@Defavlt Thanks! I'll keep that in mind.
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In terms of burrows, I use them for everything, and uh have learned a fair deal about them.
The fortress has always had a home burrow since the dwarves made it underground.
I don't assign the dwarves to it individually for a few different reasons, mostly sort of bugs I suppose (?):
- Dwarves that die assigned to a burrow aren't removed from the burrow assignment which throws the #s off
- There's a lot of job cancellation spam that happens when dwarves are assigned to burrows. It seems like if a dwarf can't get from point a -> b (say a locked door is in the way) they just silently ignore the job. But if that job is outside of their burrow they cancel it loudly and before checking for the path or something. So anytime I have dwarves in a burrow they job cancel spam a lot.
- It's just a pain to get them to work in new areas or mine if you have to keep expanding out the burrow. Then if you do the home burrow loses it's defensive properties and it's hard to react to disasters
So what I do instead with Home is just use civ alerts to put dwarves in it. If the doors are unlocked to lure in undead I throw the Home civ alert on.
I also have a few other burrows that I added later, one for the entrance ramp area that the undead wander down, one for the unprotected cavern 1 layers so dwarves could go harvest there, and one for the aquifer breach structure for dwarves to work there safely. The same applies here where I'll add multiple burrows to the civ alert to define the working zones.
Now the dwarves on the surface (the starting seasons and all migrants) are a completely different story. As much as I can and need to I manipulate where they go and stand using burrows and defining meeting zones. I use that to hurry dwarves off to this or that point of the map to keep them safe. It's worth noting that dwarves are a bit... fussy... about travelling around to burrows. Sometimes they'll make a point of idling in the proper places, but other times dwarves won't move into burrows, they'll only look for work in their defined burrows and only move around if there's something for them to do in the new burrow or new burrow bounds. It's possible it has something to do with being assigned to a burrow vs a Civ Alert for that burrow. As you may guess the whole process isn't perfect, but it does help a bit to usher dwarves around.