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[vexxice]

I have a fortress with about 142 dwarves right now. I have plenty of food and drink supplies (for once). I lost my last fort to a tantrum spiral caused by nudity, so I am worried about keeping 140-ish dwarves fully clothed. Do i really have to make: left gloves, right gloves, left socks, right socks, left shoes, right shoes, trousers, and tunics for every dwarf? If I do the math thats over 1100 articles of clothing I have to create. And sometimes dwarves pick up new clothes even though their old clothes are fine. AND THEY LEAVE THEIR OLD CLOTHES EVERYWHERE.

Basically, I do not know what I am doing.
I need help. ANY kind of help is appreciated.

[PatrikLundell]

Clothing is a mess.

Drastic solution:
- Draft everyone except miners, hunters, and woodcutters (these professions have clashing "invisible" uniforms) into militia squads that are neither given a training schedule nor anywhere to train and give them a uniform that replaces clothing. The uniform should probably be based on leather and bone, to keep the weight down (and thus the mobility reduction). Make sure you have all the uniform items for a squad before you create it, though, since they'd otherwise strip and be unhappy due to nudity. Since armor doesn't wear, this is a one time effort.

"Normal" solution:
- Set up a high production clothing industry that's capable of producing a full set of clothing for everyone every two years (possibly excluding the militia, due to the uniform perk). There are 10 clothing items I produce per dorf, nicely filling the clothier workshop queue (I guess you could also use the manager).
Since all civs don't have access to all items, you sometimes have to make do with something else than the stuff you usually use.
Every summer I go through the cabinets of every dorf to confiscate all worn clothing stored there by 'd'umping them. There is a DFHack function that either dump or destroys old clothing (not sure which, and whether it marks for hauling or teleports), but I haven't tried that one. Dumped clothing are then unforbidden periodically and hauled to an inferior quality clothing stockpile by the trade depot, and the inferior stuff is then palmed off to ecstatic traders for disposal (I only put masterworks quality in my main clothing stockpile. Given the volume produced, the clothier skill increases quickly).

[Daris]

All you need to cover is upper body, lower body, and feet.  There are a number of options to achieve this that don't involve thousands of items of clothing.  Covering every inch of skin helps fend off syndromes, but your dwarves won't fret if they don't have gloves.

DFHack's cleanowned command strips ownership of items and marks them for dumping.  You can specify what you want confiscated by the argument.  What I run is "cleanowned X" which removes items with wear of X from circulation.  Mark a dumping zone over a refuse stockpile to have the extraneous items disappear within a month or so of game time.

[vexxice]

DFHack's cleanowned command strips ownership of items and marks them for dumping.  You can specify what you want confiscated by the argument.  What I run is "cleanowned X" which removes items with wear of X from circulation.  Mark a dumping zone over a refuse stockpile to have the extraneous items disappear within a month or so of game time.

Does the "cleanowned X" command dump currently worn clothes that have X wear, or only ones lying around?

[Daris]

It strips ownership and marks for dumping all OWNED items with X wear, regardless of where they are located.  Unowned items have to be marked separately (through the stocks menu for instance).

There is another argument, "scattered," which picks up all items laying around on the floor.  I don't personally use it because I don't care if stuff is on the floor - I rarely see food on the floor, for instance - and the stuff on the floor is frequently unworn or at x wear.

I personally like to keep my dwarves in cloaks, hoods, shirts, trousers, socks, shoes and gloves, but you can omit everything but shirts, trousers and shoes, and you can easily swap out robes or dresses for shirts and trousers, leaving you with only robes and shoes as your necessaries.  It's a matter of personal preference/paranoia.

[Goatmaan]

I have a large fort currently with 544 adults/121 children to keep clothed, so ill mention a few things.
First I could not manage without the "workflow" plugin. Truly an Armok send.
second cloth plants need a farmers workshop (process plants) , and dwarfs with plant processing. This skill raises very slowly!! So be prepared.
spin thread is for sheared animal hair(yarn) skill also raises slow
Good stockpile management is needed.
If you decide to make anything out of leather, start buying it now. You cannot have too much leather!!
 Think you've got XXsocksXX?? I've got x*socks*x, Holy Armok, have I got x*socks*x!!!

  Goatmaan

[PatrikLundell]

A silk farm should provide sufficient silk to keep a fortress clothed, while producing leather as the only source of clothing probably is impossible (5 animals per dorf and year with 10 items of clothing), and besides lag there is also an animal cap. Farming works reasonably well, but it's a lot easier with threshable overground crops, since they can be grown all the year around, as opposed to the pig tails' summer/autumn. Wool is also hard to produce enough of since the animals can be sheared only once per year (at least that's my conclusion).
I start with a 3*7 pig tail plot in the first summer (planted with all the seeds I bring, typically 9 or 10), complemented with a 3*3 overground plot if I can gather suitable crops. All the production for the first two years go into bags (for sand hauling, seeds, etc), and then the first clothes start to wear, so I switch to clothing, and at that time the farmer tends to actually produce reasonable yields, so I eventually have to cut back on the plot sizes (as my pop caps are set to 60/80). Once a silk farm gets going wool and plant thread production is reduced to nominal levels to support moods, while the dorfs are clad in masterworks GCS silk gear.

And, as Goatmaan said, you can also base your clothing on caravan imports to a large extent, but that makes the supply a bit iffy, since a siege can block the caravan.

[PyroTechno]

The workflow plugin is indeed excellent, and surface plant farming is also excellent - especially hemp, which is also good for flour and hempseed oil, and the added fluff bonus that most of your dwarves are probably high at any given moment (sadly the game does not simulate this).

