One major issue in the game right now is how certain kinds of jobs (collecting sand, producing beer, processing to a bag, etc) will cancel if they run out of containers to put the results in, while other jobs (cooking, producing beer again, processing farm produce, glassmaking, etc) will cancel if they run out of materials.
This is kind of a bother, because it forces the player to constantly go back to their workshops to re-start jobs. It's worst with booze, because you can fill up all your barrels very quickly, and then when you try to re-enable brewing it immediately cancels again when it finds no barrels.
Usually, I'd prefer to be able to tell my still to simply brew whenever both brewable items and a barrel are available. So I think that, instead of canceling completely, workshop jobs that can't find something they need should wait until that item is available. The player should be alerted of this, though -- there should be a "Brewing delayed: Waiting for barrels." message. After that, it should regularly check every so often to see if barrels are available so it can re-queue the job (or however it would be best to do it.) No further messages would be produced to prevent spam, although the player could get a message if it did one barrel of beer and then got delayed again.
Delayed jobs could have a symbol marking them in the workshop's job list, like repeated, suspended, and active jobs.
Perhaps the game could even have a queue of 'needed items' that the player could view, so they can see what the jobs they've assigned all over their fortress require (and what they're running low on.) Whenever a new item is produced, it's checked against this list, and if it matches a job that requires it then that job is re-enabled or whatever.
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Topic: More jobs should delay instead of cancelling. (Read 768 times)