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[mustafa2812]

So I'm on my 4th fort or so and its 8 years in and it's a mountainhome now with a queen and everything.  The number of dwarves I have to control brings new challenges so naturally I have some questions.
1.  It seems that all my haulers are tied up in stockpile hauling constantly and don't get to some of the more pressing matters like dumping the stone in my queens hall.  A lot of the hauling orders  involve hauling stone all the way down to my magma forge.  Others involve carrying heavy things.  I just need some suggestions for how to streamline the hauling process and get my dwarves to do other things.  (I have many wheelbarrows)
2.  My fortress pop. is currently at 195 and almost 70 of them are children, the oldest being 6 yrs old.  Is there any good way to get rid of them without a tantrum spiral or utilize them in ways that I haven't tried yet.  They cap out my fortress pop. but barely do anything.
3.  I have a crap ton of goblinite ordered to melt but it doesn't seem like it's getting done at all.  Idk what I need to do for that.
4.  Can I still get migrants after my fort becomes the mountainhome?

[i2amroy]

1)Set up a minecart track or two for the most common heavy hauling tracks. Other then that all I can suggest is get some more dedicated haulers.
2)Children can be killed by bridge smashing and as long as you memorialize them then no bad thoughts will occur (since they are "missing"). Alternatively you can prevent this problem from ever happening in the first place by going into the d_init.txt and changing [BABY_CHILD_CAP:X:X] to something more reasonable (I prefer 20:30 myself), thus preventing you from ever having that many children in the first place.
3)Make sure that you are ordering the "melt item" command at your forges as well as designating the items to be melted.
4)I believe so.

[GreatWyrmGold]

1. Assign more haulers?
2. Meh. Just wait a while, and/or put the nursery outdoors.
3. Set up more smelters and furnace operators?
4. Yes.

[Triaxx2]

Minecarts are your friends. Put up a stockpile closer to the fort. While it's being filled have some miners dig four cart tracks, in a long spiral from the stockpile down to the magma forges. Then have engravers come along behind and carve tracks into them. Build a dumping stop at the bottom of each track.

Have the stop at the top load the cart from the stock pile then Push it along the track. Make sure that the track isn't too long before it reaches a down ramp. This will cause the cart to shoot all the way down the track without further interaction from a dwarf, then dump at the bottom. The bottom stop should be immediately when empty guide back to the first stop. That will vastly cut down on the number of hauling orders that are taking forever.

You can also reverse the order if you need to haul things up from the magma forges, but you'll need to guide to the top, because pushing works only going down without rollers.

[_Ivan_]

Your dwarves have too much to do. Kill one of the projects causing so many hauling jobs and wait til the other finishes.

Get dwarf therapist if you don't have it already. I split my dwarves into 3 groups. Haulers, specialists(farmer, crafstdwarves, etc), and military(up to 5 full squads). In practice i have about 50% haulers and the rest labourers and military. Things get moved relatively quickly since EVERYONE will haul and if it becomes a problem, i just switch off a specific dwarfs hauling labours and he gets to his real job.

A goblinite stockpile next to the workshop is a must but i'm always tinkering with the settings to keep things in or out depending on all my other stockpiles. On the other hand, an atom smasher is a good solution too. There will always be more goblinite for you to melt. You don't have to stockpile it either, just stockpile what your dwarves need and let the rest rot in the sun until your dwarves are free to haul all the copper items down near the workshop, then the iron, then the bronze, etc... The idea is to limit the number of things they have to do. The more there is the slower it all goes.

As for children... My fortress grew to 350+ and i have a number of children running about as well. Pathing alone will drag me down to 10 fps if everyone is hauling for some big project. Thankfully with 350, the lag dosen't last long. I don't have the heart to squash the kids but i did set [BABY_CHILD_CAP:5:1000]. That's a maximum of 5 children at any time ever. The rest will just have to die of old age before new ones will show up.

Yes you can still get migrants but once you hit a population of 200 (actually, i got migrants at 210 but it stopped right after) it will stop but new births will carry you well over that.

