Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Crossroads Inc.]

THis is something I am SURE has been brought up before. Yet I feel it needs mentioning... That basically, no matter how many items you put intio a "Q" at a workshop, no matter how many walls you tell someone to build or follors to pav or food to make, in a bit they finish and once more seem to be milling around.. Now, idlers of like 7 or 8, or even 10 isnt that bad... but I routinly hacve 20, 25+ idliers.  Evebn when you put "repeat" on an item, eventually they will stop on thier own and they wont START again unless you tell them!  What are some methods other do to deal with large numbers of idlers? And also, has there been talk of Automating certain things? As in, if theres soemthing to Brew, someone will always be at the still, or automatriclly process plants if pigtails are about, etc.   

[knightedskull]

Are you sure they are not just on break or can't find the material?

And it wouldn't be fun if the dwarfs did everything for themselves.

Check your (a)nnouncements.

[Coaldiamond]

One of the best ways to keep dwarves busy is to build 6 or more catapults, create 6 or more small stone stockpiles nearby, and assign 10 or more dwarfs to Siege Operator, then set the catapults to Fire at Will. This will keep the engineers busy for as long as they have stone, and the other idlers will get a Haul Stone to Stockpile job. It's a good way to keep people busy, and if you need extra labor elsewhere, just stop the catapults.

[Skorpion]

Just you wait until you get serious goblins. It's gonna take me YEARS of 20 haulers cramming silk and leather underwear into bins, and two wood furnaces and two smelters working non-stop melting the iron down, carpenters making the bins, wood haulage, hauling more goblin stuff when they show up, and so on.
Then there's the constant cooking, bonecrafting, and expansion of the stockpiles.

[greggbert]

I create a mental list of "Hauler Tasks".  When I start getting more than 3-4 idlers, it means that they're ready for a big hauler task.  I give them this hauler task.  Just mentally queue up some big hauler tasks (not too big, but soemthing they can do in about 2-5 minutes.)  That will busy up all your haulers and alert you to which specialists (non-haulers) you need to give tasks to.  Here are some examples of "hauler tasks".  Large temporary stockpiles are key to this strategy.  I always have a mental list of cleanup tasks for my idlers and as a result my fortress is clean and organized.

1)  Clear all stone out of a room/area
2)  Create a temporary huge "wood stockpile" next to your fortress entrance.  Dwarves will gather already chopped wood and move it all near your fotress.  Then remove the stockpile.
3)  Move a stockpile deeper into your fortress
4)  Split a stockpile in two.  eg:  Weapons stockpile becomes usable vs unusable.  Usable weapons becomes silver/wood/copper  vs steel,iron,bronze. 
5)  Move all marble to a big stockpile a few lvls underneath your forge or stonecrafters workshop.  Make this stockpile temporary.
6)  Make a giant temporary lignite stockpile on level above your forge.  Make this stockpile temporary.
7)  Make a massive temporary stone stockpile right near where you want to build a wall or castle/building
  Un-forbid fallen 5-6 fallen goblins and bring their stuff inside
9)  Release all your animals from cages and chain them up so they can breed
10) Move a subset of furntiture to your jewelers workshop to be encrusted, move it back.
11) Bring bins to the trade depot.

[AncientEnemy]

one stopgap measure is to queue up =multiple= "do this job / R" tasks at a workshop. this is especially useful for getting them to keep at their job when they get stopped by those annoying 'job item misplaced' messages. obviously you will still have to deal with idlers, but it'll keep a dwarf going at his given task for longer.

[LegacyCWAL]

Another thing to do is use the job manager to queue up work orders that you want them to keep doing.  Brewing drinks, rendering fat, cooking meals...basically anything you want them to do whenever it's physically possible for them to do it.  It takes only a few seconds to order up 300 jobs, which will keep the appropriate specialists busy for quite a while.

[Veroule]

As Legacy mentioned the job manager (u q) is your friend for some things.  Very early in my fortress I queue up 300 render fat jobs.  I do that as soon as the dwarf that does the manager stuff has bunches of free time.  This is the best job for initial training of cooks.

