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[RPB]

Is there really any particular reason why you have to designate specific trees to chop down, instead of just automatically clearing every tree on the map in order of proximity? I guess it can be useful to clear out trees in the way of a road, or designate trees that are out of the way of where the animals currently are, but these considerations aren't always going to come into play. One of the biggest hassles of gameplay is having to continually go and designate new clusters of trees all the time (especially since it ends up un-designating some of them somewhere along the line). It would be a lot simpler if there was just someplace you could toggle "go cut down trees" vs. "don't go cut down trees" and have your woodcutters figure out which trees to get.

[Mechanoid]

Doing this would put a HUGE number of tasks in the jobs list, as well as likely forcing the woodcutters to never do anything else until every single tree is gone. Not to mention the chance of a dwarf getting eaten from going out too far and cutting a tree right next to an aligator.  

But, it would definitely be nice that instead of cancelling jobs in the carpentry workshop, the dwarf would go out and chop down the closest tree that has no enemies nearby.

[Toady One]

So free dwarves with the wood cutter profession would do a tree-nearest-to-gate check any time you had a flag set and they weren't eating or something like that?  It would be kind of like fishing I suppose, but higher priority.  There are some lag issues associated to failed searches, but those could be timed out.  Thoughts on this?

[karnot]

Only if this would be enabled on "orders" page, not by default.

[Dehydration]

Seconded the only-if-enabled. I like knowing how far out my dwarves are ranging, and if they're picking their own trees I can't keep their stupid butts out of trouble.

[Aristharus]

I sec.. third this. I don't like the idea, so if you're going to do it, make sure it can be turned off.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I would absolutely love the option to have idled wood cutters start working independantly. As it stands, I have a whole wing of my economy that locks up every time I forget to micromanage the wood cutting designations to avoid the undesignation problems, as they're really plaguing my latest fortress, and resulting in a lot of idling (or marathon trekking) woodcutters. I didn't notice anything like that before -- I actually wonder if it's a newly created bug, because I only noticed it when I installed the latest version.

[Toady One]

If this was the version that included the storage job handling changes, it's possible there are going to be some adjustments to how dwarves flow compared to what you are used to.  Bugs are also possible.

[Aquillion]

You know... as a stand-in, we could just tag the entire area outside our fortresses.  It'd take a while with the scrolling, but would have you covered for several years.  You might have to go back and untag areas where wild animals are scaring your dwarves off, but at least it would prevent stalls.

It'd be nice if there was a way to move the cursor quickly when selecting... or is there?  I forget.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I first starting noticing this with 0.21.95.19c (latest as of this posting, and the version with the haul changes), though I may have skipped one or two versions before that. It was one theory I had that the hauling changes had some unforseen side effect on higher level engraving (or so they say -- I haven't ordered any lately) and wood cutting designations, but I couldn't suggest what that interference would be off hand.

When I first started, I used to try to designate larger areas, but I would occasionally start selecting a huge area, and then when I'd hit enter the second time, it wouldn't select anything. Like the original one didn't register. I quickly taught myself to be more conservative, so I don't know if it was user error with me being so new, or a bug with very large designation areas.

[Elethiomel]

I would absolutely love auto-chopping of trees.

[gimlet]

Same problems here, so a couple things I've been mulling to help:

A new order for squads:  "Escort outdoor work parties" and a new option "Workers stay indoors unless Escorted".  That way I could lose a squad in addition to the woodcutter, hehe.

Maybe conditional/seasonal orders for the Manager or somebody:
-if {wood in pile} less than 15, add 10 woodcut jobs.  Or better something like "set the number of open woodcut jobs to 10 if it is less than 10" to avoid repeated jobspamming.
-if {raw webs in pile} more than 4, "set weave silk 4"
or even if {cows > 12 and butcherable corpses < 1} "set butcher oldest cow to 1"
Also it would be nice to have an option for the manager add orders to repeat periodically, like on a specific day of the month or once per season or in a specific month or season, especially for things like "gather webs", "process plants", "weave cloth" etc.
This would go a long way to cut the mundane repetition that's fun and necessary at the beginning but that starts to get in the way of the bigger picture later on.

Oh, also please leave the completed manager  orders (but greyed out or have another screen with those), so I can re-issue them quickly with just a click - that would help a bit too.

As a first cut though, some warnings would be handy.  Maybe a screen with configurable triggers like "wood below X", "commodity Y below X", "fewer than X designated trees", "less than X free Y pile space", "more than X butcherable animals"?