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[Catsup]

my dwarves keep going into the same square when collecting sand or clay, even if the collection zone has more than 1 square designated. I've try to split the bigger zones into 1x1 smaller ones but that does not seem to work either. Is there anyway to get dwarfs to collect sand and clay efficiently so they dont go on top of each other and slow each other down?

[Garath]

I don't think it's really possible. Have you tried to make two kilns on opposite sides? do they still go to the same place? it's a bit annoying, but I don't recall a solution tbh

[Catsup]

I don't think it's really possible. Have you tried to make two kilns on opposite sides? do they still go to the same place? it's a bit annoying, but I don't recall a solution tbh

i have my collection kilns (normal kilms) in the Z level below my second cavern's forgotten beast traps (far from the fire clay above my aquifier). Apparently dwarves dont actually need to go to the kiln to collect clay, kilns are just needed to generate the "collect clay" job. So i dont think placing kilns on different sides of the collection zone works.

[Starver]

Burrows?  One for each collector, covering one/some/all of the base workshops, but exactly one collection zone tile per burrow.  Ideally unshared with any other collection-burrow, but equally distributed if you still need to double/triple up for some reason.

Needs an amount of micromangement.  But then so does anything good, in my experience.

[lwCoyote]

Related, I've noticed my fisherdwarves in my current vanilla fortress does the same thing.. I've got a huge fishing area along a river, but they all go to the same one. Grr!

[Catsup]

Burrows?  One for each collector, covering one/some/all of the base workshops, but exactly one collection zone tile per burrow.  Ideally unshared with any other collection-burrow, but equally distributed if you still need to double/triple up for some reason.

Needs an amount of micromangement.  But then so does anything good, in my experience.

not worth it, my fort has the population cap removed for a reason. I try to make everything as efficient as possible, but also so that almost no micromanagement is required. Assigning a burrow is also troublesome since i dont name specific dwarves as collectors, i just get the peasants to do it and it could be any of them.

[zooeyglass]

Catsup, how many glass workshops do you have? How many collect sand jobs can be active at any given point? Fewer workshops would mean fewer active jobs at any time, which would save you some traffic jams (but slow down the collection).

Likewise kilns.

[Catsup]

Catsup, how many glass workshops do you have? How many collect sand jobs can be active at any given point? Fewer workshops would mean fewer active jobs at any time, which would save you some traffic jams (but slow down the collection).

Likewise kilns.

unfortunately, im running a bit low on stone, and am not planning to farm obsidian because messing with liquids tend to kill fps in my fort. So im having my glass maker make all the cabinets, chests, and doors for my fort and have about 10 normal glass furnances giving collect sand jobs. I cant afford to limit collection because it usually takes at least 5 active collectors to keep up with my +5 legendary glassmaker. Im also trying to keep only masterworks and exporting everything else, so i need to have a very high production.

[zooeyglass]

Ah, ok. Well, one possible alternative is to queue an equal number of collect sand jobs with every queue for box/cabinet/portal. So job manager reads:
collect sand 30/30
make green glass box 30/30
collect sand 30/30
make green glass cabinet.
etc
etc

That's how I do it, because then I know I've collected the right amount of sand for each job. I use three glass furnaces, 1 legendary glassmaker, and only ever have a few idlers. Just a thought, rather than having 10 on the job at any one time.

[Catsup]

thing is though, the rate of sand collection is slower than the rate my glass maker produces items. My glass maker literally has to take 1 step away from the furnace, grab 1 sand bag from the quantum stockpile, walk back 1 step, and its finished, and then repeat. My sand collection zone is 2x2 grated cavern floor also very close to the previous mentioned quantum stockpile (cavern plants yield the biome's soil type in caverns when cleared, and im in a desert). But even so, my collectors still need to take several steps, collect, then several steps back and store it in the normal stockpile, and then the quantum stockpile; at which time my glass maker would have finished 4-5 items if he'd been working non-stop.

[laularukyrumo]

Solution: don't use the manager. Go directly into the glass furnace's task list from the Q menu, order up a repeating sand collection task, followed by a repeating item production task. Whoever goes to work there will alternate between the two.

As far as your original question, I've found that the pathfinding for dwarves will go to seek out the topleft-most sand tile on the highest z-level designated for sand collection, no matter what you do, because an unlimited number of creatures can technically occupy the same tile as long as some are lying down, and the game uses a brute-force algorithm that fails to consider the fact that you might want guys in different locations to improve speed. Even designating multiple 1x1 activity zones won't help.

[Schmlok]

Is there some way to build a line of hallways over the collection area, then use doors and pressure plates to seal each one off the entrance and opening the back which goes to a sealed stockpile for sand which would hit a pressure plate right after its out, reversing the doors? 

