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[Reganomics]

Just playing my current fort and the idea struck me; instead of ordering up a crap ton of stuff to be crafted in the workshop or even the manager, what if the build order itself queued up the construction job in the workshop similar to the way the job manager does.  Not to replace the current method, but an additional way to build objects that we need but without creating a massive surplus like with mechanisms and furniture for instance (though normally i use a crap ton of mechanisms anyway for traps and wells and machines and such).  If the materials are not available it could still spam the job cancellation message and the build order could just wait until they are ready.  Thoughts?

p.s.  if suggested already, apologies.

[Astramancer]

I'm not sure what you're asking.

It sounds like you're saying "as an alternative to ordered jobs through the manager, you can order jobs at the workshop exactly like if you had ordered them through the manager."

[Reganomics]

okay, sorry if its convoluted but let me give an example.  so i dig out all my bedrooms and place all the build orders for all the furniture regardless of whether the objects exist yet or not.  The build orders that do not have furniture yet crafted create a build order in the appropriate workshop.  similar to the manager, yet skips the step of making the craft order to begin with.  you end up with exactly the amount of cabinets, coffers, beds, whatever that you need and no more or less.

[tmrt]

I'm not sure what you're asking.

Original poster simply suggested to implement a furniture creation system somewhat similar to Dungeon Keeper 2. I, however, think that Dwarf Fortress' current one doesn't really need to be fixed.

[ravaught]

I could actually see this being useful. It would remove the crappy way that unused furniture clogs up your stockpile while waiting to be hauled.

In essense, there is currently only one basic process to go through, assuming that you start with nothing done already expect having a workshop and stockpile. 

Queue up room mining.
Go away to wait.
Queue up furniture in Job manager/Workshop.
Go away to wait.
Place Furniture
Go away and wait
Assign Furniture.

What he is suggesting would become:
Queue up room mining.
Goaway and wait.
Place & Assign furniture Furniture
Go do something else and never look back.

This would be even better if you could chose the material of furniture during that place and assignment phase. So that you could tailor the room to whichever dwarf you are assigning it to.

For example, you dig out a 5x5. Look at Urist's thoughts, who happens to like slate, olivine, and marcasite. Place a holder for slate, olivine, and marcasite furniture. The system would automatically queue up those jobs, and the furniture would be assigned to Urist already as soon as it is delivered.

That would dramatically streamline the whole process, as well as making it easier to cater to the individual preferences of your Dwarfs.

[King Mir]

Problem is, there would then be no way to specify a quality for the furnature, since quality isn't determined untill an object is built. Under the existing system you can build a bunch of furnature, then pick from that to get the best stuff for a particular room.

[ravaught]

Even better if you could assign an area to a Dwarf from the Places menu, with a way to toggle which activities you wanted that area to accomodate:

Urist McSchweaty:
                [y] Bedroom
                [y] Study
                [N] Throne Room
                [Y] Dining Room
                [Y] Personal Storage
            etc...

When furniture is placed in the area, it would check the place settings and auto config itself accordingly for ownership and usage settings.

@King Mir
       Add another menu item for Upgrade Furniture when Available. Then have it check when new furniture is created to see if it is a possible upgrade of the correct type/material. That way, dwarfs would automatically swap out lower grade stuff. Have a greed personality trait that serves as a tie breaker. The greedy dwarf takes the best for theirself.

[King Mir]

That would require better control of materials first.

It would also create a growing amount of underquality furnature, without a way to track it.

[ravaught]

Material handling, yes, excess furniture, no.

It would only create jobs for furniture creation the first time you order a furniture object in a place. Afterwards, it would only be checking newly created furniture to see if it is better than what is already there, not creating to furniture crafting jobs. So, if you did not turn more furniture crafting jobs, it would never fetch furniture upgrades. If it did spot an upgrade, it would set two hauling jobs. One to remove the old piece of furniture to a stockpile, one to bring in the new piece of furniture. On arrival to the stockpile, the old piece of furniture becomes available for future upgrade checks, and is removed from the checks when sold, destroyed, or claimed.

[solerante]

Hi,

I'm new here, but I like this idea.

I think a compromise can be reached if we carry on the idea that certain functionality is only available with certain nobles at work. This way, you could say that the manager queues up arbitrary jobs, but an 'interior designer' noble (bear with me) depending on his skill, could create a build queue based on furniture that is either built or not.

This is to say that you could designate to build a furniture of any specific quality, and it will remain pending until that item is to be found in the fort. Instead of spamming messages, new columns could be added to the jobs list to show what jobs are AWAITING CONSTRUCTION.

In the nobles screen, the 'interior designer' job can be customized - a switch that toggles whether or not the interior designer will queue up jobs until the furniture of the specific quality is produced. Similarly, each individual job that is AWAITING CONSTRUCTION can be toggled so that the jobs for that building type are queued until that building of a certain quality if produced.

Alternatively, instead of assigning a certain quality, you could set the quality to *best available* which would assign whichever furniture of the highest quality which was not already assigned to another job. On the other end of the spectrum -worst available- would also become available.

It would be fun if such a noble worked under the manager noble and had to submit requests for work orders to him personally, and if they didn't get along, work didn't get done very efficiently.

Anyway, this would be a godsend, to be able to design all the rooms of an area and then move on.

It would be nice, too if this guy could remember all of the dimensions of an area, and which buildings were where, and then he could recreate any room he learned, as many as his memory could fit. And if he has bad spatial awareness, an equivalent amount of noise is added to the recreation of the room, including the automatic mining designation.

I like the idea that nobles can be useful, in exchange for their demands, but only if they are skillful to do so. And so as the fort grows and becomes larger, one can go from micromanaging to macromanaging. All this for a few extra resources and a ridiculous amount of patience and incredulous tolerance.

**Also, on the topic, managers really should be able to decide if a specific dwarf gets to do a job. You assign the job, the quantity, and then you can press a key, if you want, to have a certain dwarf do the job. The dwarf with the highest skill to do it shows up at the top. If two dwarves have the same skill, and the manager has good empathy and social awareness, or intuition, or whatever is appropriate, then the  manager will rank them by other factors that influence the outcome of object quality.