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[Maul_Junior]

If you want the most bang for your buck, when requesting items from the dwarf caravan, I have found no better item to ask for, than caged animals.

Not only do you get the meat from said animals, but if you get in quickly before they're slaughtered, you can also shear them, get a free statue (Totem), can get lots of (admittedly) cheap bone products, meat, some thread that cannot become cloth no matter how much you yell and scream and research, and some atom-smashing fodder.

On TOP of that, you get the cages themselves. Usually a mix of lead, copper, zinc, and tin. Admittedly, 1/3 a bar per cage isn't that great, individually, but once you start buying animals en masse, it adds up.

So not only do you get a product that becomes many different products, that can have cost multipliers added in several different ways (Masterwork cloth with a Masterwork dye job in a Masterwork Craft or something, Prepared Food and all that glorious brokenness, bone crafts (I tend to go for Bone Large Gems, myself. I think all Bone stuff goes from Bone being worth nothing to 120/pop. Not much individually, but if you're buthering lots of large animals, it adds up quickly, and takes almost no time to perform. Tossit all in a bin and forget about it. If you're really stingy, throw it in a Masterwork metal bin made of the cage the animal came in.

I bought about 70 animals, large and small, in the last caravan, and started with somewhere less than 350 meat. Halfway thourgh the big animals (cows, reindeer, horses, etc), I'm at 1k meat. The total cost of everything that I wanted out of the caravan was something near 30-40k, including a lot of leather (I bought the leather itself, not the bin AND the leather. such fun. I bought the bins afterwards, but they're still hauling 650 leather by hand at first) and a crapload of bars. I could EASILY make that up in just the meat alone. The extra metal is just a handy bonus. On top of that I probably got at least 50 bits of thread from the wool of the alpacas, llamas, sheep, and goats. Potentially even more. I didn't keep track.

Also potentially fort-saving, if you have little surface metals, and get a caravan with tin and copper cages.

>.>

TL:DR

I love buying wolly animals from dwarf caravans. Or anyone, really.

Yarn cloth, potentially a few bars of weapons-grade metal, food, crafts (Bone, Totem, AND hoof), and the perfect avenue for FUN! to be unleashed upon your fort by your neighborhood necromancer.

[PatrikLundell]

Or you can just buy a few animals on embark and let them breed. You'll then set up a clothing industry (largely based on pig tails, but with some wool thrown in) and exchange worn clothes for all the metal (and anything else of interest) they carry. Since the economy is broken, there's no challenge in buying out caravans (except possibly to manage the huge amount of hauling involved).

[mirrizin]

I find them most necessary for filling gaps in my stone supply, especially for coal or otherwise unobtainable ores.

Trouble with buying out the caravans is the sheer volume of mostly-useless junk you end up with.

[Daris]

I only order things from caravans that I need, or are inconvenient to produce myself, like boatloads of leather for those stylish leather shoes and gloves, and kaolinite.  It's not really my objective to minimax the caravan, since it is at least as valuable to me for its garbage-removal function as its goods-delivery function.

[steel jackal]

personally i just use the caravan as a spring (well, fall) cleaning garbage truck.
i place all the x☼blue pig tail socks☼x next to the trade depot and then sell all of them for whatever bits and pieces that they happen to have with them that im interested in.

[Fleeting Frames]

Other than ores and leather, frequent request of mine include
-wood
-instruments and clothes (micromanagement to make individually...)
-codices, scrolls, sheets
-missing colors where possible

I'd consider getting a food some dwarves like at the fort but I can't produce as well.

Regarding getting metals, I'm not sure what is best way to get some. I go for bars and ores of desired metal, but it might be that asking for lots of metal light things might be better.

[PatrikLundell]

I don't see why you can't ask for every metal thing there is, if you have a huge metal desire. There's usually no need to be picky, as caravan carrying limits very rarely apply to non elven caravans.

[oven_baked]

Mostly I just buy up what I don't make, generally cloth for clothes or steel if I lack iron or flux, livestock is also good, as is buying up booze, food, and plants for more variety.

[scourge728]

since my current fort lacks iron, I mostly request iron and steel, and I give them some of my tons of gems for it

[Goatmaan]

Leather and food for variety, logs if you're low on dorfpower. (500+ logs delivered onto depot)

Anvillocked is stuck in caravan weirdness, and those damn elves started it.
One spring they came to trade as usual, and I readied some old clothes to trade.
I open the window hoping for a few animals, and what do I see? Logs, 4 pages of logs and about 10 pieces of food. NOTHING but logs and food. Elves a shift-enter trade? I happily give them 200k profit on 7k of logs. Yay me!!!
Then the humans came with their wagons. Looking to melt copper, iron, steel goods they bring I load the depot with xclothesx. Open the trade  window, and logs and food. Well the few the elves managed are charcoal already...shift-enter logs for me I guess. Yay no chopping/hauling!!
Then the Dwarfs came, ok they'll bring that leather I ordered, right? Nope. Logs and food. Well son of a kea....hmn the logs the humans brought are gone, so ok no biggie.
Seven years now nothing but logs and food. I can get a few things I order from the mountainhome but its iffy. I love the shift-enter trades... BUT I think it's messing up migrants!! No migrants since this started!!
 So I'm letting it ride for now, hopefully soon the *steel items* will be finished, and we'll be above 1 log per dwarf, thus ending it. Will the migrants come again? We'll see.
 


      Goatmaan

[Goatmaan]

Dwarfs just showed, did they bring steel items, and bars I requested?
Nope.
1 nickel bars (duchess mandates)
4 steel bars.
11 pages, displaying 74 lines each, of LOGS.
And lastly, 3 pages of food. Eh varieties I can't get otherwise wont hurt.
That's it.
I left like 3 logs and 10 plumphelmets. Bought the rest.  Total trade value 10514.
Since the dwarven wagons are virtually empty the allowed weight is 112401.
Wonder if Anvillocked has enough crap laying around to bust those axles? Let's find out.

   Goatmaan

Trader is showing 491433 profit 101098 allowed weight!! Round 2, to get those 3 logs well pay with silver nuggets and whatever other heavy stuff we have.