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[Kirbot]

I'm fairly new to Dwarf Fortress, and I've been following along The Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial. I was doing fairly well, dug out a ton of limestone and started making it into limestone blocks and storing it in bins. At the same time, I got a legendary stonecrafter to start making crafts out of it, generating many pretties for trade.

When the limestone rock littering the floor ran out, however, he started giving me this message:

"Minkot Regudar cancels Make rock Crafts: Needs non-economic rock."

Now, I know I have bins and bins of limestone blocks sitting in storage, and I know they're accessible, because I just now told a dwarf to make a wall using one of them, which he did. I've checked my Stocks -> Stones page and made sure that Limestone is green. (I even tried toggling it back and forth, and neither state worked.)

I tried digging more tunnels, thus creating more limestone rock (not blocks) littering the floor, and he was suddenly able to start making crafts again. So can a craftsdwarf not use blocks to make stuff? Because I've scoured dwarffortresswiki and Google, and haven't found anything to indicate such. (In fact, most of what I've found indicates that you can use blocks for crafting.)

So does anybody have any idea why I can't use limestone blocks for crafting?

[dexxy]

Blocks are for building things like walls. You can't make crafts out of blocks. You need those chunks of rock for making crafts. But you already converted your chunks of rock into blocks.

[Kirbot]

Ok, that's good to know. Thank you.

[dexxy]

The problem with stone crafts is that you run out of rock, as you've noticed.

If you set up a pig tail farm, farmers workshop, loom, and clothiers workshop, you can make clothes. As long as your farmers are working, you can always make more thread, cloth, and clothes. Your dwarfs want to wear clothes, so you pretty much have to do this anyway. You can trade excess clothes with caravans.

Clothiers can also "sew cloth image", which produces lots of high value items.

[Kirbot]

I may give that a shot then. Thanks!

[Conan]

I don't like to go the clothing route because it's too much work; on my current fort I have 20 or so fishermen and my main export is fish.

Coupled with shell crafts (from mussel shells) fishing and shellcrafting is also a lucrative business. Fishing and fish cleaning is also easy to train, and it's automatic in case you don't want to manage it constantly. Only thing you'll have to make sure is having enough stone pots or barrels.

[Fredd]

Besides eventually depleting the fish population, which happens

[lcy03406]

*quarry bush leaves roast* can easily values ☼7200, and only require seeds(reproducible) and cheep leathers(reusable) to start.