Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[ResMar]

I mean, on the ten-to-one, mining to fish dissection scale of uselessness potash making might clock in at a 4 - not at all necessary, but mildly useful busy work for a dwarf skilled in it. If more realistic farming is ever implemented into the game they might even become essential (gasp!). I dunno, I just stopped to think about it and realized that, hey, I actually kind of like getting some crap Potash Maker wave three.

[SixOfSpades]

I am currently feeding a population of 184 dwarves off of a single 6x6 farm plot which is deliberately left fallow half the year. Granted, I still have a huge surplus of meat left over from slaughtering all of my livestock, and I do have the Herbalists do their thing every once in a while, but come on. There is (currently) absolutely ZERO reason to make regular, unfertilized farming any more productive.

[WanderingKid]

Personally Potash is useless for two reasons.  One, it eats wood.  Depending on your embark, wood may not be a simple thing to get.  Two, my farms are rediculously prosperous without any form of fertilization.

Add that to a few of the stack bugs that exist and larger stacks aren't necessarily helpful, though usually they would be.  I'm currently drowning in seeds, inundated in plants, and swimming in booze/food stocks.  Keeping up the supply of potash for my 12 3x3 farms (6 above 6 below ground) each season would not only obliterate my wood supplies, but be absolutely pointless anyway.  The caravans already know when they come to AdmiredMansions, they're about to pick up the worlds most amazing and varied roasts known to mankind, and I'm going to buy them out if I so choose, because the profit's just too good.

[Aviator CJ]

Personally, I only use potash for pearlash, for clear glass. Otherwise, I have no need for it - farms are simply productive enough on their own.

[malimbar04]

potash is a multiplier of a resources that's already in abundance. It's like... imagine you had a way to clean air in small quantities. Say you had a hand-crank operated air filter. buy an air filter and hire a guy to crank it in your house. It's about that useful.

I suppose if you have excess wood and want to make 5000 quarry bushes a year for some reason, by all means do it. Some dwarves are sent to operate empty pumps for seasons just to kepe them busy, so why not make potash instead?

[Tevish Szat]

They're an essential part of the Clear Glass industry, which is really great for megaprojects: glass is a reliable source of infinite building blocks (you can farm obsidian but it's harder and gets you random yield), and clear is far fancier than green.  I mean, who wants their giant tower glimmering in the sunlight like a low-quality bottle?  No, I want the tip of my pyramid of doom to fry goblins like ants under a magnifying glass.

[0cu]

They are not useless, they make great haulers.

[Splint]

They are not useless, they make great haulers.

They also make great militia recruits and dorfs to take care of odd jobs.

Personally I never have need of more than one for specific tasks (namely making clear and crystal glass.)

Now if you decide to play a mod like Corrosion or Underhive, they become considerable more useful if you have the wood to make fertilizer with.

[IcyTea31]

While potash has it's uses, the problem is that being skilled in Potash Making doesn't make the potash any better. A dwarf with only skill in Potash Making is essentially an unskilled dwarf.

[itg]

If you ever try to build a megaproject out of clear glass (or potash, for that matter), you'll be glad you got those potash makers. That's the only time you'll be making enough potash for you to care about the difference in work speed.

[AutomataKittay]

While I don't consider any dwarves useless in practice, I does get annoyed by skilled migrants coming in regardless of type. I like my hauler to be all unskilled peasants, but that takes a few years for skill to rust down to that level

Heck, I usually considers metalsmiths useless for anything but hauling since sometimes I get too many of them without any metal industry. Potash and soap makers just happen to be the most frequent since I do runs somewhat large farm to feed cloth industry. I sometimes turn them into farmer just so color matches and for more hands in the field. I like to homegrow my professionals or convert them from another that have some skills that's not in demand.

[KingBacon]

And they make good magma tube tappers, don't forget about that.

[sackhead]

they can be usefull if you want to get more seeds quickly. more plants produced= more seeds.
handy if you want to start growing crops from wild sources or traders

[Tirion]

I usually play Genesis mod, where (and I'm fairly certain in other mods too) ash can be made from cremating remains and body parts, eliminating the need to burn wood for that. Still, I rarely use them for anything other than recruits or haulers- clear or crystal glass is rarely worth the trouble, imho.

[BoredVirulence]

I embarked with 500 dwarves. Even with the absurd amount of food and booze I embarked with, it only lasted a season. Now feeding them has become a nightmare. I've fished the swamps clean, I've cleared the surface of plants, and I have 8 10x10 plots (not quite working to full potential) and I still can't keep up. In this instance, potash is helpful. The problem is I don't have enough seeds to fully utilize my plots, so larger stacks of plants will get me there faster. Of course, once I get my farms working to full potential, I won't need potash makers.

Of course I might not have a problem if someone hadn't misplaced the plump helmet spawn. We could use a purple flood to cascade over my hapless starving dwarves...