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[gonadsteadyblade]

so ive been playing dwarf fortress for about 2 years, and i am currently invested in a fortress 14 years game time in the making. recently i decided that for 13 years, my fortress was not very impressive, so i began a series of large excavations to adjust for the higher population cap i had set and more extravagant standards of living overall, after completing one of these projects of roughly 100 blocks, my miner efficiency went down the drain. if i can get them to mine any sized designation within two seasons of assigning it its a freakin miracle, on top of the fact that anything beyond a designation that can be finished in a single go will never ever ever be dug out, i had the second large excavation designated since year 13 when i made this descision i am now in the winter of year 14 and they are yet to start the dig. suggestions? mods? known bugs?

[Raphite1]

What are they doing instead of mining? Just standing idle?

[gonadsteadyblade]

they stand idle, and have "no job" specified under jobs, i have tried adding the mining profession to roughly half my population, with picks galore, as well as removing all other labors besides mining from my professional miners. they also randomly take interest in small digging projects, doing an arbitrary (and useless) amount of an arbitrary designation. but that has only occured twice since they started failing

[xcorps]

Apologies if you already know this, but I've found that excavating large areas is much faster if you dig the area out in 1 tile very long tunnels that skip every other tile, then go back and mass designate the remaining walls.

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If you have 10 miners, then designate 10 tunnels. They stay focused in their own tunnels, and then rapidly cut down the remaining walls with a mass designate.

[LMeire]

If they have "No Job" specifically, and not "Break", "Rest", etc. then the problem is probably an issue with having no jobs accessible. You might want to check if you've designated the stairs correctly, and possibly widen the tunnels so more than one dwarf can work on a tunnel at a time.

[Blue_Dwarf]

There must be something wrong with your game, because mine has no such problem at all.

Perhaps a better description would make it easier to understand what's going on. Do you have mining picks? Are labors assigned correctly? Are any miner dwarves assigned to the military?

edit: ok you think you "have" enough mining picks  , but that needs checking more thoroughly. Do your miner dwarves carry them in their inventories? If not, do they have access to them (no stair removed, no burrow restriction)? Any civilian alerts restricting their pathing? Same with the areas you need mined.

[Sutremaine]

Once you've solved the initial 'no job' problem, you can set up a dining room plus some beds and a supply of food and drink and then lock the miners in with the job. They're absolute buggers for getting thirsty on the way to a dig and going for a drink after mining one tile, then getting hungry on their next trip to the dig and running off after mining one tile, and so on... You can use burrows to keep the miners in place, but picking them off the list is a pain in the butt.

[Garath]

1. Designating large areas for mining can destroy your fps. Nothing much may seem to be happening because everything is going very slow.

2. many, many miners can be slowing things down instead of speeding things up. A miner hacks away a wall and instead of taking a second to think and continuing on, another miner picks up the job, a miner that has to walk from the other side of the fortress all the way to the site, meanwhile, miner #1 goes on a much deserved break. All probably very slowly because of issue 1.

[gonadsteadyblade]

they all have picks in inventory and i don't really use burrows or civillian routes to control my dwarves, ands its not so much that they are behaving inefficiently, its as if they have no labors at all, at any given time the same 5 miners will be at the top of the no jobs section of my job list. and regardless of how much i request them to dig or what it is i request, they will stay there doing nothing. i can occasional get the inexperienced dwarves that isn't a "miner" to dig a few blocks but nothing substantial

[gonadsteadyblade]

but again its nothing im doing to get them to mine other then designating a mining section, i just happen to notice that it is primarily none miners doing the small amount of digging that has gotten done since this bug started happening

[WoobMonkey]

Sounds suspiciously like a pathing problem.  Are you completely positive you're not missing a staircase?  Have you recently designated a large section of 'remove ramps/staircases'?  I know there have been plenty of times when I've mistakenly removed stairs when flattening ramps, by designating an area that included my main stairwell/shaft.

An easy way to test is to attempt to build a wall in the same area - can your masons access it?  If not, the problem is probably that nobody can get there to do any jobs at all.

If your masons can, however, would you be so kind as to u/l a save to DFFD, so it can be verified?

[vanatteveldt]

Well they can be pretty inefficient sometimes at deciding which tile to mine next. For example, if you are channeling a moat around an area, a miner can decide to do tile 1 of the N channel, then  hike south to do tile 1 of the S channel, hike back north for the second tile of the N channel, etc. If you have multiple miners sometimes miner #1 can dig three tiles in a corridor, then the next job goes to miner #2, who needs to walk all the way down, and miner #1 (who by this time is back in the main fortress) gets the tile after that, etc. They also have the annoying tendency to leave a couple tiles standing in a room and then move on to the next one, forcing you either to designate rooms one by one, wait longer, or make a temporary burrow to get someone over there to finish the job.