Print

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

[Hier0]

So yea, sorry all you old heads out there, these might seem like stupid and inane questions but I'm still fairly new to this game. First of all I've got a legendary mason who churns out masterpiece furniture like he suspects the miners will strike a magma tube or river at some point soon and kill them all. I'm trying to save these wonderful things for an awesome bed room/throne room/dining room/statue garden/tomb or whatever that some noble might demand or that I might feel like bestowing on one of the regular population, such as the general of my army or a seasoned combat vet or a blacksmith that makes a wonderful artifact/weapon or armor(should that ever happen). The thing is I'd also like to encrust these things with gems that I have found to increase their value and make it easy to appease the king should he ever arrive. So far I've got two stock piles, the regular furniture one another where I store my gems which I have also designated to store furniture of masterpiece or better quality. Once items make it to the second stock pile I can just forbid them till I want to encrust them, but when I want to do that I have to lock the other store house which is a pain in the butt to have to micro manage when I have other projects underway as well. Have any of you found a good way to go about this? Or is there a way to tell the jeweler exactly which item to encrust?(if not there really should be) I know this game is all about micro management but as my fortress grows this level of micromanagement where I have to watch what items a particular dwarf picks up brings things to a major stand still what with all the pausing. And also this leaves my jeweler without a job for a good portion of the time which I'd rather not have.
Second thing, my expedition leader is moving up in the world, he's now a legendary bookkeeper and as such no longer needs to keep records so most of the time he is also without a job. I was wondering if I recruit him into the military to begin training him in the ways of combat would he also preform his other noble functions provided his squad was kept off duty? At current he holds all noble positions aside from sheriff(which is still unassigned, I'm thinking about giving that job to my would be second in command military dwarf).
While I'm at it I was also wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of information concerning work orders, at the moment I don't see the point in using them rather then just going to the work shops and assigning work there, or designating things that need to be smoothed or mined.

Any help on these issues would be much appreciated, thanks in advance.

[Sevrun]

The work orders are good if you have multiple shops and want to crank out mass produced items without (r)epeating them in the workshops.  or if you're not sure the supply of raw material is enough to do it all at once and you still want it done... then the work order will restart after a period of time if you run dry of materials.

Some people like it, some don't.

Now about the jeweller and the furniture, just keep the masterwork furniture closer than the normal stuff and don't (r)epeat your encrust jobs.  No real shortcut there I know of, sorry.

[Hier0]

Yea, I actually decided to try out the work orders after I started this thread. It came in really handy in the economical use of my iron bars what my budding metal industry was putting out, made it really easy to make weapons and armor for my troops in the right amounts.

Thats unfortunate about the jewelers, it's also a pain to micromanage the quality of furniture when you're placing it, unless they are already encrusted.

Thanks for the response man.

[Sevrun]

yeah, cause til it's jeweled you have no real way to tell it apart.  If you adjust the stockpile to only accept a minimum quality of furniture (i.e. Masterwork or artifact only), then you won't have to constantly watch it, just give it a glance once in a while to see if there's something worth encrusting.

[Lyrax]

More control for decorating items is definitely something I've seen and supported in the suggestions forum.  For now?  Just control proximity.  It's annoying, but it's all we've got.

[Hier0]

quote:Originally posted by Sevrun:
<STRONG>yeah, cause til it's jeweled you have no real way to tell it apart.  If you adjust the stockpile to only accept a minimum quality of furniture (i.e. Masterwork or artifact only), then you won't have to constantly watch it, just give it a glance once in a while to see if there's something worth encrusting.</STRONG>

Yea, what I've done for the moment is make the main furniture stock pile unable to accept quality levels of masterpiece or higher and set my jewel stock pile to accept all of that high quality furniture. When I see a new piece in the jewel stock pile I immediately forbid it for the time being. The two piles are on my workshop floor so they are kind of close so I'll have to do the encrusting in shifts just locking the regular furnature pile while the jewelers encrusting.

quote:Originally posted by Lyrax:
<STRONG>More control for decorating items is definitely something I've seen and supported in the suggestions forum.  For now?  Just control proximity.  It's annoying, but it's all we've got.</STRONG>

Yea, it's a real pain that would be easy to fix, not only for encrusting but also for placing, it would just require a different type of list which is obviously already programmed in like when you hit tab in the stock screen and see all of the individual items. Maybe I should post something in the support forums about this as well. The more Toady sees the topic come up the more likely he'll be to implement it in the next version I guess.

Anyone know about the nobles by any chance? I've been using work orders a bit for my burgeoning metal industry so he's got something to do every now and again  but I'm thinking that training him as a marks dwarf might be a good idea as with the next wave of immigrants I'll most likely be starting a squad of them.

[Pacho]

You can place a specific piece of furniture by hitting tab when choosing the piece.  It'll expand the list and show you each and every single one of the items in there.

[Hague]

Perhaps it would help to know which side of the workshop a dwarf prefers to grab an item first. Also, make sure there are no stockpiles above or below it, so they don't go and bejewel a bucket.