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[Libash_Thunderhead]

Should a dwarf be needed to lock a door or hatch cover?

[NW_Kohaku]

Logically, yes, unless there is some way of getting some lever to do it from a distance. (Using, naturally, their magical telekinetic mechanisms.)

But that said, magical telekinetic locks are also an Armoksend, because they give players one of their few ways of actually stopping a dwarf from walking directly into a dangerous area before they get there or quarantining infected dwarves.

They've been around since before burrows, which accomplish a similar function, and I presume if they're ever "fixed" to be a better simulation, it will come with much more advanced mechanics than simply adding a job like a lever pull. 

[Sirbug]

Forbidding entry and locking can be separate.

Forbid door to discourage dwarf from passing through. Lock door to discourage enemies as well.

[SixOfSpades]

Locks, personal (and/or official) ownership of keys for said locks, barred doors, and the militia job of "Gatewarden" should all become things.

[NW_Kohaku]

Forbidding entry and locking can be separate.

Forbid door to discourage dwarf from passing through. Lock door to discourage enemies as well.

"Discourage" is not the same thing as "prevent", and it doesn't necessarily cut off pathfinding, which is part of what locked doors do.

I use doors, for example, to have a dwarf dig out a ceiling for an aquifer tap so that they are standing on a door that I can lock the instant they move away.  I even use them with magma-channeling. 

It's also a question of whether locking doors would be worth the effort of having dwarves take extra jobs to go find and then use a key. That, itself, brings up problems of both having to make and then store keys...

[SixOfSpades]

It's also a question of whether locking doors would be worth the effort of having dwarves take extra jobs to go find and then use a key. That, itself, brings up problems of both having to make and then store keys...

Why would dwarves store the keys? They would carry them on their person, along with any other personal possessions (eating knife, religious talisman, comb, etc). Doors could easily be assigned to specific dwarves, just as beds/chairs are now, and if the door gets a lock, then the key is assigned to the owner of that door. The only difference would be that doors could be owned by multiple dwarves, for instance you might have 3 Jewelers that all need access to the Treasury--whether the 1 key gets handed between them, or you make 2 additional copies, is up to you.

Barred doors would also need the player to designate which side of the door is "Inside", the only side from which the bolt can be operated.

[NW_Kohaku]

They would store keys because you might want to have more than just one or two dwarves have the capacity to lock or unlock a door, especially if that person goes on break or dies in a FB attack, leaving the only key to the lever room on a corpse underneath the feet of a poison-spitting monstrosity.

If your suggestion is that I allow for every single dwarf to have their own key to the fortress gates, then that's just ridiculous on many different levels, from the sheer amount of metal needed to make the keys to the fact that anyone who really uses doors is going to need to make a hundred keys for every patrolman, which is going to require a mind-numbingly gargantuan amount of micromanagement making sure every guard is outfitted with their proper set of keys.

Also, dwarves are not guaranteed to be able to carry all the junk they need.  I point back to the reason the economy was retired was that dwarves would spend all day shuttling the bajillion stacks of coins they needed that flooded out of their rooms as the stacks of coins were broken up into smaller and smaller change.

Having "barred doors" also completely ignores a key feature of DF doors - their omnidirectionality.  If I have a four-way corner door on a set of three bedrooms leading to stairs, which one gets the bar?

Basically, this adds a head-spinningly massive amount of micromanagement, AI programming requirements and bug potential, resource-consumption, and time-wasting for basically no real game benefits.

No thank you.

[SixOfSpades]

They would store keys because you might want to have more than just one or two dwarves have the capacity to lock or unlock a door . . . leaving the only key to the lever room on a corpse underneath the feet of a poison-spitting monstrosity.

Well, I could easily question the overseer's judgement in locking the lever-pulling dwarves out of the lever room, but that's as it may be. Either way, it seems fairly trivial to make 1 or 2 spare keys to certain fortress-critical doors, and either entrust them to super-secure dwarves, or guard them with some super-secure militia. If that's your thing.

If your suggestion is that I allow for every single dwarf to have their own key to the fortress gates

Oh HELL no. A lock that any dwarf can open is hardly better than no lock at all. IMO, every dwarf would carry the key to his/her own bedroom (possibly workshop/stockpile, too), and every militia captain would have a key to the Main Gate. Because if all your captains are dead at the same time, your fort is dead anyway.

