I've figured out a few methods to handle the mountains of dirty laundry my dwarves are generating. So far, my three favorite methods:
1) Bin up all of the dirty clothes and then sell it to the next caravan, so they will take it away and get rid of it for me.
2) Create a stockpile that accepts only clothing and nothing else. Do not allow clothing to be stored anywhere else in the fortress. Every once in a while, when it gets full, mass dump everything. Then go back into the stocks menu and un-dump the bins, to save the bins.
3) Create a stockpile that accepts only clothing and nothing else. Do not allow clothing to be stored anywhere else in the fortress. Add in the refuse option on the stockpile, so it will accept both refuse and clothing. This will cause all clothing to rot away when in the stockpile. You will need to continually produce new clothing, but pig tails are infinitely renewable, you will get highly skilled craftsdwarves.
The problem I have not yet found a solution for is the one of dwarves keeping dirty clothes in their rooms. They will store owned items in their room if they have a room, and there doesn't seem to be any limit to how many items they will store. Even if all cabinets are full they will still keep accumulating more dirty socks until the entire room is covered in dirty socks. I play very long term fortresses, often times 60+ years after embark, with multiple generations of dwarves. This means the accumulating clutter problem is a serious one. If your fort only lasts for a few years, its no big deal, but if a dwarf has been hoarding socks for the past 60 years, things do get out of hand.
If the socks are sitting around on the floor because the dwarf doesn't have a room, after a while ownership gets revoked and they get hauled off to the rotting/dumping/export stockpiles. I'm okay with this.
Problem is that ownership is NOT revoked if they are on the floor in a room the dwarf owns. Clothes will accumulate forever. Some workarounds I've been tinkering with:
1) One possible workaround might be to zone the floor of all bedrooms as a refuse stockpile, but then not allow any items to be stored there. That should trigger the rotting tag for dirty socks, but will not cause hauling jobs to bring junk to the bedrooms. Any socks left on the floor will simply decay on their own.
2) Another solution would be to not give dwarves any rooms, but this will not work, because I enjoy making sure all of my dwarves are well taken care of.
3) A third solution would be to equip every dwarf in armor. Military soldiers who are on duty all the time end up having their clothes completely rotted away to the point that they're wearing only armor and nothing else. Armor is only worn if your soldiers are in the military and because its armor, the clothing rot while being worn isn't triggered. Downside to this is that you need to recruit all dwarves into the military, which might be a pain to do for very large forts.
Of course it might be possible to simply mod out clothing again, but I'd rather not do this. Any suggestions on how to handle the epidemic of dirty socks in your fortresses?
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Topic: [34.07] Dirty sock woes (Read 6542 times)