Is there any sort of penalty for assigning too many different jobs to dwarves skilled in other things? At the end of the first year most of my dwarves have done a bit of everything. In particular, I had farming troubles - it's my first time setting up a farm and the first two floodgates weren't right next to the river so it didn't get all finished and flooded until the start of fall. As a result I had
everyone planting for a long time...btw, I lost a lot of seeds/helmets at the crack of winter! That sucked.
But anyway. Any reason not to have everyone doing everything? Also, do most people leave a variety of tasks on for their dwarves, or do you micromanage and turn everything off except what you want them to do? I'm almost to the point of doing that since there's so much time wasted doing menial tasks (floodgates were queued up for a whole @#$% season).
My request has to do with the above. I do so much toggling and shuffling of tasks that sometimes I forget what a dwarf was originally supposed to be doing. I get mad when my skilled miner is idling when there's mining to be done...but then I check his jobs and notice that I turned off mining at some point. My solution to this would be graying out or highlighting the dwarves' skills based on whether they're currently practicing that skill or not.
Another nice feature would be highlighting the labor list in the same way furniture and such is labeled for quality. I could see right in the list whether it's something I'd want them to be doing: *Mining* or -Masonry-, etc. I don't know how DF was programmed but it seems to me these things ought to be fairly easy to throw in there for convenience. I don't mean to assume too much though, I know you've already got a lot on your plate. Would anyone else appreciate either of these features?