Brisos give us more details on what your fort is.
- Where is it? Surroundings, temp, nearby civs, biome, features(river, water in cav 2,3, magmapipe in cav 2, etc.)
- What stage is your fort in?
- Are you buying out caravans with masterwork quarry bush roasts?
- Is it a surface fort or dug into a hillside
- If you're on the surface, is your outermost wall up? Dodge trap? Z-2 reverse fortifications? z-3 patrol level to spot invaders? z-4 sniping towers? Are all surface structures roofed over with at least bridges?
- What is you military and what gear does it have at what completion rate?
- Are you still in need of massive stocks of stone for blocks/mechanisms/furniture?
- Please list your entire labor structure as well as your current and future labor plan. If you're gonna make a glass tower we'll have diff. recc's than if you want to go for 180/200 steel/adamantium legendary soldiers to duke it out with the HFS.
- List how much of what warehouse space you have with what stockpile settings.
- List your armory stats so we know what gear you have on the soldiers as well as in reserve for recruits.
- How large are you ammunition stocks?
- What size is your cage storage and prisoner processing station?
- Arena built yet?
- Been culling "finds helping others rewarding" for doctor/nurse positions? Analytical/memory/intuition for diagnose monkeys?
- What is the entrance of your fort designed like? Does it have a redundant entrance so that all goblins are fully inside before you strike, allowing for safe harvesting of goblinite? Or will you need to plan on armored haulers bearing the brunt of the work.
- Have you built or are planning to build/irrigate/dig a tree farm of large proportions?
Here's some labor designations to help group it up.
Specialists - Full time specialists, should never be recruited and should be burrowed for efficiency where applicable.
1-? Miner - Full time mining. You should have your fortress planned out and therefore you'll always have more crap to dig. Arena, warehouse, redundant service tunnels & cisterns. Early on you'll need a lot, not so much later.
2-4+ Grower - Full time farming. Burrowing is preferred to ensure a high planting rate. Disable EVERYTHING else. maybe leave haul food but you want these guys filling the fields.
1-2 Brewers - Full timer brewers. Generally once you get around 50-90 dwarves you can just leave one on repeat. might want a second once you're breaking into the late 100's.
1 Cook - Dem roasts will let you buy out caravans. Keep a stockpile around the kitchen only allowing flours, FB meat, semi-/mega megabeast meat, exotic meats, eggs if you want, quarry bush leaves, sunshine if you want, and cheese if you want.
1 Soaper - Keep your soap stocks up. Infection's a bitch.
- Soap making, lye making, wood burning. Let him help in the furnaces and animal hauling if he's idling too much.
1+ Stone Crafter - Stone pots, while heavy, will free up more wood for light bins. you should use stockpile dickery to try and limit their distribution to booze pots and food storage pots. Don't want a hauler getting fragged cause he's lugging a pot after all.
1+ Mechanism Crafter - Get this guy to legend and burrow his ass. Let him work on internal stuff like building the pump stack but otherwise don't risk losing him.
1+ Leatherworker - Backpacks/waterskin/quivers early on. not so much later unless you max out your armor coverage.
1-3+ Weavers - All weaving all the time. Keep those cloth stocks segregated and filled while you keep your unfilled bag supply and clothing stocks up. Good use for children if you cheat.
1-4+ Dyers - Unnecessary imo but if you go for it overkill it.
1-2+ Clothier - In the early days while your milling industry is still getting set up you'll want more. Once you're established you'll have a mook hauling his useless crap to the masterwork clothes bins.
1-?+ Forgers - Numbers all depend on how you distribute your labors. either way make sure they have a panic room with supplies, a pick, and unraisable bridges in case of FUN.
1+ Butcher - Like the mechanism crafter, it isn't necessary to have a guso dwarf to rock the job but it never hurt either.
1+ Tanner - A good tanner will help keep the skins from overflowing if the overflow dwarves aren't keeping the stocks low.
2-3+ Animal Trainers - You'll want more the more exotic crap or high volume breeding you do.
1-2+ Carpenters - Carps gotta carp yo.
1-2+ Masons - Quality furniture inc.
3-4+ Bone Carvers - If you enabled butcher sentients then you have a lotta bone bolts to make. Good use for children if you cheat.
1 Bookie/Broker - Handles bookkeeping/Manager/Broker duties. Can do wood cutting and animal training on off days. Architecture is a good help as well.
