Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[towersquid]

I was wondering if anyone else gets this, it's not really an issue, but it takes up a lot of time. Almost all of the time, my masons / stonecrafters seem to choose the loose stone that is farthest from them, instead of the stone that is right next to their workshops? I've literally had my mason climb ~15 z levels in order to get a stone, then climb all the way back up, moving like a snail.

[PatrikLundell]

Yes, item hauling selection logic is weird. It's also the case with stone haulers that they're not starting with the stones closest to them. I think there is an upper left corner bias. However, if you have a stone stockpile I think the mason would take stones from there. Then, if the stockpile was assigned wheelbarrows, haulers could fetch stones to the pile faster than your mason's snail pace.

[Naryar]

You can set up a stone stockpile next to your mason's workshop and use orders to "pick from stockpile". I think this will reduce long paths.

It happens to me as well. Sometimes my furnace operators go  to the latest dug hematite vein picking a hematite boulder when there is another boulder. two tiles away from the magma smelter.

Same with masons really.

[PatrikLundell]

Linking stockpiles carry the danger of failing to link to some things (like the pile with the coal in it when trying to use a forge on the metal ore), but if set up properly, it should allow you to control the distances travelled by the crafters.

[Naryar]

Linking stockpiles carry the danger of failing to link to some things (like the pile with the coal in it when trying to use a forge on the metal ore), but if set up properly, it should allow you to control the distances travelled by the crafters.

It's just a stone stockpile linking to a masonry. No issues there, unless linking has still some bugs.

[rjs71053]

I think they always pick the newest piece of stone/ore created by your miners.  Stockpiles will help, but will be time consuming (IRL time) to set up in some instances.  I usually only set up stockpiles near dedicated craftdwarf/mason workshops, and let the rest be slow going.

[Quietust]

In older versions, they would always pick the closest stone to their current position as the mole digs, just calculating the linear distance to the stone (i.e. a stone 10 Z-levels directly beneath you is closer than a stone 11 tiles to the east) since pathfinding would have been prohibitively expensive at that point (after all, it's potentially evaluating every stone in your entire fortress), and equidistant stones would be chosen in order of creation (either oldest-first or newest-first).

It's possible something broke in 0.40.20, though.

[towersquid]

Alrighty. Thanks for the answers. I'll just have a designated stockpile for them.

[Niddhoger]

Linking a stockpile to a workshop doesn't work.  Stockpiles respect the settings, but the workshop often doesn't.  I've linked a jet stockpile to a mason shop, set the STOCKPILE to only work from links.  Mason still picks up random heavy stones from anywhere in the fort.  I had to constantly forbid the stones he was working on to finally get him to using the nearby stockpile... for a few crafts.  4-5 jet pots in and hes back to grabbing mudstone half a fort over. 

The only thing the link seemed to do is keep the jet stockpile from filling up (since there was no other stockpile to take from).

I thought dwarves mostly just picked up the object closest to them at the time the job was created, not closest item to where the job is being done (workshop).  However, there does seem to be a clear peference for most recently dug out stone/ore. 

[utunnels]

Strange, MY masons don't have this problem.
I used to build a mason's workshop next to a  garbage dump site and I dumped those scattered stones then reclaimed them. The mason was happy to fetch stones from there not anywhere else.