quote:
Originally posted by Juason:
<STRONG>Howdy all. I've been having some issues getting custom stockpiles to work. Initially I had a stockpile for all weapons, armor and ammo. Later in the game I decided to designate new stockpiles for weapons, armor and ammo that only contained bronze, iron and steel (leaving the copper for training and trading). I turned off those materials on the other stockpiles, and waited years for them the items in the other stockpile to get moved - they never did.</STRONG>
The answer to this is simple: Dwarves will not tidy up a stockpile automatically. In fact, the game (generally, but see below) ignores items already in stockpiles when tasking haulage jobs. The solution, after setting enough dwarves to "Item Hauling", is to either:
* Undesignate the old stockpile, create new stockpiles in other locations each with appropriate settings, and watch your dwarves sort the stuff. This is generally the better solution.
* Keep the old stockpile, but deselect the object classes you want removed. Have one new custom stockpile at a time take from it. This is useful to winnow out a particular category of objects.
I recently used both methods. I had an old steel armor stockpile that was getting cluttered with dropped ironmongery and wasn't in a locked room (so dwarves kept wandering off and putting on their old "(iron leggings)"). I put 50 dwarves on item hauling, removed the stockpile, and set a new steel armor stockpile. Later, I realized that it was also accepting bronzewear. I sorted it again by removing bronze from the allowable material types, creating a bronze armor stockpile, and having it take from the new steel stockpile.
There is still some weirdness with stockpiles. I suspect a small bug in material types for either the armor or weapon stockpiles but it's hard to track down. The essential difficulty is that you have to get a number of things right to convince your dwarves to sort stuff properly. Otherwise, they just look at you and go "huh?".