Forgive the inacurate ascii, I haven't played with it in forever.  This also may not work, have not tested. O-P-G-C-P-SS-O   Opendoor Plate Gather Closedoor Plate Stockpile Opendoor. (maybe use one single column gather area for a set of these to prevent cancellations)

dwarf walks in to gather, steps on plate, finishes gather, only job is to haul since he's sealed in, haul, on way to haul: doors switch and open exit, set stockpile to send elsewhere, make a bunch of rows of them.


Does stacking actually affect gather rate?

[laularukyrumo]

It does, because the dwarves lying down have a lower speed.

[Starver]

Burrows?  One for each collector, covering one/some/all of the base workshops, but exactly one collection zone tile per burrow.  Ideally unshared with any other collection-burrow, but equally distributed if you still need to double/triple up for some reason.

Needs an amount of micromangement.  But then so does anything good, in my experience.

not worth it, my fort has the population cap removed for a reason. I try to make everything as efficient as possible, but also so that almost no micromanagement is required. Assigning a burrow is also troublesome since i dont name specific dwarves as collectors, i just get the peasants to do it and it could be any of them.

I have a 300-plus fort, at the moment (including sprogs and babbies).  I also nickname every adult, and already maintain (without any clue from the nicknames) a "Crèche" burrow for the females (originally just mothers, but I extended it at one point, rather than reacting to births and weanings) and children that is a 'safer' subset of the more general restricting burrow[1].

Even if I did have more than a couple of peasants (the ones I have are immigrant children now grown-up) I could probably spend less effort than I already have done to make a set of peasant/collection burrows and assign (say) a dozen burrows with two or three individuals per... and remove them from their current "macro"-burrow[2].


However, you have your approach.  I probably admire you more for working without micromanagement, even though that's my default 'mode' most of the time (witness also my probably not unrelated footnote fetish) the game on pause while I'm fiddling with things.


[1] Deemed necessary because of the long strip of Acrid Rain biome along one edge, which tends to blister those that wander through it (or encounter any traipsed-in gunk, from the feet of immigrants/invaders/merchants, which I can't do much about).  Seemed easier to assign everyone not otherwise burrowed to a burrow that excluded the gunk-laiden area.  This is a peacetime burrow, as I;ve never even meshed any alert mode with burrows, like apparently you're supposed to.

[2] On top of the aforementioned general "everywhere but where the acrid gunk is" burrow and the "crèche" one[3], I have a number of miner-orientated burrows. Miners (I have five of them, at the moment, my original two and three sufficiently skilled immigrants that I gained) are assigned to one or more of these, sometimes shared and sometimes just for themselves.  This way I can keep my "exploration/expansion" digging plans on track for at least one of the miners, whilst still able to assign out the others to "infrastructure" digging projects (at the moment, mostly digging out large voids that are part of the megaproject, but has also been a matter of digging out the necessary bedroom areas when I was still not able to accommodate all the new immigrants...).  Adding and removing dwarves from burrows isn't easy (I'd like a DwarfTherapist-like grid representation, ideally, to give me the ability to review that everyone was burrowed and every burrow I cared about had someone in it), but with practice it's pretty autonomous.

[3] Which is designed to prevent nursing mothers (and free-roaming kids) from being anywhere beyond the pretty heavily patrolled choke-point beyond which no snatcher should be able to reach.

[Catsup]

Solution: don't use the manager. Go directly into the glass furnace's task list from the Q menu, order up a repeating sand collection task, followed by a repeating item production task. Whoever goes to work there will alternate between the two.

this is what i already do by default, i manually queue repeats on both collection and the magma glass furnace.


and @ starver

my forts cap is set to 450 though i've actually yet to get that many. My fort is surrounded by a haunted biome with some of the middle part being wilderness. Undead ponies that can kill through steel helmets occasionally wander the surface in groups, but the real danger is the evil weather fog that turns anything caught in it into a husk. Still though, i dont use burrows save for getting everyone inside during a siege because i simply avoid the surface most of the time and monitor my dwarves when their wood cutting or plant gathering.

all of my peasants have both wood cutting and plant gathering enabled so i can quickly storm the surface when there is no evil weather to strip a section of it bare, before looting and going back to cover.

As for mothers and children, i treat female dwarves the same as males, no exceptions. When i have more children than i need to do the harvesting they are sent to my child-smasher and slabbed before the ghost appears. In my current forts though, the cases of children being "spirited away" are fewer because i set the child cap lower, and i only resort to smashing if there really is a uncontrolled child-splosion.