But also things like thresher are more efficiently handled by a few skilled workers than many novices. Even though there is no quality. 1 legend works extremely fast. IMO its better to have 1 thresher and 4 haulers than 5 thresher/haulers. Same for milling (if you use a quern) smelting, block making, and wood cutting, etc. If you have adequate pig tail income, then it can be set to repeat with little to no micromanaging and get legendary as fast as anything else. I'd say it's easier than carpentry, but not easier than masonry. maybe a bit more time consuming to set up though. Then weaving is cake, since it automatically assigns the job when there's threads available. The hard part is figuring out how to pawn all the products off on merchants without crippling your hauling capacity for 3 months. (sewn images are your friend)

I think the secondary fighting skills (biting, kicking, etc.) would be easier to train if you didn't assign weapons. But you would still gain more in wrestler than any of them. If you have a crutch user in your military, then you will probably see alot of misc. object skill over time.

[CptFastbreak]

Weapon/Armorsmithing is incredibly easy if you have any sort of weapons-grade ore on your embark. The only reason it would be difficult is if you are limited to goblinite and what the merchants bring.

It needs a fuel source, and lots of metals. Standard setting for worldgen gives you few iron ore, so if you assume a standard configuration, Metal related skills aren't easy to train, or at least a lot harder than lots of others. Also, ore is a finite resource even where it's plentiful. Weaponsmithing is the easiest of those though, since you can produce bolts and melt them with near zero loss of raw material, so you don't need as much metal.

Siege operation takes absolutely forever to train I hear.

If you set up a catapult in an area with lots of stone and then have it fire at will at the wall it will train in relatively decent time. Not as fast as Mining for example, but it will give you experienced operators in maybe a year.

butchery can take awhile, although maybe not anymore since workshop clutter has changed.

teacher/student/concentration/observer takes a while to skill up.

biter/kicker/striker/misc object user takes a lot of fighting and sparring to get trained up.

Also imo its very worth it to have a trained weaver/dyer.  Mostly weaver though.

Yes, butchery takes some time, but in my experience it's not that crucial to have an experienced butcher anyway. You're right about the Weaver, but how easy that's to train really depends a lot on the amount of thread you get, so I'm not so sure in which category to put it. As for the others, I didn't include them because I didn't think they were very useful.

I can see how you could argue that any metal working should be in easy or hard. because it totally depends on whats available. if you are short on ore, then its hard, but if you have magnetite and marble, then even a booming steel industry is easy to setup (assuming you are comfy finding/ using magma).

Yes, it depends on the availability, but it still requires a lot of setup and pre-processing, so it's in any case harder than Mechanics or Mining.

I agree about weaver/ dyer. But also things like thresher are more efficiently handled by a few skilled workers than many novices. Even though there is no quality. 1 legend works extremely fast. IMO its better to have 1 thresher and 4 haulers than 5 thresher/haulers. Same for milling (if you use a quern) smelting, block making, and wood cutting, etc. If you have adequate pig tail income, then it can be set to repeat with little to no micromanaging and get legendary as fast as anything else. I'd say it's easier than carpentry, but not easier than masonry. maybe a bit more time consuming to set up though. Then weaving is cake, since it automatically assigns the job when there's threads available. The hard part is figuring out how to pawn all the products off on merchants without crippling your hauling capacity for 3 months. (sewn images are your friend)

But usually it's not that important to get the threshing jobs quickly anyways. Where it is, there will be enough work to get it trained without any extra effort. In that way, it's similar to crutch walking.

I think the secondary fighting skills (biting, kicking, etc.) would be easier to train if you didn't assign weapons. But you would still gain more in wrestler than any of them. If you have a crutch user in your military, then you will probably see alot of misc. object skill over time.

I think I might try that with my current military. Also, could you explain your setup for training the teacher skill? I think I'd like to try that too.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

Excuse me if I'm mistaken, but...

Doesn't a stack of 25 bolts produce 0.2 bars of metal, for a 20% melt yield?  Whereas metal leggings provide 0.5 bars, for a 50% melt yield.  (Not that it's impossible to set up a bolt recovery firing range, but I don't believe very many people do so.)  So why are people talking about good melting rates for weaponsmithing, but not for armorsmithing?

[Shinziril]

I believe the trick was stack-splitting using an archery range designed to preserve the bolts, and then melting down the individual bolts.  This can actually net you MORE metal than you started with, depending on how excessive it gets. 

I will say that on my embark, armorsmithing and weaponsmithing were both easy to train- but I have both magnetite and magma, and thus far more metal than I know what to do with.  The fact that the armorsmith did in fact mood quite early on didn't hurt, either. 

[Rude]

ah. teaching. It's definitely not "easy" and takes some micromanaging, but it can be less tedious than other things.

You can start with zero skill recruits, but I bring along lvl5 teachers on embark.
When I start a fort, the first thing I do is make a rock cabinet and plop it down right outside the entrance to the fort and set 2 dwarves to train year round (10 min). By the time goblins start showing up, they are skilled enough to fend off a small ambush and by the first siege they are both around legendary in at least fighter.
when 1 gets to legendary weapon skill, he already has a bit of teacher ( 2-3 skill levels) I move 1 dwarf to another squad and fill both squads up to 2 dwarves each. When the new recruits get to legendary in fighter, I move them both into a 3rd squad (to finish out their training).
I fill both of the first 2 squads back up with 2 fresh recruits and repeat until I run out of potential recruits.

Sometimes instead of just using 2 squads for training, I'll make every legendary weapon user a teacher. Then you have lots of growth but every squad will have at least 1 poor fighter at any given time.
I've experimented with trying more than 1 recruit when I get GOOD teachers, but unrelated disaster always seems to interrupt the experiments.