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[Rascal]

A quick explanation of my status

I started playing some 2 months ago. I’ve been playing 5-10 h every day. I started around the year 250 and now it’s summer of 263. I got a lot of immigrants quite soon and I was dreading for the goblin sieges that have so far never happened. After some 5-7 years my population already came close to 200. Now I’m running with popcap 275 with a military of 59 melee + 31 xbowdwarves so 90 total, current fort value ~20M. FPS are around 10-13, which is quite bad and I don’t really dare to keep the waterfalls running in my dining room (using  PRINT_MODE: VBO). I have breached the first cavern and I’m looking forward to go deeper. I recently made a whole new fort to replace the first one, which was full of n00b errors and this relocation has taken the last 4 years. I am now ready to search the magmalakes I’ve heard so many legends about. I am not a true dwarf ruler until I get my first death due to magma (enemy or not, Armok doesn’t care).


Praise

This game has provided the most astounding gaming experience I’ve had in my life. I remember the first time I played Civilization, my first VGA Planets game, my group of adventurers in Ultima 6 or the first time I saw a demo of Doom. Those are classics that have ingrained themselves to my central nervous system in a way that I thought would never happen again in this time of short attention span console gaming. Recently, I’ve had some good time with games like Banished, Train Fever or Cities Skylines but they inevitably fall short due to technical shortcomings or the compromises to accommodate the lowest common denominator. I’ve been thinking that perhaps Star Citizen would possibly be the next such groundbraking experience. How wrong I was. This “simple” ASCII game has shown me the depth of what a truly intelligent game developer can do, even without a big dev team. Toady One, I salute you! I am currently unemployed but once I get my first salary on the job that hopefully starts soon, you are gonna get your share Mr. Creator of Masterwork. Also, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without Dwarf Therapist or the nice people who have populated the dfwiki with their entries, which explained the basics. Thank you!


Criticism

I’ve been following the updates on the upcoming release and all the inn/poetry/multiracesfort stuff sounds really cool. However, I hope he has the time to also address certain gameplay aspects, which currently hinder the very basic routines. A great appreciation also goes to the makers of DFhack, which have made my life easier but unfortunately the workflow seems a bit bugged in certain cases (explained below in point 20.).


List of things that I think need improvements ASAP

Sorry for being obscure in the topic but some of these things I just don’t know if I’m being a newbie or whether they are truly broken. I will try to list them as accurately as I’m able and appreciate greatly any input from oldtimers if there are workarounds (or whether it’s just “yeah, that’s the way it is, no fix there”).

1a. Equipping the military is a horrendous task. In the beginning when my metal armor was scarce, I had much trouble trying to get them wear armor. Googling taught me to replace clothing, which has helped and nowadays my melee military wears all steel. However, my 4 xbow squads still report missing armor (I have made them wear leather) in Dwarf Therapist but the dwarves don’t seem to get a bad thought about it so I’ve let it go. However, I would prefer they have some armor when they face the enemy.

1b. I like to individually equip all my soldiers, I don’t use the presets (like metal/leather etc.). However, this task is made very difficult by the fact that e.g. when choosing armor for a certain place, it also shows all the CLOTHING fitting that particular part of the body. Need some way to filter out all the x(pig tail trousers)x.

2a. The relationship with dwarves and clothing is horrible. They tend to throw their clothing around the fortress even when it doesn’t have a wear level and they stock their rooms full of clothes. These are dwarves for crying out loud, I don’t want them to behave like my wife! When I discovered the Dfhack command “cleanowned” the first time I used “cleanowned x” my dwarves spent several months just grabbing their shit from their rooms and bringing it to the dumping spot. When the merchant caravan came I designated all those to be brought up for sale. They spent the next month running things to the depot and only got like half the stuff up there but I still had 300k worth of USED clothing to sell. The dwarves need to bring their old stuff to the clothing storage, not just leave them in their rooms or around the fort. I think from now on I’m just gonna use Dfhack to autodump and destroy the old clothes. I don’t feel like a dwarf when I’m selling clothes.

2b. This brings me to the next weird thing about clothing, which is the fact that it is extremely valuable. That 300k of clothing was before I got my GCS silk farm running so it was mostly just normal pig tail stuff (masterwork for sure though, I got several lvl20 clothiers and weavers). Still it sells for more than metal armor. This is very unrealistic. I don’t think I need to go in depth here to argue why metal armor is almost always more valuable than even the most exquisite piece of clothing. Well maybe not to my wife but at least to dwarves. So even a masterwork of clothing shouldn’t cost more than 100 whereas it’s understandable that masterwork armor have their costs in the 1000s.

