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[Revenant342]

I've noticed much less stone/ore/etc getting left behind by my miners in DF2014.  In the previous version, once my miners hit Legendary I'd get a boulder from almost every tile excavated.  Now it's like 1 in 8.  Is this intended?  While I certainly don't mind not having to dump thousands of boulders of waste stone, I am concerned about my ores.  I've got a megaproject requiring a LOT of steel, and while iron's always free because of goblinite, I only have a few hundred tiles of flux stone.  Same goes for silver for bolts, used to crank them out by the thousands but now the 4 magma smelters I used to have going around-the-clock to keep up with my miners are constantly starving for ore. 

[blue emu]

You now get several (four?) bars of metal from each unit of ore.

[Revenant342]

Oh, okay.  That's actually pretty convenient.  Noticed that rocks blocks have a higher yield, too!

[MDFification]

Oh, okay.  That's actually pretty convenient.  Noticed that rocks blocks have a higher yield, too!

Higher yields + less actual stone/ore drops is good for the FPS. In previous versions you got 1 stone per tile mined, which basically meant that stone stockpiling would be constantly running even if you hadn't mined in years.

[Corona688]

In some ways stone stockpiling has gotten worse;  an unaided dwarf will now move stones at the same rate they would a pregnant hippopotamus.  Wheelbarrows help a LOT but have their own issues too -- three per stockpile max, for one thing.  So keep your stone stockpiles small, or you'll have 30 dwarves hauling one stone each all week, after which they'll immediately go eat, drink, and break for the season.  And no matter what you do you'll sometimes have dwarves going 87 z-levels down to fetch stone #87, instead of grabbing stone #88 from 3 tiles away.

It's also an incentive to make blocks, which are light enough for dwarves to move easily, and/or build minecart arrangements to efficiently shuttle things around.

[TheKaspa]

I use dfhack to assign 10 wheelbarrows for critical stockpiles like the mineral ore ones.
I start with a small stockpile for tethrahedrite, that I then smelt for getting enough copper for the wheelbarrows. I then design a bigger stockpile for general mineral ores with 10 WB, and smaller ones around smelters.

[Corona688]

What's wrong with wood wheelbarrows?

[Eldin00]

For someone coming from the older versions, it's worthwhile to note that stone drops are no longer tied to the miner's skill. A dabbling miner will produce just as much stone/ore as a legendary one, so no need to be careful about which of your miners goes after the valuable ore veins.

[Corona688]

I think ore and gems always drop 100%, too.

[Pirate Bob]

I think ore and gems always drop 100%, too.

Gems drop 100%, not ore.  Ore drops are usually 33%, with some exceptions.

See the wiki for details.  This section also explains the changes from previous versions.  The wiki for Dwarf Fortress is generally fantastic, especially considering the game is under constant development.

[TheKaspa]

What's wrong with wood wheelbarrows?

Nothing. But I do not like to waste wood.

[Revenant342]

It's funny, because wood always used to be a bottleneck for me in the older versions, but now I have literally more than I know what to do with just from clearing the way for a road.

[Corona688]

It's a hard habit to get out of.  You used to get one unit of charcoal from an entire tree!  But, even cutting sparingly in a sparse biome, avoiding fruit trees, I now have enough wood to make tables and chairs for 7, doors for 25, tons of bins and wheelbarrows, with leftovers to burn to make a full set of steel.  I didn't even bother having stone furniture until my third migrant wave, and thereafter, whenever dwarves are sitting around bored, felling one tree is a good way to get 30 idlers doing something.

In short, wood furniture can be a decent early strategy now.  It frees up a dwarf from masonry to do something profitable.

[TheKaspa]

This is quite true, but I do not like to have dwarves outside the fort, and I want to keep a decent stockpile for making charcoal during sieges, so...

[Putnam]

In the previous version, once my miners hit Legendary I'd get a boulder from almost every tile excavated.

Not sure which "previous version" you played, since that was changed in 0.34.08.