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[MaxZero]

For my past few fortresses, i've been nicknaming the dwarves numerically via the year they migrated in, EG the embark dwarves are 0-1 to 0-7 and a migrent dwarf from the third year is 3-1 to 3-whatever. I've also been keeping a spreadsheet open on my second monitor with what i've assigned them to do to ease piddling around with the menus in game trying to find out who the hell i assigned to something or other and wether they got killed somehow or not.

Thats been working out fine in terms of knowing whats going on, but i hate doing it, just wandering if anyone had their own systems/solutions for this sort of thing
Cheers

[Elifre]

Dwarf Therapist is incredibly useful for this sort of thing. It allows you to sort your dwarves in numerous ways, and assign jobs, or in general see how your dwarves are doing. I really recommend you try it out.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=66525

[MaxZero]

Ah, looks useful. Too bad theres no OSX version

[quokka]

You can download the Mac version here: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=4463.

[Telgin]

I used a similar idea in that I nicknamed a new arrival and gave them a job based on what I either lacked at the time or thought would help balance the fort out.  Or because he or she had a lot of skill in certain field.

In the end that works fine for me.  No need to break out a spreadsheet or anything.  I'm also probably not the most efficient player, but that doesn't bother me either.

If a big job comes up, somebody gets offed in a siege, or whatever, then I'll go back through and take a look at some idling dwarves and see if they might make decent replacements.  I haven't used Dwarf Therapist before, mostly because I got used to playing the game like it is and can't be bothered to try anything different.

[Nan]

My basic approach is to name the most skilled dwarf of each important profession the "Chief XYZ", for example "Chief Weaponsmith", if a new immigrant comes along who out-skills the old chief, or if a dwarf moods their way to legendary, then I rename the dwarves to make the new one chief. I then make extensive use of workshop profiles, usually I'll create specialist workshops which only have the relevant chief or chiefs assigned, or I'll use minimum/maximum skill levels, depending on what's appropriate. Having a chief is useful even for jobs like furnace operating, for example if you have one highly skilled furnance operator, and a bunch of low skilled ones, it can be useful to have one furnace set aside for the highly skilled one, so that you don't get the scenario where the low skilled dwarves hog all the furnaces, leaving nowhere for the skilled guy to work. It's the same with say, masonry and block production - sure, anyone can make blocks just fine, but a legendary does it soooo much faster, so you want to set aside a place for them to work.

I find that I don't really need to use Dwarf Therapist, unless I decide I need a dwarf with a certain profession, like say, a leatherworker, and I can't remember which if any came with that skill. That's when DT is useful for tracking down the most skilled dwarf so I can put them to work.

I also sometimes rename a dwarf's profession to their highest useful profession, for example if I get a high master fish cleaner / proficient carpenter, I might just rename it's profession to Carpenter.