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[MOK]

I have a few forts under my belt, but I've not really gotten to long-term sustainability yet.  And one of the things I've come across in my play of late is what happens after clothes finally wear out, and what happens when the baby boom grows into children and adolescents.  Suddenly there's a need for a textile industry, as well as the management of clothes produced and replaced.

So far I've set up my pig-tail and rope-reed farms, a few farmers workshops that are processing plants constantly, a few looms, dyers, and four clothesmakers.  I've been using my production manager to queue up batches of socks, trousers, dresses, tunics, and robes.  I also make leather shoes, leather gloves, and leather cloaks.

First I'm curious if that's sufficient in terms of type?  Do the non-soldier population require other clothing items than those?  Are any of those unnecessary, either partially or wholly?  Are there some optional items that are worthwhile to produce?

Second, I'm curious how much is needed.  What rate of production is needed?  Is it easier to supplement clothing income from goblinite and caravans?  Do I gain simplicity and streamlining or other benefits by using only what I produce?  And if I was purely self-supplying, what rate of clothes making is necessary?  How early should it start?  How many workshops?  On paper, the magnitude of the need seems... Dizzying.

Third I'm curious about organization.  Stockpile setup, keeping track of needs and replacements, separating and somehow dealing with the old, worn out stuff.  Avoiding the random perma-clutter of dropped clothing.  Etc.

Do you have your system working fluidly?   How do you do it?  What challenges do you run into?  What kind of scale do you deal with? 
My fort is currently around 250 population.  =(  I run LNP out of the box, haven't changed any settings.

Thanks everyone!

[Blucher]

In my forts every man jack gets tossed into a squad with leather/copper/whatever armor set to exact and replace clothing and that's that.  Goblins, dwarves, and elves all provide useable clothing for the kids and miners/woodcutters.  Once the children grow up, they get tossed into a squad too.

I've given up on clothing.  Too much of a hassle.  Armor doesn't wear out.

[Thudde]

I typically just check the inactive dwarfs in the meeting hall or statue garden about once every year.  If any are wearing any clothes wearing out (with a "x") I queue up 10 or 20 of that item.  Otherwise I try to ignore clothes.  The trouble happens if you have lots of children.  If they all grow from babies to kids about the same time, they all need clothes and can start a tantrum spiral.   

[AndreaReina]

I believe clothes start to wear out after a year, so an annual production of 2x fort population per item will keep you safe (including baby booms). You can always sell the excess to the caravans.

[MOK]

Nice, thanks AndreaReina.

I experienced the naked-child-based tantrum spiral in my last fortress.  Frustrating, as the solution required either the creation of hundreds of items, or modding, or exploiting game mechanics.

I guess if the situation is un-fun enough, I'm amenable to a mod or exploit, but I'd rather try to 'win' the game as-is.  To work a solution according to the system-as-intended.

After scrolling 5 pages back, I found this thread on Clothes Management.  I may try the ideas there.  Though, I really have a distaste for quantum stockpiles. 

Boy, I come off as finicky, but I don't feel finicky...

[thiosk]

I am not a modded, but let me tell you- I would be so in for a mod that made masterwork, dyed, cloth image clothes decay either slower or not at all.

With the addition of new standing orders, I think cloth management will get better.

[Drazinononda]

Here's how I would do it, if my forts were ever big enough to reach the industrial age:

* Keep the workshops and stockpiles close to each other. An ideal setup actually doesn't use stockpiles: supplies are hauled directly from one workshop to the next when a job calls for them. Longer hauling times require either that more dwarves be tied up with hauling, or more of your skilled workers hauling their own supplies around, both of which are inefficient.

* Use as few tailors as possible. One clothesmaker, until you notice he's not keeping up, then a second, and so on. I imagine though that as they reach Legendary and can sew a four-piece suit in their sleep with their toes, you won't need more than one even for a few hundred dwarves. Same thing with threshers and weavers.

* Overproduce at each level of production. Produce more plants than your threshers can handle; process more plants than your weavers can handle; weave more cloth than your clothier can handle; make more clothes than your dwarves need. That way you always have enough clothes even for migrants and growing children, and you shouldn't have many (if any) "Cancels Job: Needs supplies" messages.

* Keep it simple: shirts, pants, shoes. Set your clothes workshops to one of each on repeat, and the clothier will cycle through them, producing a full set of clothing before starting over.

* If you want to incorporate dyeing into the chain, graft it in after the rest of the industry is running well. Once you're confident that cloth output is outpacing cloth usage, then you can spare some cloth here and there for a dyer. Once his skills come up to par with the rest of the industry, you can change the standing orders to Use Dyed Cloth and get an instant boost to the average value output.

This sort of setup (incremental oversupply, skilled workers, repeat orders) minimizes micromanagement and maximizes worker efficiency (if not supply efficiency). If you want to tangle with burrows, for example to keep your dedicated rope reed farmer from harvesting plump helmets two hundred steps away, you can improve efficiency even more.

[Callista]

Basic clothing industry:
I prefer rope reed because you can grow it year-round.
Either channel out a space to let sunlight in (roofing over it is preferred), or wall up a garden on the surface. Grow rope reeds. You can get seeds from the elves, or by gathering plants on the surface if they grow up there. Turn off cooking for rope reed seeds.

