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[urmane]

So I've been playing a few days, and am on my fifth and by far most successful fortress.  I've got a beautiful location and I've gone thru most of the tutorial - I have 17 beards (first immigrants arrived), have a lot of rooms, levels, workshops, et al. going, have been mining coal and iron ore, have made some more picks, axes, and armor, and am putting out more exploratory mines farther down.  I've almost tapped out the coal and iron veins near the surface, and am ignoring the platinum for the moment (as per tutorial advice, and because they line water pockets - I don't know how to deal with water yet).

It's about time to do some maintenance on skill assignments and stockpiles, but I do have a few questions first:

1. The Drink seems very low, currently at 9.  I've got brew on repeat again - not enough dwarves, brewer was multitasking, had to mod his skills.  I have no context for how to scale the numbers for food (at 66), seeds (at 25), and drink - is that enough drink?  It drops very slowly, but has only increased once since brewing started ...

2. How does one tell how skilled a particular dwarf is?

3. The caravan passed me by - apparently, they won't go thru traps.  I had verified access before making them.  My entrance hall is ~20 long - is it worth it to move the trade depot close to the drawbridge, and move the traps behind it?

4. After the caravan, a lot of merchants showed up, took a very long time to unload, and then just left.  I checked the depot with 'q' often, but the 't' option to trade never lit up.  No idea what happened here?

5. I get a lot of "cancels Plant Seeds: Needs plump helmet spawn" messages, but the kitchen shows 13.  From searching the forum, that appears to be an artifact of the way seed containers are moved around - do I need to worry about this message, or can I ignore it?

6. In the kitchen screen is red disallow and blue allow?  I hope so ... please have the dev team change those to red and green :-)

7. In the Stocks screen some items have a red number after the primary number - what does that mean?  Also, none of the listed keys (Tab, Zoom, View) appear to do anything ... ?

8. Does creating a pile over another pile "erase" the original pile's contents, or just make them invisible?

9. Since setting up my stone fall traps, I have a huge pile of rat corpses at my entrance.  How do I clear them, and are the traps still good?

[xeniorn]

1. usually the brewer will produce booze quite fast, soon halting production because of a lack of raw materials and/or empty barrels. I usually let him produce a huge amount (huge meaning a different thing early when you have 10-20 dwarves and later when you have ~100 or more) and then live off of it for some time until I notice supplies are falling into two-digit numbers later in game, or 10-20 in early game. Try to keep it over 10-20, by supplying the brewer with enough brewable plants, empty barrels and/or pots and reducing the number of jobs he's doing on the side.

2. when you look at a dwarf using v-g you can see all his skill levels. You'll have to learn what the words themselves mean, though, as it might not be immediately obvious that an adept dwarf is better than a skilled one, or that talented is better than proficient. The full list you can find here: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Skill

3. there are many ways to have secure access to the fort while retaining the ability for wagons to pass, described in other threads. Usually, it's not a problem to place the depot in front of the traps, but that all depends on your playing style.

4. you probably either missed the time when T went on. Either that, or something scared the merchants away before they finished unloading.

5. you can just ignore it. The problem is that a dwarf takes the barrel which stores the bag which stores the seeds when he goes to pick up a seed left behind by brewing, so the seeds become unavailable for some time. They will soon become available again so it's no problem.

6. yes, and the UI changes won't be happening anytime soon

7. the red number represents units of whatever you're looking at that are on the map but in any way unavailable as items (e.g. beds that have been placed become buildings so they're not usable as items, blocks that have been constructed into buildings, items you've forbidden, items carried by traders/enemies...) To use T/Z/V you need to have a bookkeeper, the dwarf who runs the books, manages your inventory so to say. You can assign any dwarf to it in (n)obles screen. You'll need to assign a chair as his office for him to do the job.

8. It doesn't erase the contents

9. make a refuse pile if you don't have one, make sure there's room in it and that (O)rders are not set to ignore vermin remains. Stone traps get reloaded after they go off by another (or the same) stone, by your mechanic

[Hurkyl]

1. The Drink seems very low, currently at 9.  I've got brew on repeat again - not enough dwarves, brewer was multitasking, had to mod his skills.  I have no context for how to scale the numbers for food (at 66), seeds (at 25), and drink - is that enough drink?  It drops very slowly, but has only increased once since brewing started ...

66 units of food should last 17 dwarves almost half a year. (2 food per season per dwarf)
9 units of drink should last 17 dwarves one and a half weeks. (4 food per season per dwarf)

You're essentially in emergency status on your booze. Your dwarves won't die -- they will drink water if they must -- but doing so will make them slow and grumpy.

