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Author Topic: Can't make clothes from pig tail cloth ("need unused plant cloth")  (Read 9877 times)

Cyctemic

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Hello everyone,

I started DF about a week ago, and here comes the first issue the wiki did not solve... Textile industry.

So here is my production line :
Quote
10-square pig tail crop
- pig tail forbidden for brewing.
- pig tail stock : 31

Farmer's shop
- pig tail thread stock: 7

Loom
- auto-weaving activated
- pig tail cloth stock: 19

Clothier's shop
- not working

No dyer (yet)

I have someone for every job, namely grower, thresher, weaver, clothier. I produce cloth, but no clothes. The exact message I get is "Clothier cancels Make cloth <whatever clothes I ask>: Need 1 unused plant cloth". Which is nt exactly true, since I have 19 "pig tail cloth" in stock.

I have activated "Use any cloth" in the workshops orders. The choice is between"only dyed" or "any", so I assumed it rules wether or not dwarves can use undyed cloth to make clothing. Tell me if I'm wrong.

Thanks!

PS: English is not my native language... And I don't have a natural inclination toward language. So please excuse my mistakes ;)
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Bandreus

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Re: Can't make clothes from pig tail cloth ("need unused plant cloth")
« Reply #1 on: August 01, 2013, 06:26:34 pm »

Chances are all of your cloth is placed in a single bin. Clothier needs cloth, but a hauler is carrying the bin between the stockpile and the loom to store more cloth in the bin.

Try setting max bins to 0 in the cloth stockpile and see if that solves the issue
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Garath

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Re: Can't make clothes from pig tail cloth ("need unused plant cloth")
« Reply #2 on: August 02, 2013, 12:09:10 am »

if you have a hospital set up with storage, it can claim all the cloth as well
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Merendel

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Re: Can't make clothes from pig tail cloth ("need unused plant cloth")
« Reply #3 on: August 02, 2013, 12:26:28 am »

also check to make sure you dont have a stockpile linked to the workshop as that can cause issues aswell.
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AutomataKittay

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Re: Can't make clothes from pig tail cloth ("need unused plant cloth")
« Reply #4 on: August 02, 2013, 04:21:36 am »

Hospital can seize cloths if it's got boxes set up ( chest, bag, and suchlike ), or use them up to point that they're not usable for clothmaking to patch up dwarves. Have you had injuries among dwarves that need to be patched up?

It could be you've accidentally assigned stockpile that don't have any cloth yet to the clothmaker. Or dwarves are still hauling cloths around and it's not finished, which's much more of an issue with bins being moved back and forth.

As for your guessimation about dyed and any, you're right :D
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grody311

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Re: Can't make clothes from pig tail cloth ("need unused plant cloth")
« Reply #5 on: August 02, 2013, 04:35:36 am »

I had this same problem, and it turned out to be that the hospital was stealing every bit of cloth and thread in the entire fortress.

Even then, the clothier industry is very finicky.  To make a nice cloth shirt, you need a farmer to grow the crop, and then another one to thresh it, then a weaver to weave it, then finally a clothier to make the shirt.  If you want to dye it, you need a miller and dyer, too.  At any moment, for the most trivial of reasons (say, the cloth that the dyer wants to dye is currently being transported to some stockpile), any one of these workers will cancel their job and hold up the entire production line.

Compare this to the creation of a door, or traction table, or iron short sword; it's an incredible headache.  The only way I can deal with the clothing industry is to use dfhack's workflow to force these guys to make clothing no matter what, and turn off all job cancellation notices.  What a lot of other players do is make everyone join the military once, then have then wear mail shirts and leggings in place of clothing.  It's not pretty either way.
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AutomataKittay

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Re: Can't make clothes from pig tail cloth ("need unused plant cloth")
« Reply #6 on: August 02, 2013, 04:45:35 am »

I had this same problem, and it turned out to be that the hospital was stealing every bit of cloth and thread in the entire fortress.

Even then, the clothier industry is very finicky.  To make a nice cloth shirt, you need a farmer to grow the crop, and then another one to thresh it, then a weaver to weave it, then finally a clothier to make the shirt.  If you want to dye it, you need a miller and dyer, too.  At any moment, for the most trivial of reasons (say, the cloth that the dyer wants to dye is currently being transported to some stockpile), any one of these workers will cancel their job and hold up the entire production line.

Compare this to the creation of a door, or traction table, or iron short sword; it's an incredible headache.  The only way I can deal with the clothing industry is to use dfhack's workflow to force these guys to make clothing no matter what, and turn off all job cancellation notices.  What a lot of other players do is make everyone join the military once, then have then wear mail shirts and leggings in place of clothing.  It's not pretty either way.

I'd say traction benches are more of an headache for me than clothings, I uses managers to queue things up and ignore job cancellation. Traction benches need chain or rope, tables and mechanisms, which means I need clothing industrty or metalsmithing, a mechanics shop/forge for mechanism, and mason/carpenter/metalsmith for table and finally mechanics shop to put it all together. Clothing industry's relatively linear and straightforward in comparsion to me, a lot easier to arrange stockpile linkage for sure from farm > threasher > loom > clothier shop ( Dyeing don't really do much for dressing up and ropes with image on it are already absurdly valuable without it ).

Of course, it depends on fortress design and how stockpiles are set up as well as personal preference, metalworking industry in general is an headache for me and I usually uses leftover or junk cloth ropes to make traction benches since it only takes material value from the table :D

Though maybe I'm just used to it, really, it does depends on overseer's priority and designs.
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Bandreus

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Re: Can't make clothes from pig tail cloth ("need unused plant cloth")
« Reply #7 on: August 02, 2013, 04:56:36 am »

I had this same problem, and it turned out to be that the hospital was stealing every bit of cloth and thread in the entire fortress.