3. Skill development happens way too fast. I have basically all my military dwarves at level 20 in their main weapon. Other combat skills at 10-20. Peasants seem to reach the highest level in just a couple of years. I don’t have dangerrooms, which I’ve read develop combat skills even faster, just normal training. I would like it to take something like 100 years to reach level 20. I mean the top level should indicate that you are the Bruce Lee of that skill discipline. Currently with my level 20 steel military forgotten beasts take a second to go down with 0 hits from the beast coming through (blocked or dodged). My biggest loss due to combat so far has been a FB with poisonous vapors, which went down in a sec but a moment later 7 weaponlords/masters died due to breathing problems. I had a webbing FB once but I was able to take it out from range with xbow dwarves after a couple of weeks of ingame time shooting (it was just stuck on a beach even though it could come kill them anytime). Conversely, certain skills like bee keeping seem to take forever to improve. Which doesn’t really matter at the moment, because the honey/wax yield is so bad that I have the bees around just for curiosity. But I want it to be non-trivial to achieve truly legendary skills. Is there mods for this?

4. Military doesn’t obey commands. My xbow dwarf in leather spots an elven ambush and I order he and his patrolling squad to retreat to positions they can hold until my melee dwarves arrive to back them up. Nope. He chooses it is much wiser to go hack 4 grizzlybears on the head with his fricking xbow instead of falling back. And that’s another completely fallacious thing. If you use a crossbow as a melee weapon, it is very likely it will be broken. Those are quite delicate pieces of equipment, especially the string.


List of things that I think might be bugged or perhaps I’m just a fool (please clarify, oldtimers!)

5. Is it possible for levers to lose linkage? In the very beginning when I redirected a river into my fort I came across a curious situation. I had made a floodgate linked to a lever and then I channeled the rest of the ground between the floodgate and river so the water was leaning towards the floodgate. I opened the gate from the lever and took the water in to my waterpool. When I wanted to close the gate, I pulled the lever. Nothing happened. I know it takes a moment (100 ticks?) for the effect to transmit so I waited. Nothing. I pulled again and waited. Nothing. And again and nothing. I ended up using the Dfhack liquids command to block the water.  I was later on wondering did I just do some n00b mistake or what the hell was going on. I had managed to open the gate because it was linked and while the water was running there was no way I could’ve unlinked it, right? I’m still unsure what happened here, because it was so early in my DF career and nowadays I have tens of levers regulating the waterfalls to my dining room and nothing of the sort has ever happened again. So maybe just some n00b confusion but that’s why I’m asking if anyone has had similar experiences?

6. Is it normal in the reports that older (and even not so old) reports are blank? I’ve had a couple of times that some (in)fighting has happened and I only see that afterwards but can no longer see the details. The game still has that data somewhere, right, so why not? I tried to google if there was some way to increase the log length but came up with nothing. Nowadays this is not a problem, because I’m getting the reports in a separate window (https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/3qh2j8/i_wrote_a_program_that_filters_announcements_to/)

7. In the beginning of the game I could scroll back several pages of announcements. Nowadays I only have 1 page. I can’t say at which point did this change. I’m wondering if this can be set up from some configuration file. So far no luck but not a big deal due to that program I mentioned above in point 6. Did I exceed some buffer or something?

8. When I have made a farm, which makes several different things e.g. plump helmets and pig tails. Then I realize I have way too much plump helmets and I need to tone them down. But only them. Is there a way to uncheck the plump helmets without destroying the whole farm? Pressing enter doesn’t unselect the farmed plant.

9. I have currently 3 dukes in my fort.  Only one of them is the duke (or in my case, the duchess) of Sealbasement, which is my fort. The other 2 are dukes of something else I guess. I noticed that when she got promoted to duke from a lower level of aristocracy, the other two also were promoted to duke. Is this a bug?

10. I always save when I get the announcement that merchant caravan has arrived. I’ve had 2 instances so far where the merchant caravan arrives, drives to the entrance of my fort and instead of going in, just continues their voyage to the edge of the map. The first time this happened, I tried it a couple of times and was it the 3rd or 4th time, the caravan just went in like always and everything was fine. The second time no matter how many retries (I tried like 10), they just went past and I missed that year of trading. I was unable to discern any reasonable cause for this and the first time, which shows that there was some random element just baffles me. Is this a bug?

