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[slashnul]

Ive noticed that when designating big areas for mining under the same designation priority miners will do a dance I call the Miner Shuffle.  They pick at one section without much earnest then travel to another distant section to flail ineffectually for a few turns, then just return to their original spot for another feeble attempt at work.  Why dont they keep working at the same spot?  Are they malingering?  Trying to waft farts?  Cause magma solves both those problems.  I dont get it.  Maybe theyre tired, and recover while in transit? 

[steel jackal]

its been like this since i started, dwarves just have a short attention span for digging in a straight line

you and me can dig out something in row after row, but not dwarves, they just pick a random spot and dig, then pick another random spot nearbye

[Dainz]

Dwarves can smell other Miners Running from Dining Hall to dig that nice little spot next to digging spot, so he just uses dwarfen logic to find the next best spot to dig, prefarably 1z level down, from the nice row!

[khearn]

Mine will usually stay in one area quite nicely now, as long as they have more spots to dig. If they're in a narrow space like a vein that has been marked for digging with digv, they'll often end up with nothing they can dig at the moment where they are and run to another part of the vein. But in wide open spaces they always seem to go for the nearest designated tile.

You also can have problems when you have more miners than the working face is wide. If you have 3 miners and you designate a 2-wide tunnel, 2 miners will start, and as soon as one tile is removed, now there is space for 3, so the third will dig a tile, and now one of the others has no space, so it heads off to dig somewhere else, then you end up with 3 spaces available in the tunnel for a moment, so that one comes back, and someone else ends up squeezed out. Having too many miners can actually end up being counterproductive at times.

Where I see them running back and forth the most is when I have two tunnels designated on top of each other at the same priority. They'll dig a spot or two on one level, then decide that the spot on the level below is closer since they rate closeness by x,y,z straight line distance.  So they'll run down stairs and dig a couple of spots, and note the spot directly above them is closer and run back upstairs. The way to avoid this is to designate the digging at different priorities. Make one floor  priority 4 and the other priority 5, and they'll do all the 4s before moving on to the 5s.

[slashnul]

Thats got to be it... the spots were right above and below eachother.

[Dirst]

I've taken to putting the entrance to each new large dig at a lower priority, that way the dwarves finish one before heading off to the next.  Even when they're pulling their Keystone Kops routine in a narrow passage, no one peels off to mine another area (though one of them might take a hauling job).

[Bradders]

I notice this happen mostly when designating for mining over multiple z-levels, the dorfs are much better about sticking to one chunk out of several on the same z-level.

[PatrikLundell]

The multi level digging shuffle is reasonably easily handled with digging priorities. What I find extremely annoying is that miners now run 130 levels down to dig, and then cancels the digging as they draw near, because there was a harvesting job available (even when the digging is priority 1). The joke gets old when they approach the same dig tile for the third time without reaching it. I'd definitely like to be able to disable harvesting on miners only (as opposed to all except farmers).

[Dirst]

The multi level digging shuffle is reasonably easily handled with digging priorities. What I find extremely annoying is that miners now run 130 levels down to dig, and then cancels the digging as they draw near, because there was a harvesting job available (even when the digging is priority 1). The joke gets old when they approach the same dig tile for the third time without reaching it. I'd definitely like to be able to disable harvesting on miners only (as opposed to all except farmers).

Try using burrows. You can designate a ginormous cube of unrevealed tiles for mining, as well as basically the whole fort minus the farms.

[khearn]

Digging priorities seems like less hassle than burrows. if you set burrows you also need to include food, booze and bedrooms in each of the burrows. :-P

[MoonyTheHuman]

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[Spinning Fly]

The multi level digging shuffle is reasonably easily handled with digging priorities. What I find extremely annoying is that miners now run 130 levels down to dig, and then cancels the digging as they draw near, because there was a harvesting job available (even when the digging is priority 1). The joke gets old when they approach the same dig tile for the third time without reaching it. I'd definitely like to be able to disable harvesting on miners only (as opposed to all except farmers).

Amen to that. Would be great if "Harvesting" was a labour that could be individually enabled/disabled rather than just an option in the orders.

[AceSV]

My miners don't harvest.  Is that tied to a certain hauling labor, or am I just lucky? 

[Bumber]

My miners don't harvest.  Is that tied to a certain hauling labor, or am I just lucky?

IIRC, it's tied to food hauling. Maybe.

Nope. Wiki says even nobles and children will harvest.

[khearn]

My miners generally don't seem to inclined to harvest. Certainly not as bad as some people have experienced, where they'll switch tasks to harvesting while en-route to a dig job. I'd guess there is a preference involved. Maybe the miners who do so much harvesting have a preference for plump helmets or something like that?