[billw]

If you aren't adverse to quantum stockpiles I would have one dump all all armor and weapons right next to your furnace, have a dedicated furnace operator, and you will get through them in no time. Obviously better if it is a magma furnace.

[Sutremaine]

You can also reverse the order if you need to haul things up from the magma forges, but you'll need to guide to the top, because pushing works only going down without rollers.

It's possible to make one-way accelerators.

Code: [Select]

P = power train
* = gear
R = roller, E->W in this example
= = track

 P
 * 
=R^=

You build the gear, disengage it via lever, and then connect it to the pressure plate. When a cart goes from left to right, it passes over the unpowered roller as though it was normal track. When a cart goes from right to left, it hits the pressure plate and passes over the now-powered roller, getting a speed boost. The route can be set up so that the pressure plate has deactivated by the time the cart hits the roller from the left side, or the route can be set up in such a way that it doesn't matter if the cart gets bounced back by the still-powered roller.

You can have multiple power trains coming out of the same power source, either making sure only one is activated at a time, or making it so that the times when the system is overloaded are the times when the rollers aren't needed. I've used one-way rollers to push a cart up a ramp in one go, though I don't know if the cart would keep going for the hundred ticks needed for each pressure plate to reset. If not, you could always use more power -- it's not as though water reactors are particularly difficult to build and fill.

[celem]

Incidentaly your goblinite not getting melted may be linked to your hauling issues. 

Firstly melt seems to be a pretty slow task, if you get lots of gobbo xmas gifts then 1 forge on repeat can struggle to keep up, i generally have 2 dedicated melt smelters.  (always dedicate melt smelter/s if you can, fractions of a bar are tracked per smelter not across all smelters)

If the goblinite flagged for melt is still lying around outside and isnt yet in stockpiles then its hauling thats the bottleneck.  The smelter will often cancel the melt task even with hundreds of flagged items if they havent yet been taken to a stockpile.  This is because these items have a hauling job assigned to them that just isnt being done due to the load.  This can also occur obviously if you run short of room in weapon/armor piles which is also very common with lots of goblinite and a shortage of bins.

Kids just suck, they take too long to grow up (longer than the life of many forts) and they are limited in what they can do.  Personaly i use a mod that has them reach adulthood earlier and expands the jobs available to them while children.  Mine churn out a lot of junk rock crafts n such. (masterwork mod btw)

[Urist McPenguinhead]

To help with your children problem, you can have them grow up earlier (say at age 6 instead of 12), if you don't mind "cheating". To do that, I believe you change [CHILD:12] in creature_standard.
If you do that, know that it takes some time for them to turn into peasants, even if they are over the age you set.

Then they can be put to work on your latest mega project.

[Triaxx2]

Post of awesome stuff.

Very clever. 83 power for four tracks, providing an optimal set up, but it's balanced just right to provide enough power to run the entire power train off a single mini-reactor. I'll do some pictures later today.

[Sutremaine]

Here's my setup: (large pic)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It's rather inefficent where the curve is, but that was for aesthetics. Also of note is the fortification-based security (the pressure plates are also linked to a pair of retracting bridges, to form an airlock within the shaft) and the return loop. The pressure plate there takes a sort-of third option for roller activation, being placed sort-of after the roller and being quite a way through the 100-tick cooldown by the time the cart passes over its connected roller.

One year it randomly stopped working despite no changes to the route, dropping carts down the last gap instead of returning them to the start point. So I stuck in a second system on the corner, with the option of expanding it if I got bored and wanted to save a few ticks per journey. I could have run another arm off the reactor, but it would have had to run from the top of the pump and intrude into the soil layers.

The absolute maximum with direct connections is six, though trying to run gears from the bottom of the reactor isn't really worth it. Also you sacrifice one power for elevating one top-connected gear from the other, but that's minor. You can add more gears in a mandelbrot pattern to have more arms, but these extra gears will either suck power or require extra pressure plates to disengage whole sections at a time.