Brewing drinks is something I handle manually because my farmers are also my brewers, and barrel requirements can be an issue.  Cooking meals is handled manually as well.  Much later in my fortresses when food, drink, empty barrels, and plants are at good levels; and all the dwarves involved have reached legendary status in thier professions, then I will let the manager take over for these jobs and I will balance it based on how many fields I mark for planting and animals for slaughter.

The largest way I handle idlers is with screw pumps.  My fortresses have 4 worker groups.  Furniture, food, woodcrafters, and pump operators.  The furniture group includes all the miners, masons, mechanics, and metal workers; and tends to be about 15 dwarves.  They can be idle as much as they want.  Idling here means I have run out of things to construct.

The food union tends to be 6 or 7 dwarves.  Two are trained as cooks, the rest are planter/brewers.  By the time they are fully trained I don't mind them idling either, my food stocks are in the 10k range by then.

The woodcrafters make wood and bone bolts continuously.  I let the workshops for these guys become heavily cluttered.  If the military isn't using it up as fast as they make it then production slows down automatically which allows other things to catch up.

Finally we get to how the pumps are used.  I like to call them dwarven tread mills.  About 1/3 of each immigrant wave ends up working these, and this is my hauling force.  This works perfectly fine early in a fortress as the dwarves will frequently stop pumping until they gain some skill, which let's them deal with the hauling tasks.  Later when they have many stat gains, from operating the pumps, they get all the hauling done quickly.  Anytime I need to free up more haulers for a sudden demand I just stop the pumps and they all immediately look for new work.  This keeps them busy while still keeping that idlers number low.  Since this group grows to a rather decent size I give them what I consider low demand labors along with hauling and pump operating.  The list I use is butchery, tanning, leather working, weaving, clothes making.

If you still have large numbers of idlers then you should think about increasing the size of your military.  I tend to draft 1/3 of each immigrant wave.  You should see from the numbers above that I am fine with having 20 or so idlers when it is the right idlers.  Those numbers are for a 200 population fort.

[Martin]

Cross-train

Grab a dwarf, even one legendary in something, and train them up in glassmaking, or gem cutting, etc. with hauling turned off. You never know when your sole carpenter takes a stray arrow to the heart. Not only does it keep that dwarf busy but usually keeps a handful more busy hauling their wares away. If you have 20+ idle dwarves, training 2-3 is a good idea.

[Forumsdwarf]

Maintaining full employment is one of the central challenges of Dwarf Fortress.

One thing I do is look for "scalable" industries.  Here are a few examples:

Textiles.  Always scalable.  If you have more workers than work, just grow more tails and/or reeds and sew more clothing.  The only drawback is your profit per dwarf-hour is pretty low.  But skills just keep going up because your sweatshops never go down, and with skill comes quality which makes up for the low value per unit of labor.  Because of all the value-adds to textiles, like dye and sewn images, textiles concentrate a lot of value into a small space.

Green Glass.  Scalable with magma or cave river.  Cutting the glass makes an endless supply of gems, awesome value-adds that train your jewelers, make fey moods more likely to succeed, and don't increase space requirements (gems are encrusted onto existing items.)
Glass can even make trap components, including the edged varieties you can't get with wood, such as the always-popular serrated disk.

Clear glass:  Scalable with cave river.  Clear glass is worth a fortune but eats wood.

Stonecrafting.  Any map.  Stone crafts are low-value items which take up space.  But the industry is scalable.  If I had to guess without breaking out a calculator I'd say it's more profitable per dwarf-hour of labor than textiles.

Cave river (unlimited wood) makes a lot of industries scalable, anything from crossbows to soap.  On a map with sand I'd opt for the clear glass I've already mentioned.
With a wood-based economy you'll have lots of work for the miners, as you'll need to carve out massive underground vaults for your tree farms.

The key is to identify industries with unlimited or renewable inputs and put all your excess dwarves to work in one of them.