11. Pressing “z” shows that my food stores are currently at 43799. When I go to stocks it shows that there are 19775 prepared meals. Where does this discrepancy come from? Earlier when my food stores were still around 20k, I noticed that they kept fluctuating between 12k – 20k. I realized this was because the bookkeeper didn’t have enough time to keep up to things. I stopped all his other work and the fluctuation stopped. Is this something similar? Can I get more bookkeepers than 1?

12. Sometimes dwarves seem to be unable to get things from bins. I saw on the official DF-pages that there was trouble with lye buckets not getting taken out of barrels – a problem I also had but the bin thing is related to clothing. Due to this, I have now several 30x30 cloth/thread storages to keep my clothing industry going without dwarves telling me that there are no raw materials when there are. The lye bucket-in-a-barrel thing was fixed (or will be in the next release) but what about this bin problem?

13. In order to make getting rid of refuse easier, I channeled a deep hole next to my fort entrance on the outside (to not have miasma). It goes deep and at certain depth of the hole there is a dump area. From general orders menu I have selected to dump instead of refuse (o-r) to skulls, shells and other. Nevertheless, none of these end products are automatically marked as “D” at butcher’s and dwarves keep bringing them to refuse stockpiles. I understand there’s some problem that you have to keep outside refuse hauling on. I have it on. Also I read somewhere that dwarves might need to access the lowest level of the pit for some reason. Well they can but this dumping just doesn’t happen. Any ideas?


List of things that are definitely bugged

14. If you have a pastured dog and you attach the dog to a chain, the dwarves will keep transporting the dog between the pasture and the chain.

15. I’ve had several werebeasts in my game (especially werehorses) and their corpses (the blinking N with a ~on top of the N) are not transported into corpse refuse, they are left in “normal” refuse. I don’t know if they are accidentaly classified as other type of refuse or something. All other corpses are nicely dragged to my corpse refuse but not werebeasts. I even had a werebeast corpse dragged to my bone-only refuse inside the fort.

16. When milking, the animal is brought to the farm work shop. No, the bucket should go to the animal, not the animal to the bucket.

17. Sometimes when you designate e.g. mining (1x1 = single tile) next to an engraving, also the engraving tile starts blinking as if designated. This is purely visual, it will not get mined out so doesn’t matter much. I am not sure about the reproducibility of this one but has happened several times, seems to be especially around engraved corners.

18. When storing wheelbarrows, dwarves seem to carry them (=slow) instead of driving them (=fast). For example when dwarf is wheelbarrowing to get a stone, then that stone becomes unavailable and the dwarf abandons the store in stockpile work (and hence the wheelbarrow). Then someone comes and carries the wheelbarrow slowly to storage.

19. When in the squad menu and you select “choose individuals” and if you had to scroll down to select that squad due to so many squads, the individual menu is already scrolled down and cannot be scrolled back up (-+*/ does not work). I.e. the problem is that the person selector menu retains the scroll settings of the previous squad selector menu.

20. The wonderful Dfhack feature of “workflow” is unfortunately bugged with cloth making. When the amount of clothing goes below the defined range, it will not sometimes start reproducing the required clothing. I was first thinking I had this problem due to dwarves not getting cloth out of bins, which I mentioned in (12.) but this seems to happen despite of that. As a comparison, I’ve had no problems with leather production restarting when the amount drops below defined range.  Maybe it’s the item type? In leather workshops I make armor, leggings, helms, high boots and gloves, in clothing workshops I make tunics, trousers, mittens, hoods, socks and shoes.

[Immortal-D]

Welcome to the party   Regarding invaders, there is a known bug with the current version, hopefully to be addressed in the next big release (which in turn is hopefully this year).  I am quite sleepy as I write this, so I will be cherry-picking a few of the queries you bring up.  I'm sure other Dorfs can fill in the rest.

1a./b.- You can design your own Uniforms, and modify the existing ones.  Short of wanting to create a specialty outfit for some project, there is no reason you should go through the trouble of manually assigning every piece of equipment.

2a.- When a Fort gets on 100+ Dwarves and ~5+ years, excess clothing can become a nuance.  Either create a Dump Zone over magma, or utilize the Dwarven Atom Smasher.  I'm not saying you are wrong, btw.  Clothing is one of those things which is so insanely detailed that the entire process has gotten ahead of itself in terms of gameplay.