Do you have brewable plants available? (check either the kitchen tab in the status screen) If you do, and you can get your brewer (or any dwarf) to start brewing soon, then you'll probably be fine.

It's worth double checking your farms are set up right. It's easy to tell them what to grow in the spring and then forget to tell them what to grow for the rest of the year! With the booze shortage, you should make sure you have plump helmets growing, or maybe pig tails both grow much more quickly than sweet pods or cave wheat.

Also, make sure your kitchens aren't set up to cook booze. It's very easy to accidentally create a severe booze shortage by cooking all of your booze into food!

4. After the caravan, a lot of merchants showed up, took a very long time to unload, and then just left.  I checked the depot with 'q' often, but the 't' option to trade never lit up.  No idea what happened here?

Do you have a broker? Did you set the toggle the "trader requested at depot?" Did you select goods to bring to the depot?

8. Does creating a pile over another pile "erase" the original pile's contents, or just make them invisible?

I thought it just ignores your attempt to create a new pile on those squares, but I could be wrong.

[greycat]

1. The Drink seems very low, currently at 9.  I've got brew on repeat again - not enough dwarves, brewer was multitasking, had to mod his skills.  I have no context for how to scale the numbers for food (at 66), seeds (at 25), and drink - is that enough drink?

I like to keep my booze at 5 units per dwarf, minimum.  So for 20 dwarves I would not be comfortable with fewer than 100 units of booze on hand.  When the fortress is mature, I'll aim much higher.

5. I get a lot of "cancels Plant Seeds: Needs plump helmet spawn" messages, but the kitchen shows 13.  From searching the forum, that appears to be an artifact of the way seed containers are moved around - do I need to worry about this message, or can I ignore it?

Disallowing barrels in the seed stockpiles can help with this.  Also, if you aren't already customizing your food stockpiles, you should start doing that.  Try a small no-barrels seed stockpile by the farms, and no seeds allowed in any other food stockpiles.  You'll still get the cancellation spam when they take the bags out to gather up seeds, but it won't be quite as bad.

6. In the kitchen screen is red disallow and blue allow?  I hope so ... please have the dev team change those to red and green :-)

I'm not colorblind myself, but I've been led to believe that red/green is a bad combination for people who are.  Maybe that went into Toady's decision.  In any case, it's unlikely that anything we write on this forum would influence the development of the game.  Toady rarely reads this stuff (he's too busy coding).

9. Since setting up my stone fall traps, I have a huge pile of rat corpses at my entrance.  How do I clear them, and are the traps still good?

Are they actually giant rat corpses, or just rat remains?  They're quite different.  Remains are vermin that have been killed by cats, not by traps.  Corpses are dead creatures that may be large enough to butcher for meat.

If a stonefall trap is triggered, a job will be created for someone to reload the stone.  This is automatic, so you don't have to do anything about it.  Of course, the drawback is that if a bunch of goblins hit your stonefall traps, your civilians will walk right up to them.

Management of corpses and remains can be handled in various ways.  If they're just vermin remains, you can ignore them.  They'll go away on their own eventually, and vermin remains don't produce miasma (they haven't for a very long time).  If they're corpses, then they may start to rot and produce miasma if they are underground (they won't produce miasma above ground).  If they're butcherable corpses, and if they're sufficiently close to a butcher's shop, and if you have a dwarf with the butcher labor enabled, then they'll automatically be butchered.  However, if any of those conditions are false, then they won't be.

So, for corpses that aren't automatically handled, you have a couple choices.  You can make a refuse stockpile, and dwarves will haul corpses there.  Or you can make a garbage zone and dump them manually.  (For either approach, you may also have to enable the option to deal with "outdoor" refuse -- o r o if I recall correctly.)  The problems with refuse stockpiles are: (1) they fill up way too quickly (no bins/barrels -- everything takes one tile); (2) dwarves may put things there that you don't want them to; (3) some items decay when stored in a refuse stockpile, but not when stored on a regular tile.  I prefer to manage my corpses with manual dumping, to a garbage zone that is close to the butcher's shop, and also under a raised bridge.  Anything that can't be butchered, eventually gets smashed.

[smakemupagus]

You shouldn't need to mod your brewer's skills to keep up (no problem with you doing that per se, but it might just mask the real issue so you don't figure out how to improve)... You're probably running short of brewable plants, barrels, or simply not have enough stills & brewers to keep up with demand.

