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[NW_Kohaku]

Right now items can be tagged [M]elt [D]ump [F]orbidden and [H]idden. If [T]rade were to be added; what other flags might be added at the same time in a batch to encourage Toady to make the multiple changes at once?

oak to command an item be dropped in a Pond zone (cleaning off contaminants)
ncinerate to command an item be dropped into the nearest magma or furnace to be destroyed, without material recovery (zombie body parts)
[A]mmunition to load an item into the nearest catapult for firing ("fetchez la vache")

Bit flags come in batches of 8, so if Toady is only using 4, then he has 4 that aren't being used right now, anyway, unless he did some sort of other hidden strangeness for data compression we don't know about.

However, if we have farming fertilizers to worry about, a composting option for organic materials like used clothing or dead goblins would be nice. 

Also, "clean this" and "burn that" options would be good ideas, although I believe you forgot that brackets are used for markup text.

In addition to those, we could also have a special marker for allowing something to be claimed as internal fortress property, or, inversely, a ban on allowing internal fortress members to own that item as property.  For example, marking goblets as not for sale to outsiders, but OK for dwarves to own their own goblets.

[greenskye]

The main benefit of using an input stockpile vs a [T]rade flag is the automation of your exports. A well crafted set of stockpile settings will allow your depot to only allow crafts/finished goods produced by certain workshops and of a certain quality to be sold for trade. When the caravan arrives, the Depot automatically marks everything in the stockpile to be hauled to the depot to trade.

You'd set the whole chain up once and never have to touch anything again.

Perhaps you could also have a per-race stockpile? So a stockpile for elves, another for humans, and dwarves. You could then disallow wood items from your elven stockpile.

Another thing that would be nice is to have a standing order for your broker to go to the Depot to trade whenever a caravan is present. It's not much work to just hit the button as it is now, but I'd expect a real trade broker to automatically handle his duties. I put him in charge of it for a reason after all.

[Silverionmox]

One thing I didn't understand from your suggestion; when you mark something for trade (rock mug), does it mark *all* rock mugs for trade, or that specific rock mug? If it's all rock mugs, does that include any that are made afterwards?

As others have said in the meanwhile, it's intended to fit in the melt-dump-hide-etc. series, and would use the same methods of toggling.

That does not preclude new general commands in the manager, eg. "mark all rock mugs as trade goods", or "unmark all masterpiece goods as trade goods". Persistent as well: "all new rock mugs are trade goods", "all goods produced in this workshop are trade goods". One could even have "decorate trade goods with rock encrustation" as a general command without worrying that your masterpieces may be decorated with orthoclase. Similarly it should be a selection criterium for stockpiles, so you can set up a "trade goods" stockpile near the entrance.

I do think some sort of persistent marking is a good idea, but by using a stockpile you avoid any exploitation of infinite storage in the Trade Depot.

I agree, in fact as the caravan arc progresses I would prefer the trade depot to disappear: the caravan would just store their goods in dedicated stockpiles, while the trader and your broker meet up in his office to depart on a tour of the stockpiles of your fortress to inspect the trade goods. When they leave they would simply pick up what has become theirs and be gone.

[NW_Kohaku]

The main benefit of using an input stockpile vs a [T]rade flag is the automation of your exports. A well crafted set of stockpile settings will allow your depot to only allow crafts/finished goods produced by certain workshops and of a certain quality to be sold for trade. When the caravan arrives, the Depot automatically marks everything in the stockpile to be hauled to the depot to trade.

You'd set the whole chain up once and never have to touch anything again.

Perhaps you could also have a per-race stockpile? So a stockpile for elves, another for humans, and dwarves. You could then disallow wood items from your elven stockpile.

Another thing that would be nice is to have a standing order for your broker to go to the Depot to trade whenever a caravan is present. It's not much work to just hit the button as it is now, but I'd expect a real trade broker to automatically handle his duties. I put him in charge of it for a reason after all.

Yes, I was also thinking about this - a stockpile with a definable area would also give you the ability to functionally decide how many of any given item will be available for trade, as well, provided you have a separate stockpile for each type of item.

I was also thinking about possibly trying to suggest into the Standing Production Orders ESV winner idea that we have some automatic designations and jobs included in that update as well, such as automatic milking whenever a cow is ready to be milked the way that there is automatic tallow rendering any time there is fat to be rendered.  We could also have a setting for "trade away any mugs over ___ amount, preferring lowest quality first".

[greenskye]

Standing trade orders would be a good way of managing inventories. Make X amount of Y; Trade all Y over amount X. That way you could ensure you always had say, 400 booze on hand and trade the rest.

It'd be nice if it also respected the ability to trade for needed items. Rather than make all 400 booze, perhaps 150 could be bought from traders and the remaining 250 produced in house.

[NW_Kohaku]

Yes, in previous threads, I have pointed to the Sierra City-Builder series as a model.  When you set up a trade route, they would be willing to buy up to a certain amount of specific goods they needed per year, and could sell to you up to a certain amount of specific goods per year. 

In that way, you could set it to automatically "buy up to 100 units of wood per year" or "buy 50 socks per year" from elves but not humans.

[Urist Da Vinci]

I was going to create a new thread, but decided to search first.

The stockpiles in 0.34.10 allow items to be given to or taken from specific workshops. Trade depots are essentially another building, similar to a workshop, so it wouldn't require making new UI to allow a stockpile to give or take from the trade depot.

The problems that I forsee is that trade depot jobs include old code related to export bans, detection of ownership, and perhaps other features that don't apply to other buildings. The old code would have to be migrated (as in the case of the dragon breath code) or disabled (like the dungeon master). A change to the ownership tracking code might fix the "steal from merchants by deconstructing the trade depot" exploit.