Even "x" clothing still gives bad thoughts, and will be replaced automatically if there are available clothes.

You usually want to make robes or dresses, trousers, and socks. Robes and dresses are the most valuable clothing in the game, trousers are almost always available for production, and socks are a DF tradition.

Clothing disposal -
This is very important to any mature fortress, as a buildup of items can and will murder your FPS.

Without cheating or exploits:
Dump the clothing outside of a Finished Goods Stockpile. It should rapidly decay and eventually be destroyed entirely.

Sell the clothing to a caravan. Worn clothing retains 1/2-3/4 of its value, and can buy significant chunks of the caravan - or you can trade it all for a single iron anvil. This has the advantage of not causing bad thoughts from destroyed masterworks.

Dump the clothing in magma. Designate a dumping zone right next to a cliff, and your dwarves will throw the item off of the cliff - and, say, into a pool of magma. This has the disadvantage of opening your fortress to the magma sea, unless you do something with pumps and bridges and other complicated things.

With cheating or exploits:
Dwarven Atom Smasher. Build a random bridge somewhere, raise it, and designate a dumping zone under it. Close it again, and everything in the zone will be destroyed.

DFHack. Use the powerful commands, "cleanowned scattered x" and "autodump destroy", and suddenly all worn and/or randomly discarded clothing will immediately vanish. This has the advantage of cleaning up permanently discarded food - a known bug involving being interrupted while eating.

In the next version, there will be the additional option of turning worn clothing into paper for the writing industry.

[vexxice]

I have a large fort currently with 544 adults/121 children to keep clothed, so ill mention a few things....

How in the world do you have a fort that big without fps death? Right now I run at 30, but at times of peril (sieges, werebeasts) my 140 dwarf fortress drops to 9-12. 544 dwarves? How? What? Why? Who? And How can I get some?

I'm glad to hear that I am not the only one who has problems with clothing.

[Goatmaan]

It all started in my "sub 5 fps quest" thread.

Most players would consider my game " fps dead".
5 or 6 fps steady.
I can go from 270+ idlers to 20 (caravan time) with no fps drop.
If I want a new stockpile filled, it gets done in minutes no matter the size. The biggest drawback is that "gametime" passes so slow, I'm in it for the migrants you see.
So I can get to 1000 dwarfs.
So while I'm waiting, I'm paving my 6*6 forested embark with granite, clothing them with the best variety of cloth/leather/silk I can. And building enough barracks to house 70 squads. And working on masterwork steel for a military of 700.

Nice thing about 5 fps? Problems don't "jump" at you.
There are no "oh holy armok I forgot to..." moments

   Goatmaan

[PyroTechno]

It all started in my "sub 5 fps quest" thread.

Most players would consider my game " fps dead".
5 or 6 fps steady.
I can go from 270+ idlers to 20 (caravan time) with no fps drop.
If I want a new stockpile filled, it gets done in minutes no matter the size. The biggest drawback is that "gametime" passes so slow, I'm in it for the migrants you see.
So I can get to 1000 dwarfs.
So while I'm waiting, I'm paving my 6*6 forested embark with granite, clothing them with the best variety of cloth/leather/silk I can. And building enough barracks to house 70 squads. And working on masterwork steel for a military of 700.

Nice thing about 5 fps? Problems don't "jump" at you.
There are no "oh holy armok I forgot to..." moments

   Goatmaan

You have a Legendary patience stat.

[Raven]

with the bin bug, is it convenient to work with manager orders to keep production efficient?

right now I have my weaver on repeat to make cloth and cloth stockpiles without bins in order to not have cancel orders from that bug

[PatrikLundell]

I work around the bin issue through a heavy usage of quantum stockpiles. Those have the issue with lag, however, since stuff is first hauled to the feeder stockpile and then hauled to the mine cart. Also, they're prone to stalling when the feeder stockpile gets full and nobody feels any need to perform the mine cart loading tasks (I think the have a lower priority than normal hauling even).
I'm not using the manager much, but if you have multiple workshops (say one loom for actual making of cloth, and one for silk collection by the silk farm) the manager screws things up by distributing the jobs more or less evenly. It also clashes with assignment for workshops for quality production versus ones for bulk production (e.g. mason for production of goods versus mason for production or blocks, with the quality shop restricted to highly proficient dwarves).

[vexxice]

Do dwarf children need a special size of clothing? Or do they just walk around with really baggy clothes (like all the hip dwarves do)?

[PatrikLundell]

One size fits all...
There are only 3 sizes, L (Humans & Trolls), M (Dorf, Elf, Goblin), S (Kobold). Haven't seen any animal people with clothes, though.

A few of other clothing notes:
- Dwarves can not produce underwear. Those hotly desired items have to be bought from elven caravans, or pried from the stiff corpses of elves and goblins [it's somewhat disturbing to see a dwarven child try again and again to get hold of some loincloths from the carnage, only to break off each attempt due to being horrified].
- Human caravans bring only Large stuff, which are useless. They happily buy M xsockx, though.
- Giants don't wear clothes (couldn't find any XXXL, I guess).
- Something will happen with clothing size production in the upcoming multi species fortresses.

Dwarven clothing probably are produced using the same secret that causes raising drawbridges to have a height of 1 regardless of length and cages to fit any number of cave dragons (I think I had 26 when I managed to breed them at one time, and only the two breeders were pastured) despite being capable of capturing the smallest of true creatures.