1 Chief Doc - A dedicated diagnoser/suterer with high analytical/memory/intuition. Disable feed/water and recover wounded.
1+ CCand - Chief candidates in training. same as above.
1+ Surgeon - At least one dedicated skilled surgeon to help lower infection rate. Keep in mind that a novice is better than letting them go untreated for months. Disable recover wounded
1-3+ Doctors - All 4 labors enabled. disable recover wounded. These are your primary doctors. When training them via drop shaft volunteers make sure only these, the Chief, and the surgeon have their medical labors enabled to help condense the xp.
1-6+ DCand - Dwarves with "Finds helping others rewarding".These are overflow doctors. Enable wound dressing and suture to keep infection rates low.
1-10 DCand Enforcer - Dwarves with "Finds helping others rewarding as well as strong attributes. Train in the military and have them billeted in the hospital quarters. Survival of the medical team is of the utmost priority.
5-???+ Nurses - Additional "Finds helping others rewarding" dwarves, but in rough times any dwarf will do. Purely feed/water and recover wounded. If the battlefield is hot, disable recover wounded and let the recovery haulers bring the wounded in.
If your fort takes catastrophic damage you may need to draft enforcers and nurses to help with the suture/dressing and enable set bones/surgery/diagnose on the DCand's. Also, if it wasn't clear the medical staff must have no hauling labors enabled. You want them idling life away while you arrange for injured. If that burns your ass then kit them out as leather marksdwarves and get them a couple ranks via shooting prisoners. then let them train the day away during peacetime. hospital should be designed as a mini-fort with it's own guarded single entrance with multiple raisable bridges, picks, well & redundant wells, seeds to an unused crop, etc. If the shit hits the fan you need to be able to seal them off. Try to leave a shaft to an unused and blocked off quarry for slab crafting/memorials. Quality quarters for the medical staff is reccomended to keep deaths via tantrum spiral down. Wont hurt to put their fav caged animal in their room or have their fav foods/booze on hand with masterwork roasts in a legendary dining room.
1-2 Baron, 1-2 duke, 1-2 king - Let your nobility be a shoulder to cry on or a master bolt maker. w/e boats your float.
You'll easily run 50-80 dwarves as the backbone of your fort and that's not even getting into teachers and misc junk.
Overflow jobs - Unskilled labor has a skill all it's own
1-3+ Gather - These are your rustic frontiermen keeping your wilds tamed. May want to hurl the wood cutters to axedwarf training for a year or two as well as putting the generics into the hauler reserve. Large tree farms need lots of course
- Wood cutting(Just a few with wood hauling disabled, Plant gather, animal hauling, wood hauling. If they idle too much give them food hauling.
1-20+ Eng Core - These are bulk engineers for large scale low-quality projects when you're just getting the fort on its feet. Shift labor designations to fit your needs. If you don't plan on dropping a hojillion traps at once you might scale back mechanics to condense xp. ditto with engraving. Large surface forts need a fuckton. less with the recent change to stone blocks but still a lot to get dem 55x55x4 5-tile thick walls up.(|___|).
- Masonry, Engraving(Carve fortifications), Mechanics,(installation), Architecture,Furniture Hauling
As needed,temp, Armored Eng Core - Armored marksdwarves in the hauler reserves for unsticking traps in hazardous conditions will need to use burrows to make this useful.
- Masonry(Exposed walls once ambushes are popped), Engraving(Carve fortifications, cavern/exposed particuarly), Mechanics,(installation,maintaining,replacing),Architecture(Exposed pumps, bridges, etc.
As needed, temp, Engraver - One day you might feel like smoothing & engraving large sections of the fort. Draft chunks of the hauler reserves to be your engravaboos.
2-6+ Processors - Backbone of your food industry, also a great use for off duty hauler reservists.Assign labors as needed.
- Milling, Plant processing, shearing, spinning(keep low to condense xp), fish cleaning(if you fish), Pressing.
4-12+ Furnace Ops - Help melt down goblinite, keep charcoal stock up for ash and so on.
- Furnace op, Wood burner. Add item and stone hauling if they idle too much.
1-?+ Railmen - Doesn't hurt to have agile dwarves burrowed on your minecart route to be on hand all day erryday.