You can go ahead and mine the platinum or anything else without really worrying too much about flooding; i don't know whether they indicate water pockets but if your miners strike a "damp stone" they will stop digging and you have to explicitly tell them again to mine it out.  Just to be clear, you absolutely will lose several forts eventually to flooding, but probably not because you mine platinum  

Platinum can kill your fort for a different reason:  as you get rich, you can attract more enemies.  As long as you craft the platinum and trade it for useful things you will be OK.  Just don't stockpile rooms full of useless platinum junk until you're ready to defend yourself.

[wuphonsreach]

My ballpark is 10 units of drink per dwarf as a minimum.  Preferably 15 units/dwarf.  Below 5 units/dwarf and it's a "stop everything and harvest plants" emergency.

In a mature 150-200 dwarf fort, that means I stop creating stockpiles/barrels/pots when I have 3000-4500 drinks on-hand.  When we drop below 3000, I make sure there are a few dozen barrels in the stockpile and order the brewer back to work.

[urmane]

Thanks, guys, that was a lot of help.  We're now a bit better off:

- The brewer was also hauling - removing that and he got to work, I'm up to 23 drink, tho I don't understand harvesting timing yet.  I have about 100 tiles dedicated to farming, half plump helmets, half split by season helmets/wheat/pigtails/dimple.  Should I be doing anything else with those?  I'm assuming they are gathered somehow, but ... ?  I see "gathering" and "processing" mentioned in the forum ...

- Seed-only stockpile by farms - done

- They're rat remains - no big deal

- Seems there's an awful lot of hauling going on ... is Job screen just showing me every subtask?  I suspect they're clearing away all those stone left over from mining - they could be marked to garbage, I guess, or saved for stone pots ...

- I've got dedicated jobs to:
Expedition leader is still a miner, also broker/office guy
2 miner/haulers (only)
1 Mason (most things stone)
1 chief medical/brewer
1 carpenter (most things wood), and hauler (since there's not that much wood things to do)
4 furnace ops
2 blacksmiths (all things metal except furnace ops)
1 gemcutter/mechanic
with four left over as miners/haulers and "everything else", and I'm usually at 0/1/2 idle.  An *awful* lot of hauling going on ...  I'll split off "else" jobs when/if I get more immigrants.

- I'm not clear on how to manage all the barrels, et al., or even if I should.  I can see them all in Stocks screen, and Tab will show me if they're being used or empty (although I'm not clear on the remainder of the notation: oaken barrel vs -oaken barrel- vs *oaken barrel* vs -oaken barrel <#21>- ).  I'm tempted to just put the carpenter and craftsdwarf on repeat-go-make-barrels-and-pots-all-day for a while.  As for what's going in them, that's a whole 'nother level ...

- I'm thinking that I should get to a point where almost every type has its own stockpile - that seems to be the trend ... now that I'm off-tutorial, I guess it's fun time :-)

- I have a *lot* of iron bars now - weapons and armor for everyone are on the way.

Again, thanks all!

[smakemupagus]

if they're all hauling stone, make some wheelbarrows at the carpenter, it'll go much faster.  Also, you don't really need to haul all the stone, you can ignore it or if you don't want to see it, you can use d-b-h or k-h to hide it.

the punctuation you notice about the barrels are just marking the quality of craftsdwarfship of the barrel manufacture, it's not important (although quality is very important for other things, like crafts, mechanisms, and weapons..)    Dunno what you mean about 'managing' barrels, but you seem to have the idea: make a lot of them.  Putting barrels or bins on repeat is not a bad idea, but i usually prefer using the manager to make batches of 30, since I would otherwise forget to turn repeat off.  Your mileage may vary

100 tiles of farm is plenty. Something like ~1 tile of planting per dwarf is not a bad rule of thumb for getting started, assuming you have some meat or fish coming in too.  Yes, there are other things to do with the other crops, but most of them at least can be brewed without you doing anything else special.  But to get other industries going such as cloth or oil you'll need to do other things.  see

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Plants

[misko27]

Yes. Quality is important is in trading always, and will sometimes increase objects perofrmance. In weapons and armor it is very important. Mecahnisms too. Everything else just increases value, which can make dwarves happier if its furniture.

Also I saw this and needed to comment

6. In the kitchen screen is red disallow and blue allow?  I hope so ... please have the dev team change those to red and green :-)

Devteam, you funny. Its just Toady.

[greycat]

- Seems there's an awful lot of hauling going on ... is Job screen just showing me every subtask?  I suspect they're clearing away all those stone left over from mining - they could be marked to garbage, I guess, or saved for stone pots ...

