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[DanielCoffey]

This is not necessarily a Steam issue but I am struggling to get accurate condition checks in a Clothier workshop and I think it is down to not having enough bodies to do hauling in a small fortress. Let me explain the issue and please feel free to give your suggestions on how to either avoid or correct it.

The fortress was still small and had two migrant waves (including a couple of kids) so was sitting at only 22 Dwarfs. The next 4 migrant waves were dry with nobody wanting to come so I had a full year with only that group of Dwarfs.

I had a clothing job set to make 1 robe if number of robes less than 5 and number of plant cloth greater than 10. Other non-chained jobs were set up for the other clothing items and initially all was well as Dwarfs just came and collected a robe before it could ever go into a stockpile. No linked stockpiles were used.

After the four seasons passed with no migrants, the elves turned up and I was struggling finding things to sell to them so I looked at the clothing. I had over 100 robes!

I checked and while there were a few robes in the Clothing stockpile, all the rest were either in bedrooms (which is acceptable) or in a HUGE pile on the floor under the Clothiers Workshop. There were surplus of almost all clothing items well beyond the number specified in the conditions check.

So the first question is... does a Work Order Condition only check items in a stockpile, ignoring those on the floor or does it count all?

Does defining a Give To stockpile affect this problem?

Next, how do I prevent this in future forts and how can I rectify it in this one?

I feel the problem was initially caused by a lack of dedicated Haulers in my young fort because every Dwarf was needed for something more important. There were piles of goods under every workshop type apart from the kitchens. It seems that Hauling is a relatively low priority if left to Everybody does it?

Of course large forts can afford to have teams of Haulers or Janitors but how do you deal with this in a small fort and still have automated jobs?

[Thorfinn]

Easiest way is to make sure you have at least a few guys whose only labors enabled are hauling and maybe recover wounded and feed injured. If there's stuff piling up in your workshops, you need more of them. Only let them do something else if you really want to micromanage moods.

[anewaname]

So the first question is... does a Work Order Condition only check items in a stockpile, ignoring those on the floor or does it count all?

The work manager counts all items not "owned" and not currently Tasked (being hauled to a stockpile, flying through the air, etc). This means the robes in the stockpile and in the workshop are counted, unless they are 'T'asked. All work manager counting is like this, so booze is a good example... if you have 3 barrels with 25 drinks each, the work manager thinks you have 75 booze, but if three dwarfs each start drinking, they will Task those 3 barrels and the work manager will think you have 0 booze left because the 75 are all unavailable. But your work order is for 1 item, so it is unlikely the robes are all tasked or owned if you have many in the workshop... Try going to the order's conditions and adjust the number until you determine how many the work manager thinks you have.

[DanielCoffey]

Thanks - I have restarted the fort and am still still seeing things piling up under workshops. I got two very small migrant waves in the Summer and Autumn and am now at only 13 Dwarfs so I can see I will have to learn how to pace myself with tasks.

One Reddit comment I found implied that there can be issues when adjusting work orders with multiple conditions when the game isn't paused or something? The end result seemed to be if you created a multiple condition order without pausing, the game could sometimes only trigger on one of the conditions instead of the AND result of all of them.