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[Descan]

Two suggestions, or I suppose three, that me and Owlbread kind of bandied about.

One is the idea of updating the kitchen screen to specify to your dwarves to continuously brew and/or cook a specific food-stuff. Right now you can tell them to brew or not brew, cook or not cook, a specific type of food, but you still must go to the still or the job manager and line up the jobs. The issue there is that if they run out of barrels or food-stuff, they stop and the job cancels from the still, and the job manager only allows up to 30 items per job. So either you must continuously go into the manager to re-allocate the jobs, or your job manager is clogged with like 15 different brew jobs, that you still have to eventually re-allocate. By telling your dwarves to just brew all of a specific food-stuff as soon as any is available, they'll be able to do so without needing to constantly make sure you actually have the jobs allocated.

The other idea is a sort of mix of two ideas. Right now you can specify stockpiles to hold a certain TYPE of item, but if that item is strewn about your fortress, then if you have  specific area you want to clean up you need to use the dump command. I would much prefer being able to select a sort of "grab item" designation from specific stockpiles, and thereby select specific items to go into that stockpile. Such as wanting to clean your just-dug dining hall of stone, you can go to your masons stockpile, select the designation, and select all the stone in your would-be dining hall to be hauled first, without having to use the kind of vulgar "one tile garbage dump, then reclaim" method of specific-area cleaning.

Connected to that idea is the idea of specifying items like wood or stone in a stockpile to be used for a single purpose, such as "All wood in this stockpile goes towards bins" or "All stone in here is to be used for blocks." This way, you can make sure your dwarves will use the specific material you want them to use for your purpose. Whether the dwarves would continuously create those items until the stockpile is empty or you would have to tell them to build a specific number of bins or blocks before they use the priority stockpile is another thing to wonder about.

These suggestions are almost purely about stream-lining some (to me) tedious aspects of fort control, as well as giving some more robust storage and stockpile abilities than just "these types of items only" and "these workshops use this stockpile only." Good tools, of course, but they can only go so far.

[Owlbread]

Connected to that idea is the idea of specifying items like wood or stone in a stockpile to be used for a single purpose, such as "All wood in this stockpile goes towards bins" or "All stone in here is to be used for blocks." This way, you can make sure your dwarves will use the specific material you want them to use for your purpose. Whether the dwarves would continuously create those items until the stockpile is empty or you would have to tell them to build a specific number of bins or blocks before they use the priority stockpile is another thing to wonder about.

This could be particularly useful if a fortress uses produce for a variety of purposes. One example would be plump helmets that can be either brewed into alcohol or eaten. It makes sense to have two separate plump helmet stockpiles; one for brewing, one for eating. Dwarves should not take plump helmets from the brewing stockpile and eat them, or cook them or whatever.

You could say that this idea of "stockpiles for a purpose" could get around some of the problems we have around making sure Dwarves like masons use the stone we want and so on. At least until we can actually choose that from the workshop menu.

[breadman]

One is the idea of updating the kitchen screen to specify to your dwarves to continuously brew and/or cook a specific food-stuff.

This overlaps with the workshop toggle "Wait" thread.  That thread asks for the ability to have any workshop job remain in a semi-suspended state until materials become available again, instead of being removed from the list.  Granted, that would resume brewing/cooking whenever anything is available, instead of the items of your choice, unless the workshop is linked to an input stockpile.

Alternatively, the stockflow system can be used to enqueue cooking/brewing manager orders whenever you have foodstuffs in a particular stockpile.

Connected to that idea is the idea of specifying items like wood or stone in a stockpile to be used for a single purpose, such as "All wood in this stockpile goes towards bins" or "All stone in here is to be used for blocks."

This can also be implemented with the proposed workshop job toggle, at the cost of a dedicated workshop for each such designation.  That way, you can even specify up to ten jobs that the stockpiled items can be used for.

[Loci]

Right now you can specify stockpiles to hold a certain TYPE of item, but if that item is strewn about your fortress, then if you have  specific area you want to clean up you need to use the dump command. I would much prefer being able to select a sort of "grab item" designation from specific stockpiles, and thereby select specific items to go into that stockpile. Such as wanting to clean your just-dug dining hall of stone, you can go to your masons stockpile, select the designation, and select all the stone in your would-be dining hall to be hauled first, without having to use the kind of vulgar "one tile garbage dump, then reclaim" method of specific-area cleaning.

Create a new stockpile over the items-to-be-moved, and set it to "give" to the destination pile. You can use a no-item-accepted custom stockpile, or something like "coins" which is unused. This won't work for items in buildings, or items that can't be stockpiled, but for the most part it'll get your dwarves to clear the items away without using the dump command you dislike.

[Descan]

Okay that's one way to do it, but it's still a *workaround* for something that seems pretty obvious, a "clean up this area and put it over there" command.

My dislike isn't for the dump command per se, it's for the necessity of a work-around instead of a simple way to tell your dwarves to prioritize the items in a specific section when filling a stockpile.