2b.- Yes, Dwarven rags and cloth scraps are worth an entire caravan, lol.  There are a few things which I personally restrict myself when it comes to trading.  Specifically; I avoid selling prepared meals and xx☼Clothing☼xx

8.- I think the you press D or F (forget what it stands for) to deselect a chosen plant, but I know it's in the 'q' menu of a farm plot.

15.- See if you can use them to 'Decorate With Bone'.

13.- Items marked for Dumping are Forbidden, and thus will not be used.  Be careful with the Order 'Collect Outside Refuse'.  Dwarves will happily go outside to pick up a stray tooth, even with a Werehorse rampaging about.  To collect the dumped bones and things, use d-b-c.  Additionally, you can create a Dump Zone (i-d) over a magma pit, which is a non-cheaty way of destroying old junk (and Nobles).

I realize you have a lot of points here (and well-written I might add, props for spacing).  I hope I have helped a little bit.... sleep.

[Jay]

3. Skill rates are very easily moddable. I don't know any existing mods that touch on it, though.

4. Melee (or ranged lacking ammo) dwarves leave their station to pursue spotted foes. Same is true if you set the station for somewhere else while they can presently see an enemy. To get them to disengage, you have to deactivate them. Valid suggestion for a disengage/retreat order.

8. You choose one plant per season. Fallow the field for that season to have your dwarves stop planting.

12. By default, since the hauling "fix", dwarves have a tendency to grab up entire bins to go pick up newly produced thread/cloth, which causes cancellations on any jobs that happen to be pathing towards that particular bin at that moment. There are options in /data/init/d_init.txt that can tweak this, but it might prove difficult to balance between that and wasted bin space.

13. I'm not familiar, but I guess that the standing order doesn't flag them, and so won't forbid them when they hit the bottom, so they'll still ultimately end up in a valid stockpile if you have one set up and dwarves can path down there.

[FortunaDraken]

10, you might want to check with shift+d (D) to check whether or not your trade depot is pathable to. There might be a tree or construction that's blocking the way that the wagons get huffy about. Also merchants can and will get spooked by things like corpses and angry animals, and if one gets spooked before he gets to the depot, it's not unusual for them all to decide to lolnope out.

For number 12, the only way I've personally found to handle issues with stockpiles and workshops being like that is to set up stockpile links. I believe I read once somewhere that workshops are defaulted to taking from links and there's no way to really change it? So sometimes they believe they have nothing in an 'allowed' area to use. Setting up stockpiles to Give to the workshop should fix the issue.

19, I've never had that issue, but try using -= to scroll instead of the numpad? Dunno.

20 is probably the issue that DFhack is counting clothing that's worn, so doesn't think that you need more :|a Try making an atom smasher or magma dump for those and it might resolve itself.

[Flying Dice]

11: It seems obvious, but every edible unit in your fortress will count as food, not just prepared meals. On the main screen of the Stocks tab there's even a breakdown underneath the total; prepared meals will fall under Other.

16: Not a bug. The milking job is associated with the Farmer's workshop; the same process occurs for shearing and gelding. It's a byproduct of how labor works: production jobs are associated with workshops, and in the case of these three jobs a living animal happens to be one of the "materials" for the job in the same sense that a stone boulder is a material for a mason.

[Robsoie]

12 - definitively a bug
Bins (and probably other kind of containers) in stockpiles can be very bugged , do NOT allow bins in stockpiles that have items you need, like the ammo stockpile by example, if there are any bins holding their ammo the marksdwarves will never refill their quivers.

It's an old bug that has been present for years and unfortunately is still here.

[Rascal]

Thanks for the replies everyone!

1a./b.- You can design your own Uniforms, and modify the existing ones.  Short of wanting to create a specialty outfit for some project, there is no reason you should go through the trouble of manually assigning every piece of equipment.

I know about the uniforms and I guess I could nowadays use them because I have enough steel armor for everyone. But in the beginning I didn't have enough good armor for all so I found it important to assign armor individually to have my militia captains have the best stuff and so forth. And if you've assigned metal uniforms and you don't have enough, will they take leather instead or just stay naked?

3. Skill rates are very easily moddable. I don't know any existing mods that touch on it, though.

Oh that's cool, I have to look into that.