Even then, the clothier industry is very finicky.  To make a nice cloth shirt, you need a farmer to grow the crop, and then another one to thresh it, then a weaver to weave it, then finally a clothier to make the shirt.  If you want to dye it, you need a miller and dyer, too.  At any moment, for the most trivial of reasons (say, the cloth that the dyer wants to dye is currently being transported to some stockpile), any one of these workers will cancel their job and hold up the entire production line.

Compare this to the creation of a door, or traction table, or iron short sword; it's an incredible headache.  The only way I can deal with the clothing industry is to use dfhack's workflow to force these guys to make clothing no matter what, and turn off all job cancellation notices.  What a lot of other players do is make everyone join the military once, then have then wear mail shirts and leggings in place of clothing.  It's not pretty either way.

Well, you can make it way better though. I don't use workflow (in fact I pretty much play vanilla + various fixes to assorted bugs and therapist, that's pretty much it).

I.e. don't allow bins to be used on pigtails/ropereeds/thread/cloth stockpiles, unless you do have a huge amount of stuff which needs to be stockpiled. Most of the issues related to this industry is bins-related, and you are indeed not required to store everything into bins. Everything goes much more swiftly if you just don't make haulers carry around bins all the times causing cancellation spam.

I just let my stocks build up a bit before I start producing the next product in the pipeline, and even then I rarely put jobs on repeat. It takes quite a bit of experience and understanding your production-throughput in all points of the pipeline to finetune an industry this complicated to the point you can just have jobs on repeat without risking for things to go wrong. Well, that's in my experience, at least.

Given these 2 very simple tips, you can pretty much build things up (adding more plots, processors, weavers, dyers, clothiers, haulers) as you see fit.

Alternatively, if all you care is keeping your dwarves from going around the fort while naked, you can just ditch the industry as a whole. Caravans will bring plenty of cloth/leather for you to shortcut the most tedious parts of cloths making.

I had this same problem, and it turned out to be that the hospital was stealing every bit of cloth and thread in the entire fortress.

Even then, the clothier industry is very finicky.  To make a nice cloth shirt, you need a farmer to grow the crop, and then another one to thresh it, then a weaver to weave it, then finally a clothier to make the shirt.  If you want to dye it, you need a miller and dyer, too.  At any moment, for the most trivial of reasons (say, the cloth that the dyer wants to dye is currently being transported to some stockpile), any one of these workers will cancel their job and hold up the entire production line.

Compare this to the creation of a door, or traction table, or iron short sword; it's an incredible headache.  The only way I can deal with the clothing industry is to use dfhack's workflow to force these guys to make clothing no matter what, and turn off all job cancellation notices.  What a lot of other players do is make everyone join the military once, then have then wear mail shirts and leggings in place of clothing.  It's not pretty either way.

I'd say traction benches are more of an headache for me than clothings, I uses managers to queue things up and ignore job cancellation. Traction benches need chain or rope, tables and mechanisms, which means I need clothing industrty or metalsmithing, a mechanics shop/forge for mechanism, and mason/carpenter/metalsmith for table and finally mechanics shop to put it all together. Clothing industry's relatively linear and straightforward in comparsion to me, a lot easier to arrange stockpile linkage for sure from farm > threasher > loom > clothier shop ( Dyeing don't really do much for dressing up and ropes with image on it are already absurdly valuable without it ).

Of course, it depends on fortress design and how stockpiles are set up as well as personal preference, metalworking industry in general is an headache for me and I usually uses leftover or junk cloth ropes to make traction benches since it only takes material value from the table :D

Though maybe I'm just used to it, really, it does depends on overseer's priority and designs.

I don't usually even bother producing ropes/chains for traction benches. I just buy whatever junk-rope I can from caravans and use those in benches and as restrains. Now, if I want to build an awesome well, I would actually take the time to have a masterful steel chain, encrusted with gems or something.
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Cyctemic

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Re: Can't make clothes from pig tail cloth ("need unused plant cloth")
« Reply #8 on: August 03, 2013, 10:08:38 am »

It was the hospital indeed... I fixed that and it's better now. If I may, I have another question... Can I have my production automated without producing only one type of clothing ?
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Deepblade

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Re: Can't make clothes from pig tail cloth ("need unused plant cloth")
« Reply #9 on: August 03, 2013, 10:14:24 am »

using DFhack's "workflow" I believe you can automate it. I've not used it myself, but I know people have used it to automate brewing.
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AutomataKittay

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Re: Can't make clothes from pig tail cloth ("need unused plant cloth")
« Reply #10 on: August 03, 2013, 10:17:57 am »

It was the hospital indeed... I fixed that and it's better now. If I may, I have another question... Can I have my production automated without producing only one type of clothing ?

If your farm's making enough fiber plants to outpace the rest of production, then yeah in theory you could just using Repeat production in clothier and farmer's workshop. Though that'd end up with mountains of clothings to deal with, too much clutter for practical use.

I just uses manager to order a batch of sock, trousers and dresses every year or so and have a farm plot pernamently set to grow the fiber plant as often as it can.

Doing it like I do, I can just set the farmer's workshop to process plant and let them run until it runs out ( sometimes it can't with enough farmer planting pig tails, rope reed's slightly better for constant production ) and loom automatically put it together into cloth, and clothier takes the cloth whenever I have the manager set up a batch of orders.

It's not really automatic, but if you're selling worn clothings, you can see how much you have left anyway and order up a batch when you runs low.
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