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[Kruniac]

So I have two farmer's workshops - one set up inside my cattle pen and another set up inside my dining hall/kitchen area. I have infinite cheese jobs ordered as well as infinite milking jobs ordered. I have my cheese making set to only fire when I have milk. I cannot (As far as I know) set milking to only fire when a cow is "ready".

The problem is that the job manager is assigning my dining hall workshop to milking (and cheese making), so my boys are carrying cows across my entire settlement, slowing down production and exposing my cattle to danger.

Is there a way to restrict a certain job to a certain workshop? I want my cattle pen workshop to ONLY handle milking. Can I do that somehow?

[Kruniac]

Never mind - figured it out.

You can open a workshop's Profile and go over to Work Orders to assign a work order to just that workshop.

My god, I've been away from DF for almost a year. I know nothing.

[Werdna]

Another (older) technique is to suspend the unwanted job, and leave it suspended.  I did this with kitchens so my Master Chef-only kitchen can focus on meals (with Render fat suspended) and the open-to-all-cooks kitchen next to it handles the Render Fat jobs.

[mikekchar]

Also, you don't want infinite jobs.  What that does is wait until the condition(s) are satisfied and then work like 'r'epeat from the workshop.  Essentially it will lead to endless spam.

My advice is to count the number of milkable animals (N) and set up a job for (N) milkings repeating every month (animals get milk every month).  Then set up a job for making 1 cheese.  Set 'c'onditions for that job: 'r'eagents at least 4 unrotten milk items (or how many you want -- just allows you to ensure that you have certain milk stack sizes for making bigger cheese stacks).

The bad thing is that you can't change N without removing the job and redoing it, so you have to remember to do that every year as the number of milk producers increase.

Just as a bonus, you can do something similar with shearing.  Wool gets long enough in 10 months.  So if you have 10 sheep, shear 1 sheep a month.  You will get cancellation spam if the timing doesn't work out, but only one a month. 

[Fleeting Frames]

Small note:

Animals can get milked every 17 days, actually. Ensuring something close to that actually happens is left as exercise to the determined (Ordering the herd milked twice a month will just give two milking jobs once a month, for instance). For instance, if you have exactly 51 female pigs, then setting up their distance from workshop so that it takes third of a day (4 seconds or so) to milk one and then leaving milking job on repeat would work.

[mikekchar]

Excellent!  More cheese for the cheese maker    I must adjust accordingly!

[Garrie]

My god, I've been away from DF for almost a year. I know nothing.

Me too.
Last time I played you couldn't actually milk anything I don't think.

For instance, if you have exactly 51 female pigs, then setting up their distance from workshop so that it takes third of a day (4 seconds or so) to milk one and then leaving milking job on repeat would work.

So it is only "for role playing" that you would milk cows rather than the 0-pasture-requiring pig?

[Fleeting Frames]

Well, cows also provide more meat and are more durable. Since you get same number of hauling jobs and pay same price in FPS it is generally better to have larger animals for meat industry.

While milk does make for nice prepared meals I consider it bit of a side job, tbh - at above-suggested 1 milk a month, they're roughly quarter as productive as turkeys, leaving me to consider the whole milking thing almost entirely for role playing.

[Ironfang]

I find you have two main options for meat. You either want big animals with a lot of meat, like tamed giant animals and cattle. Your other option is non-grazers in cages. the best possible thing for meat is something that neither grazes, and is giant.

So if your hurting for grassland in a normal embark, caged turkey is what I suggest. If you want really nice livestock. I would go for savage tropics, or a savage artic beachfront. I have a fort on a volcanic tundra island with a meat industry of giant elk that are mostly domesticated.

Elves are another good source of possible livestock. Some once provided me a breeding pair of giant leopards.

[Fleeting Frames]

Well, there's a cutoff point where turkeys are better, for just egg-cooking - by my reckoning, it's between Yak and Water Buffalo.

The biggest land animals that don't graze or require nest boxes would be hippos, at third the size of elephants.

However, their biome is any river and lake - in the first case, you must be lucky enough to get them and then capture them before they leave the map, for rivers don't give new river creatures after embark right now, even if you wall off all the map edges and airspace.

Then there's the 5 years they take to grow up. That said, most "adult at 1" creatures take 2 years to reach full size, including the afore-mentioned water buffalo, and in 2 year a hippo grows to half their adult size.

Of course, your dwarves will be generally happier and you'll have it easier if you just max meat on caravan - works just like maxing leather. Just make sure you have enough haulers handy to bring it out of depot.

[mikekchar]

Yeah... Unless you are doing some super challenge, pretty much any food is just for RP.  Having said that, sheep, llamas and alpacas are good because they provide wool, leather, meat and cheese.    For leather production, I'm wondering what the most efficient animal is.  If you butcher a 1 year old turkey, will it always give you a skin?  If so, I guess that's still the way to go.  It's too bad large grazers don't give you more leather...

[YetAnotherLurker]

Adult at birth creatures multiply very rapidly if you let them. As a further bonus, because they never can be fully tamed, you can stuff them in a cage until they go wild again, then use a drop shaft/tower to explode them to multiply their leather yield. Giant Olms or Giant Cave Toads both make decent leather producers if you insist on a domestic source, though I find requesting leather from merchants is more than enough to supply needs.

I bring a handful of turkeys on embark to hold my dwarves until I can breach the caverns safely and start trapping more fun animals. Every mature fort I've had winds up with a Cave Crocodile farm for eggs, with absolutely ridiculous yields due to huge clutch sizes.

[Thisfox]

Ah yes, cave crocodile fps disaster stories aside, the legendary clutch size has saved my fort from starvation death on more than one occasion.