Farms. Turn on rope reed every season. Kids can do the harvesting, so you only need a few dedicated farmers. A 4x4 farm is probably enough to supply your rope reed needs. If you use pig tails, remember that you can only grow those two seasons out of the year, so you will want twice the farm plot space.

Build a farmer's workshop, for plant-processing. Put stockpiles for the rope reeds and the rope reed threads next to the workshops.

Thread goes to the loom. Auto-loom option should be turned on.

Cloth gets turned into the bare essentials: Tunic, trousers, socks. Make double as many socks. You do not need anything else, at least for the civilian dwarves. Add gloves to this lineup if you are worried about dwarves' hands getting in contact with contaminants (forgotten beast goo, for example); but gloves are not needed to prevent negative thoughts.

Don't bother with dyes unless you want your clothing to be worth more in trade. Dimple dye can be grown year-round. Grind at a quern or millstone; make sure you have bags to put the dye in. Dyer's workshop to dye. The only reason to dye cloth is to increase its value, presumably for export. This does bring in a little more when you trade away your worn clothes.

Elves will bring cloth if you have very little cloth on the map when their caravans arrive. You may also request it from the dwarven caravan.

Sell all old clothing to the caravans, or else atom-smash it. It's quicker than waiting for it to degrade in the refuse stockpile.

Goblin clothes will fit your dwarves. Human clothes will not. Just make sure your dwarves are not running out to claim the goblininte in the middle of a battle.

[Sutremaine]

Grow rope reeds. You can get seeds from the elves, or by gathering plants on the surface if they grow up there.

You need water for this. If you have willow trees on the map, they can be used as a guide because they also grow only around water.

Rope reeds are rare at embark even if you live in a swamp, partly due to their limited range and partly because above-ground plants have a low chance of giving any herbalist anything at all.

I generally find leatherworkers to be best in the long run. They can make armour for the adults not mining, woodcutting, or hunting, and clothing for everyone else. Armour does not rot, and while dwarves will continue to claim clothing they won't wear it out and get pissy about it. If you put every kind of leather at highest priority in the first autumn you'll have tons of it next year, just in time for the founders' clothing to start wearing out. Have lots of trade goods ready. 1000 units of leather cost rather a lot.

[megahelmet]

I prefer the overproduction method. With just everything set on repeat. Socks, dresses, trousers, mittens on repeat. With dyer's set on repeat, using only dyed cloth. Of course, this creates massive wealth which leads to bigger sieges. So I don't get the repeating part until about year 8 of a fortress.

[Vercingetorix]

I prefer the overproduction method. With just everything set on repeat. Socks, dresses, trousers, mittens on repeat. With dyer's set on repeat, using only dyed cloth. Of course, this creates massive wealth which leads to bigger sieges. So I don't get the repeating part until about year 8 of a fortress.

Basically this, the caravan often brings enough cloth by itself to keep a fort outfitted

I ended up building a clothier's shop for each article of clothing (plus leatherworkers' shops) and just kept them on repeat, varying based on type of cloth available.  Later I invested more in pig tails/looms to keep the industry going with more domestic supplies.  DFHack's workflow command is convenient because it keeps the suspended jobs protected.

[MOK]

Hm.  So some conclusions I'm coming away with are this:

1) Unless textiles are my money, don't dye; Dyed clothes do not make dwarves happy, and increases my threat.

2) Only bother with trousers/socks/tunics.  Other items do not make dwarves happy, nor serve a specific purpose, nor make other minor benefits.  The exception being gloves, to protect in case of handling badness.

3) Start making clothes early.  Start buying the supplies or growing them early.  Allow specialists to grow.

4) Armor could remove the clothes problem, but would require managing squads....  Something I can't stomach, unfortunately.

5) If Rope-reed growing is safe and available, it runs smoother than Pig-Tail.

6) If I have a surplus of everything, the workshops can stay on repeat forever.  I'll just need to cope with selling excess materials to caravans.  Relies on determining demand rates, though.


So whats eluding me now is the matter of stockpile organization.  How do you consolidate the crap clothes?   How do I keep them in their own location so that I can easily get them off dwarves, off the ground, into the stockpile, and onto the caravans?

[Oaktree]

If your domestic clothing is of decent quality you can separate your clothing stockpiles based on core quality.  Put the poor quality stuff near the Trade Depot and put the better quality stuff elsewhere.

For production I just have a large room - thread and cloth bins in the middle.
Clothiers to the north by the doors to the Trade Depot and clothing stockpiles - for moving clothes out and also grabbing clothes to sew images onto.
Dyer to the east with their own stockpile of dye.
Looms to the south - with the silk farm to the south of them
Processed thread is coming in from the west where the farmer workshops are located up a set of stairs.

[MOK]

Another thought I'm having is that it could be worthwhile to dump all of my clothes from my stocks menu, minus the ropereed/pigtail items that I've been producing.  If I start early.  This allows me to know roughly what everyone is wearing, and keep better track of my stocks.  It also might make the fps slightly better since that's a drastic amount of items i'd be removing from the game over the longterm.  Perhaps it could also cut down the rate of un-touchable garbage.

[Weylyn]

One thing I do to reduce clutter and overflow is to have my main clothing stockpile be marked as a refuse pile. Freshly produced clothing, about 10 of each type, gets saved in small stockpiles but everything that goes into the main pile will slowly rot away over time.

This means that my dwarves are constantly taking the freshly produced items and all of the old clothes and overflow get taken care of automatically.