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[em1LL]

Hi all!

Is there any way to add jobs like milking and shearing to the queue automatically when suitable animals are ready for this?

Thanks in advance.

[paldin]

If you don't mind the alert spam, or if you disable it, you can queue jobs with your manager that continue to assert themselves until completed. You'll have to re-queue the job when it runs out (maximum of 30 jobs) but you'll get a nice alert saying that the job was complete and reminding you to assign more work. You'll also have to deal with farmer workshops that are full of these failing jobs and manually give other labor priority.

Probably the best way to do this would be to queue just one shearing/milking job, and when you get the alert that its complete, you can just add it manually to a farmers workstation with repeat selected. When he runs out of animals to work with, you queue it with the manager again and wait for the alert to tell you that your animals are ready to be milked or sheared again. The only problem is that you're going to either have to deal with alert spam until he does the one job or you're going to have to remember to periodically check the workshop and see if the repeat order is gone.

I'd love to hear other solutions too!

[tussock]

Wool stacks are proportional to the length of wool on the animal you shear, so saving it for a row of repeat jobs in spring works about as well as fussing with it. Milking can be set to repeat until you run out of buckets pretty much any time the rest of the year, then make some cheese on repeat to free them up again (to keep the prisoners watered).

Spring: Repeat shear, then when finished repeat spin (onto repeat dying cloth, assuming you've also repeat milled your winter Dimple Cups by then).
Summer: Repeat milk, then repeat cheese when out of buckets.
Autumn: more milk and cheese.
Winter: leave the poor things alone, it's cold. Go build something gigantic with all your spare farmers.

I like to make yarn mittens and socks. Fresh set for everyone every year, which takes more time to lay out than the shearing, spinning, and dying. Should really make a macro for it. Cheese just adds to the ludicrously high-value meals.

[Loyal]

You don't generally need to deal with processing animal byproducts more than once per season. My having the game set to autosave seasonally (shit happens, y'know?) also serves as a handy reminder of when to bring out the milkers and shearers.

[peridot]

If you're determined to automate milking, the workflow dfhack plugin can do it. Just set the "milk animal" job to repeat until there are some number of buckets of milk, and "make cheese" to repeat until there is some large amount of cheese. Like all workflow setups, you get a lot of job cancellation spam, but it does keep the job active unless you have a backlog of cheese piling up.

Generally workflow can be used to automate making almost everything; for example, I tell a magma glass furnace to make doors until there are 5-10 unused ones in the stockpiles. Then I can just slap up some doors any time I need them and rely on the dwarves to make more as needed. It's only annoying for more nebulous jobs like "encrust with gems" where the output is hard to specify. And jobs where you want to regulate the job based on the input ("weave all but five spools of thread into cloth"); you kind of just have to make the jobs run to exhaustion and then live with the spam about not having any input.