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[xzaxza]

I have this problem that every time I butcher/slaughter multiple animals at once, some of the return items just rot. Even if I designate them for dumping, the jobs aren't necessarily generated. And as the hauling jobs aren't there, burrows don't help. Same happens in kitchens if I have fast cooks, and rotting roasts are pretty annoying.

Is there any way around this? Is this a common problem, or am I missing something obvious? How are hauling jobs generated anyway? Is it related to the number of haulers?

[PatrikLundell]

Yes, it happens all the time. I designate 3 animals for butchering at a time and wait until the butcher's shop has been cleaned out before designating a new batch.

One reason for hauling not to be performed is the usage of quantum stockpiles: if the feeder stockpiles get filled up, haulers will turn to other hauling jobs before going for the "fill into vehicle" ones, causing things to rot/wither.

Dumping jobs are the lowest of the lowest, and can appear and disappear on the job table dynamically (and there's no indication when all dumping jobs have been performed).

Burrows won't help as DF allocates jobs that are outside the burrows to dorfs, only for them do immediately drop those jobs, get back to find a job, and pick up the same one again, leading to both spam and blocked activity. You'd have to actually reduce the number of competing jobs to steer them to the ones you want by removing hauling categories you want to ignore for now on some or all haulers, and by forbidding competing items of the same category (similarly to suspending building jobs will guide builders to the important one of bricking up the entrance when the building destroying necro horde arrives in the first summer).

The exact details of how hauling jobs are generated are probably not known. The jobs are generated by the stockpiles as they detect items that can be hauled to them, but there are oddities in that logic, as everything isn't listed and it sometimes can take a long time before That Important Thing gets scheduled, despite being the only thing in that category and there are plenty of dorfs who are just idling or performing normal Socialize/Pray activities.

[anewaname]

Food hauling has a priority over hauling of other goods (most likely this is because food can rot and other stuff cannot). If your dwarfs are allowed to haul food (check 'o' 'f' and check your burrows), your problem could be that your food stockpiles are limiting the creation of food-hauling jobs.

The simplest solution should be to create a 20x20 custom stockpile and set it to accept Food/Meat and maximum barrels. You will see a flurry of hauling activity (and if you do not see a flurry of hauling activity, then something else is causing the problem). Create a similar stockpile for Food/CookedMeals.

My large forts end up with three large barrelled stockpiles (one each of Food/Meat, Food/Plant+Leaves, and Food/CookedMeals), and a few smaller stockpiles for specific production flows.

[PatrikLundell]

Food hauling has a priority over hauling of other goods (most likely this is because food can rot and other stuff cannot). If your dwarfs are allowed to haul food (check 'o' 'f' and check your burrows), your problem could be that your food stockpiles are limiting the creation of food-hauling jobs.

The simplest solution should be to create a 20x20 custom stockpile and set it to accept Food/Meat and maximum barrels. You will see a flurry of hauling activity (and if you do not see a flurry of hauling activity, then something else is causing the problem). Create a similar stockpile for Food/CookedMeals.

My large forts end up with three large barrelled stockpiles (one each of Food/Meat, Food/Plant+Leaves, and Food/CookedMeals), and a few smaller stockpiles for specific production flows.

Is that correct? I get meat rotting at the butchery while the morons haul the refuse, until it's rotten, of course. Similarly, they run as one into the caverns as soon as drawbridge is lowered to pick up old bones (both from animals and former sapients) rather than clearing out the food out of the butchery or kitchen (and pass by the newly slain corpses to get dry bones, so what could have been butchered rots, causes miasma, and the morons then complain about it.
The only "hauling" job that's of really high priority is the one directly following on harvesting (and that's reasonable).

[Leonidas]

I have this problem that every time I butcher/slaughter multiple animals at once, some of the return items just rot. Even if I designate them for dumping, the jobs aren't necessarily generated. And as the hauling jobs aren't there, burrows don't help. Same happens in kitchens if I have fast cooks, and rotting roasts are pretty annoying.

Is there any way around this? Is this a common problem, or am I missing something obvious? How are hauling jobs generated anyway? Is it related to the number of haulers?

Managing the pool of haulers is a big DF challenge. The solution has many pieces, such as:
1. Don't view stockpiles as storage locations. Instead view them as job generators and labor drainers. Periodically review your stockpiles with an eye to reducing or deleting them.
2. Design your fortress to reduce hauling distances. Keep it compact. Aim for a cube.
3. Don't carelessly leave workshops on repeat. Those are also generating hauling jobs.
4. Wheelbarrows. Lots of them.
5. Avoid massive dump jobs, especially long-distance ones. If you want to move stone, move it to a wheelbarrowed stockpile on top of the dump, then assign the dump in pieces.
6. Don't try to do everything at once. Focus on two or three projects at a time.
7. Review your (j)obs screen to see if it shows what you think it should.

[anewaname]

Is that correct?

I want to demonstrate how food-hauling has priority but I am not certain how to isolate that as an observable event, and am now questioning if it simply appears to have a higher priority due to how I set up my stockpiles, but I am certain this other question can be answered first to remove its vector...
"So why do the older corpses from the caverns become highest priority when you open the gate to the caverns?"

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

When you dig out new stone, the new stone is hauled first. It appears the stone is hauled based on the creation time of the item, but it is not. It is based on when the item was added to that zone's list. A loose definition of a "zone" is a group of tiles linked by pathing. The "zone's list" represents a list of all the items within that zone. When you embark, there are three zones (the surface, the caverns, and below). When you breach the caverns, the two zones are merged and the two zone's item lists are merged by taking all the items from the cavern zone's list and adding them to the end of the surface zone's item list, meaning that the cavern items are suddenly last on the new item list so it will be the first to be hauled. That is the rough description of what is happening to cause cavern junk to appear to increase priority. I don't know how it is actually implemented behind the scenes, but I am fairly sure that these zones and zone item lists are rebuilt each time the game is loaded and represent in-memory indexes used to speed processing.

[PatrikLundell]

@anewaname: The spoilered description makes some logical sense, but doesn't match my experience anyway, as it often takes years between me breaching a cavern and immediately closing the drawbridge and me deeming it somewhat safe for the dorfs to visit it. Even then they ignore the fresh stuff in the butcher's shop to go for the garbage below, and the corpse of the critter just killed by dorfs certainly should be a more recent addition to the list than the bones that were present even when the cavern was breached originally.

[anewaname]

I don't expect you to agree or disagree with it immediately. Give it some time and when next you open the gates, look for ways to test it. Then, watch the activity.

There is no doubt that the model could be wrong and that there could be more factors involved. It could be that rather than a merging of "item lists", all those items are linked to tiles and it is the method of merging the "pathing trees" that promotes the corpses priority.

[Afghani84]

From what I have been testing, two things seem to influence the speed of hauling jobs added the most:

- limiting other job options for some haulers (like Patrik said), so that they resort to the hauling type you are looking for
- increasing the amount of haulable items of that type (not always possible or wanted)

I'm sure there are some hidden priorities at play, e.g. food over stone hauling, but these two worked for me so far.