1-2+ Butcher/tanner - Assign as needed to keep the refuse stock clean
Haulers
Animal Haulers
2+ Hauler Dedicated - Livestock - You need dedicated haulers or unburrowed doctors/nobles will go get themselves killed.
?? Hauler Reserve - If you have exposed cages you may want the reservists to handle it since they'll be armored.
Wood Haulers
1+ Hauler Dedicated - Keep at least one dedicated on hand for timely hauling.
1+ Hauler Reserves - Toggle on more reservists as needed.
Stone Haulers
1-2+ Hauler Dedicated - Keep a few on hand to sort your stone and keep the minecarts dump zone clean.
3-8+ Patrolmen - Off duty job for leatherclad patrolmen. 4 on, 6 off per 10 will be fine
Food Haulers - NEVER send these into combat. At least without checking each dwarves inv. 1 barrel of booze is all it takes man....
2-4+ Hauler Dedicated - Grower - Haulers to handle crop/generic food shuffling
1-2+ Hauler Dedicated - Kitchen - Handles the production from brewery and helps keep kitchen clutter down.
1-2+ Hauler Dedicated - Pig tail/rope reed/dye reagent shufflin. helps with generic food shufflin
Item haulers
4+ Hauler Dedicated - Ammuntion - Bone bolts suck up a huge amount of jobs. Helps with generic item
2+ Hauler Reserve - Various cloth related shufflin
3-5+ Hauler Reserve - Armor/wep shuffling. Goblinite sorting to melting/incinerator stockpile.
Furniture Hauler
1 Hauler Dedicated - The rest is split with the Eng Core. May want to enable animal hauling if he's idling too much.
Recovery - A subgroup of the Hauler Reserves. Train as skilled marksdwarves then cross-train to hammers once legendary. After a siege only let recovery haul useless crap to a garbage dump just inside the wall. raise bridge, enable item hauling, and let the fortress sort it out. dump burnables in the incinerator, let furnace ops melt the meltables. Do it right and you wont have UristMcKing getting shot by a post-siege ambush party.(Play DF with a copy/paste & title rename of the goblin entry x3+ for good times.=D )
20-40+ Hauler Reserve. - Burial, recover wounded, refuse hauling, item hauling(clean-up/overflow only)
As your fort grows you should be drafting dwarves for the military as their attributes/skills place them. Get a group of 6 dwarves to function as teachers. Keep them deep inside the fort and safe at all but the most grim times. Get a group of 10 legends trained up, split into 2-five dwarf squads. They can patrol, master teacher and train a different weapon, etc. At least 1, 10-dwarf dedicated marksdwarf squad.
Once you have your rough military and core needs met all dwarves get drafted into the hauler reserves after being tagged by attribute post-migration wave.
- If times are rough and you can't kit them well then use whatever castoff goblinite you can scrap together. The big priority is masterwork xbows and a sufficient ammo stock asap.
- On arrival, assign them to a full marksdwarf armor uniform or a full leather marksdwarf kit if you value speed more than risk.
- Use a "Recovery" custom profession to autoassign them their generic job. As your fortress has new needs arise grab haulers from the reserve and reassign them.
- Do not activate prior to getting a few ranks in marks. Get those via ventilating prisoners/using an obs platform to plink at ambushes/sieges.
- Distribute labor so that a 2-3/10 training schedule wont interfere too badly. Motivated dwarves will give 0 fucks and may req. retirement into a permanent civilian job.
- If you build a swimming pool you wont have to use quality soldiers in risky ops.
Other uses for idlers are:
- Medical test subject. Have them fall 2 z-levels and break a few bones to train the medical staff. Armor,disease resistance,faster healing increase training rates. Remember to clear the traction benches of the cowards every couple months.
- If you ever snagged skilled wrestlers/striker/kicker/misc. obj user outside of your teaching 6 you can throw together wrestler squads to help round out future recruits. Full armor,open hand + shield(metal). Will train fairly quickly vs armored but disarmed prisoners for a bit. give them wood shields to keep the headshot rate low.(Ha! wood shields are misc. obj training weapons.)
Aaand bam! There's ~ 160 dwarves at the minimal side. the other 40 easily get placed and you're at 200 going oh god i need more dwarves but my fps can't take it! D:
Most of these numbers wont get met cause you'll keep needing dedicated specialized dwarves here n there but such is life.
I'll post some attribute copypasta in a sec.