8. You choose one plant per season. Fallow the field for that season to have your dwarves stop planting.

I had somehow managed to miss this fallow functionality entirely, thanks.

13. I'm not familiar, but I guess that the standing order doesn't flag them, and so won't forbid them when they hit the bottom, so they'll still ultimately end up in a valid stockpile if you have one set up and dwarves can path down there.

Hmmm I don't understand. What is then the point of the whole standing orders - refuse menu if the items that are marked to be dumped by that menu will not get automatically flagged to be dumped? And I mean nothing hits the bottom of my pit, because no dumping happens in the first place. I first thought it takes a moment for the standing orders to be acknowledged. But even newly butchered turkeys get their skulls taken to refuse despite the fact that I've marked skulls to be dumped in o-r-menu. The whole reason I have to make my pit work with dumping is that I cannot make a refuse storage in empty space tile but dumping zone can be designated so. The pit goes to the surface so the bottom isn't considered underground and therefore wouldn't produce miasma.

10, you might want to check with shift+d (D) to check whether or not your trade depot is pathable to. There might be a tree or construction that's blocking the way that the wagons get huffy about. Also merchants can and will get spooked by things like corpses and angry animals, and if one gets spooked before he gets to the depot, it's not unusual for them all to decide to lolnope out.

Yes the depot was accessible the whole time in both of my weird cases. And in the first case they did go in after a couple of tries.

19, I've never had that issue, but try using -= to scroll instead of the numpad? Dunno.

None of the scrolling buttons worked. I guess it's quite rare to have enough squads so that they don't fit one page so this bug doesn't manifest so often but I thought I'd mention it.

20 is probably the issue that DFhack is counting clothing that's worn, so doesn't think that you need more :|a Try making an atom smasher or magma dump for those and it might resolve itself.

As far as I understand this is not the case, because the workflow menu reports how many clothing you have and when that number was clearly below the range, the production would not start sometimes.

11: It seems obvious, but every edible unit in your fortress will count as food, not just prepared meals. On the main screen of the Stocks tab there's even a breakdown underneath the total; prepared meals will fall under Other.

Ah ok, drinks, seeds etc. are also in that number. Thanks for clarifying.

16: Not a bug. The milking job is associated with the Farmer's workshop; the same process occurs for shearing and gelding. It's a byproduct of how labor works: production jobs are associated with workshops, and in the case of these three jobs a living animal happens to be one of the "materials" for the job in the same sense that a stone boulder is a material for a mason.

I guess you're right that it's not a bug but just the game mechanics. I just thought it was so counterintuitive that I put it there.

12 - definitively a bug
Bins (and probably other kind of containers) in stockpiles can be very bugged , do NOT allow bins in stockpiles that have items you need, like the ammo stockpile by example, if there are any bins holding their ammo the marksdwarves will never refill their quivers.

It's an old bug that has been present for years and unfortunately is still here.

I do get the equipment mismatch cancellation spam from my crossbow dwarves (which are also all hunters) occasionally but in general my ammo bins seem to work. I just had the problem with clothing bins. And I nowadays have the same ammo for training, combat and hunting but still the equipment mismatch happens...

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, I wasn't trying to say that it wasn't a tad silly, just that milking was working as intended for the state it's currently in. 

Most of the ones which haven't been replied to yet are either known bugs (as suggested) or things which are probably bugs but which I haven't been able to find documentation on.

[omega_dwarf]

So your issues with xbow dwarves might have something to do with this...miners, woodcutters, and (I believe) hunters won't use the same tool/weapon for combat and for their day jobs, and will either drop the weapon where they stand when they get drafted or go to a stockpile and switch out. I'm pretty sure that's still the case.

And yeah, agreed, the scrolling things are weird. Every menu seems to have its own rules, and a rewrite of the UI is coming...sometime...

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, that's why you don't make your tool-users soldiers unless you explicitly take them off of those jobs for long periods of time.

[Zorromorph]

Good discussion here.  I just wanted to say that I've toyed with the skill idea(point #3), but the thing about it is that a not-insignificant part of what makes DF dwarves what they are is their ability to become ridiculously good at things.  For example, moods which make someone legendary instantaneously.  I don't think it makes much sense for a dwarf to become a legendary craftsdwarf because of the artifact toy axe they just made, but have the combat skills take what would seem to us to be more sensible timeframe of a lifetime to master.  I've realized that it's one of those things that you simply accept, or don't . 