Making large stone stockpiles is generally a bad idea.  Make a small one right next to (or surrounding) the mason's shop, another one next to or surrounding the mechanic's shop, and so on for any other workshops that use stone as input.  Make sure you've assigned an appropriate number of wheelbarrows for each of them, and that you've actually built the wheelbarrows.  The last thing you want is your farmer dragging a boulder hundreds of tiles without a wheelbarrow.

[Starver]

I don't know if I missed anyone else say precisely this, but for some jobs (depends on what you consider a priority, in your case the Brewer as you have done, in my case invariably the miners but also others as additional priorities demand) I completely remove the Hauling tasks from the people working those.  I'm not sure if your Miner/hauler pair is going to be good management, either, if it means they keep stopping mining and start hauling.  Keep 'em at the 'coalface' for as long as you can.  (Burrows can also help, but perhaps need more explaining.)

Mostly I end up with dwarves set to Haul being those without any other priority job of their own (either the no-skilled or the lesser-skilled-where-someone-already-has-higher-skills), but this varies according to relative needs.


If you want to clear an area of mined stones (of no other intrinsic value[1]) or rat corpses[2] that the miners are leaving, then there's always setting them to be dumped to a Quantum Stockpile (check for that on the Wiki) and then any dwarf not involved in other important business can have Refuse Hauling enabled (perhaps as their sole task?) and then set the appropriate items to be Dumped (either across an area of ground, individually by moving the cursor around or[3] through the Stocks screen, and watch the stuff get cleared up.

In general, though, you can usually survive with rubble on the ground, unless you're as OCD as me.  (And even I can't always clear it away fast enough!)


[1] Or valuable items (or at least socks) that you want to clear out as a 'special priority' over all other miscellaneous hauling jobs.

[2] Noting that anything that is outside is (by default) exempt from Dumping.  Somewhere under the (o)ptions command's sub-menu is the place to change that, but my advice is to only do it when you know that no-one's going to wander across half the map into a henceforth unforeseen goblin ambush.

[3] As a complex option to start from, but simpler when you know you're not going to be dumping things you aren't wanting dumped...   Might be worth ignoring this option for now, though.

[urmane]

I'm over that particular hump - a flood of immigrants has brought me to 42, and now almost everybody is specialized, including miners and haulers.  There's a few backups for things like blacksmith and a few cross-tasked for extras.

Drink was up to 99, now down to 84 - it seems to go in waves.

Hm - I've actually made a big stone pile, under the assumption that the stones and the pile space will be needed for all those pots and other rock things ... is that just causing the haulers to spend their time clearing debris unnecessarily?

Thanks for the tip on wheelbarrows - I'd made them, but didn't know they were "assigned" as such.  I am now regretting making several piles in lines outlining workshops, instead of just overlaying one big one.  Fun!

Here's a question - on the management screen, suddenly it says "All work orders must be validated by the manager before they become active." and all my order lines have a red X.  That wasn't there before, and I can't seem to find a way to "validate" anything - what gives?

[knutor]

Give 'da Man' a chair.

Manager cannot manage with out an office.  I like to put his own bed nearby it as well.  And a table.  Two chairs if he's married.  Once he's assigned a chair, he'll start validating orders.  Knutor

[smakemupagus]

Hm - I've actually made a big stone pile, under the assumption that the stones and the pile space will be needed for all those pots and other rock things ... is that just causing the haulers to spend their time clearing debris unnecessarily?

Yes, it is.  A modest size stone pile with wheelbarrows assigned (4x4, maybe?) near your mason would be refilled by your haulers as needed. 

Here's a question - on the management screen, suddenly it says "All work orders must be validated by the manager before they become active." and all my order lines have a red X.  That wasn't there before, and I can't seem to find a way to "validate" anything - what gives?

Do you have a manager?  If not, assign one on the Nobles screen (n).  If yes, see knutor's advice above.  If you already have him a valid office but he's overworked, reduce his other jobs.  Of course, Make sure he's not crippled or melancholy or what have you.

[greycat]

If you want to clear an area of mined stones (of no other intrinsic value[1]) or rat corpses[2] that the miners are leaving, then there's always setting them to be dumped to a Quantum Stockpile

I strongly recommend against dumping stones.  They are extremely heavy, and your dwarves will not use wheelbarrows when dumping them.  Leave the stones alone, except to make small stockpiles by the workshops that use them, and use wheelbarrows in those stockpiles.