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[Gorjo MacGrymm]

reading the wiki leads me to believe that some workshops are automatic, that is to say, you never actually have to goto that building and "[a] add a task" and that a given dwarf with the applicable skill and necessary material will perform the job his/herself.  is this true?  It only seems to work for the fishery as far as i can tell.  what about farm workshops?  will they automatically process plants if a laborer is there or do they need to be [a] added every time a plant is harvested (jeez what pain that would be).  I am unsure of other shops that have only a very few tasks.  please help!

GMcG

[GreyMario]

If you're getting that from the wiki, you haven't played Dwarf Fortress.

[Faustus]

Uh, technically some workshops are automatic in the sense you mean it - but fisheries aren't one of them.

Looms, butcher's shops and tanneries are the only ones I can think of off-hand. If you look in the standing

• rders menu, you'll see that there are settings to auto-loom all thread, auto-tan all hides, etc., and that's why these particular shops require no input.

  However, you can set tasks to repeat, and if you have chains of workshops set up with repeating tasks intelligently, you can have a whole line of production happen without having to micro-manage it overly much. It's automatic in a sense, but not what you're talking about.

[Inquisitor Saturn]

Ideally, there should be a way to set a percentage of whatever you want to be used in some task. For example, you could set it so that only 40% of your pigtails are automatically turned into thread, or ale, or whatever.

[Kagus]

Looms, butchery shops,  and tanners.  Most single-purpose shops will have that toggle available (you can always turn off the specific automatic workshops through the

• rders menu).

[Thassa]

I've never had the fishery kick in automatically.  Butcher shops on the other hand will grab nearby corpses to butcher (has to be either right in the shop or in a corpse stockpile very close by), looms will automatically create gather webs and spin cloth jobs, tanneries will automatically generate tan hide jobs (doesn't always help since fresh rawhides rot FAST).  I'm not sure offhand if there are any others though, and all these can be adjusted in the standing (o)rders screen.

Main problem with all these is if you have more then one of these workshops, orders can be generated at all of them, eventually resulting in some slow poke canceling orders because someone beat them to it.

LOL.. looks like several people answered the same question at the same time.  

[ May 08, 2008: Message edited by: Thassa ]

[Faustus]

quote:Originally posted by Inquisitor Saturn:
<STRONG>Ideally, there should be a way to set a percentage of whatever you want to be used in some task. For example, you could set it so that only 40% of your pigtails are automatically turned into thread, or ale, or whatever.</STRONG>

I've found it's possible to balance your output by building the right number of workshops and letting them go at it, but that method can vary a lot by skill level. It's tricky to know the exact rate at which stuff is going to be produced relative to other stuff without a lot of trial and error - even if you know production times by looking them up or something, there's travel time . . .

You can set skill prefs in the workshops' profiles to prevent novice dwarves from choking your supply train or limit your ultra-legendary crafters from consuming your raw materials too fast . . . but what happens if one of the key dwarves gets imprisoned because your nobles want adamantine shower heads, or some dwarf gets ambushed on his way to wellylug some mountain goats?

You end up with a bunch of error messages and have to set it up again, is what.