[Flying Dice]

I'll be honest, regarding training military dwarves, pick one:

1. Turn up the rate of skill gain.
2. Use danger rooms.
3. Be unemployed so that you can monitor the game for decades in-game to train them up slowly.

Way back before I ducked out of the upper boards for ages, people endlessly whined about danger rooms. IDK if that's still a thing, but if it is, pay no attention to it. It's a minor miracle just getting your soldiers to train reliably.

[miauw62]

Yeah, I don't see how your military skill gain is fast. Mine is always horribly slow. I can't seem to construct a working military.

[Shonai_Dweller]

If you have your military training properly full time they will train far too fast for the current rate of sieges. Elite soldiers with no combat experience at all after a year or so in the barracks? It's kind of silly. No need for danger rooms these days, for the most part.

By the way, higher ranking soldiers get the choice of better weaponry and armor before the rest of the squad so you don't actually need to micromanage it too much. It does mean everyone's constantly swapping weapons and armor as you produce better stuff, but they'll get back to training eventually.

[Snaake]

Some of these were already answered, but anyhoo:

1. Set your own uniforms, or equip the individual dwarves using e.g. generic metal breastplates. Don't mess with individual items unless you're trying to get them to equip a specific artifact, decorated weapon/armor piece, etc.

2. Yea this just happens. If the mass of hauling after a cleanowned command is a problem, disable the hauling/dumping labor in question either on dwarves who should be doing something else, or even periodically for your hauler peasants when you need them for something else.

3. On the flip side, lots of people do have trouble getting the military to train and to any decent skill levels without asking the forums for a bunch of help. Skill learning (and rust rates) can be adjusted, some mods do this (masterwork at least used to) to have separate e.g. guildsmen and military castes for dwarves, you can also mod it yourself in the RAWs with http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Creature_token#SKILL_LEARN_RATE and the tokens listed immediately afterwards: for more advice, look up some mods or ask in the modding sub-forum.

4. Yea, dwarves are berserkers, they usually won't retreat despite commands if they're within sight of an enemy.

5. Maybe something was pushed by the flow to block the floodgate tile? Might also be invisible, flows used to make some of the items they pushed invisible, possibly only viewable/able to be located through the stocks screen.

6.-7. ??

8. One farm plot can only farm 1 plant per season, regardless of season. There IS a way to deselect, it might be a different button, or by choosing "none" or "lie fallow" for that season... can't remember what the exact mechanic/wording is, but it's there.

9. Simultaneous promotion from baron to duke sounds like a bug, nobles of other places immigrating to your fort may or may not be one.

10. Not sure what's happening, but note that traps (including pressure plates) block caravan pathing.

11. ?? ...but once the bookkeeper has achieved max. accuracy, I thought it still just stayed that way (haven't played 0.40, it's been that way for ages but afaik it is/was scheduled to change at some point, so accuracy would decay). And yea, food includes lots of other stuff besides prepared meals. Also, for example, you plant a rock nut to produce X amount of quarry bushes, depending on the dwarf's grower skill. Each quarry bush, when processed, produces 1 rock nut and 5 quarry bush leaves. A single animal being slaughtered will give anything from a few to a few dozen (or hundreds/thousands in case of stuff like sperm whales or their giant versions) meat products. Cooking to prepared meals will not change the total food count, however: a biscuit of 1 rock nut (paste/cake/oil) and 5 quarry bush leaves will give a stack of 1+5 = 6 biscuits.

12.-13. ?? or not sure. Could be you've misunderstood the o-r menu somehow, it's entirely possible it's not quite intuitive
14. Yup, sounds like it's unintended behaviour, despite not necessarily being strictly a bug.
15. ??

16. That's your logic, the game does the milking at the farmer's workshop, definitely intended behaviour and not a bug. Even in reality, if you had a lot of milk cows, you would drive the cows to be milked at one spot instead of making dozens of trips to the pasture to milk individual bucketfuls from each cow.

17. ??

18. Dwarves just aren't the smartest tool in the shed. Give the wheelbarrow storage stockpile wheelbarrows of it's own, for added irony?

19. Retaining the cursor location is a feature, not a bug. Scrolling not working anymore would be a bug.

20. I would double-check that you have workflow set up correctly. To get more specific advice, you should probably post your exact workflow listings (and the raw materials available), or a save. Maybe in a workflow advice thread rather than here. That would also be where you should report bugs in workflow, I think.