Also, dwarves are not guaranteed to be able to carry all the junk they need.

True. I don't see personal possessions being implemented until dwarves get pockets.

If I have a four-way corner door on a set of three bedrooms leading to stairs, which one gets the bar?

Don't expect to be able to implement security on a setup that was specifically designed to prevent basic privacy.

Basically, this adds . . . basically no real game benefits.

Realism is not a benefit? Granted, as an overseer I like the ability to instantly lock/unlock any door in the fort, but that doesn't mean I feel it's an ability that I should have. How about . . . locked doors would slow down thieves, while barred doors would slow down building destroyers. Smart vampires would lock victims in their own bedrooms, greatly delaying their discovery. Locks would be pretty much the only way to deter petty theft.

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, I could easily question the overseer's judgement in locking the lever-pulling dwarves out of the lever room, but that's as it may be. Either way, it seems fairly trivial to make 1 or 2 spare keys to certain fortress-critical doors, and either entrust them to super-secure dwarves, or guard them with some super-secure militia. If that's your thing.

I would question the judgement of an overseer who doesn't. 

If you expect to lock a dwarf in a lever room, then you basically ensure they will become unhappy as they fail to attend to their social needs, which will result in tantrums, which will result in wild lever-pulling.  What could possibly go wrong?!

If you expect to leave a lever room unlocked, you open up the possibility of random tantruming dwarves running in and performing wild lever-pulling.  What could possibly go wrong?!

If you expect, for that matter to have just one dwarf who is assigned the duty of lever pulling, you're putting the fate of your fortress in the hands of a single dwarf that at any moment could decide it's time for a nap or a prayer. What could possibly go wrong?!

The only sane way to manage your levers is to have multiple dwarves ready for lever-pulling duties, and draft a few that are in handy locations and ready for jobs when the need strikes, usually locking them in as well as locking everything else out at the same time. I don't want my dwarves to have keys to leave the lever room until I say the coast is clear, either. (Although, granted, I tend to accomplish that by drawbridging the lever room shut as an absolute line of defense.)

That requires letting some as-yet-undetermined dwarf from virtually anyone in the pool of dwarves who are likely to be near my fortress core have keys to get in, but not out until I tell them so... which is really a problem if dwarves have keys and the capacity to use them when not explicitly instructed to do so by me.

Oh HELL no. A lock that any dwarf can open is hardly better than no lock at all. IMO, every dwarf would carry the key to his/her own bedroom (possibly workshop/stockpile, too), and every militia captain would have a key to the Main Gate. Because if all your captains are dead at the same time, your fort is dead anyway.

This makes a ton of massive assumptions. 

I don't know how you play, but I have emergency isolation drawbridges in key parts of my fortress, with emergency food and drink reserves as well as picks and axes to restart my fortress from scratch.  My whole army can die, and I'm still in the game.

Also, I don't care about locking bedrooms, and neither do dwarves. That's trying to create an overcomplicated solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

True. I don't see personal possessions being implemented until dwarves get pockets.

Which is a potentially massive problem if you have hundreds of doors, including multi-layered doors, all of which need to be locked.  Right now, especially, you need doors at least two layers thick just to stop people from dodging through locked doors. 

If you set up doored hallways as speedbumps for FBs, then you need a few dozen keys just to get a patrol through their commute to work in the morning.  A single dwarf could need hundreds of keys to get through their standard paths in my fortress.

Don't expect to be able to implement security on a setup that was specifically designed to prevent basic privacy.

You nonetheless want to break a basic functionality of doors as they currently exist without even bothering to consider the existing functionality valid, much less even attempt to propose a solution to maintain it.

Realism is not a benefit? Granted, as an overseer I like the ability to instantly lock/unlock any door in the fort, but that doesn't mean I feel it's an ability that I should have. How about . . . locked doors would slow down thieves, while barred doors would slow down building destroyers. Smart vampires would lock victims in their own bedrooms, greatly delaying their discovery. Locks would be pretty much the only way to deter petty theft.

OK, then, let's talk game-breaking consequences of what you're suggesting.

You know how assigning doors to be pet-impermeable causes pets to just ram into those doors, continuously pathfinding into them? That's because an unlocked door (whether set for pets to pass or not) is counted in the connectivity map for pathfinding as an open space.  Locked doors are considered impassible space. There isn't a separate connectivity map for pets, because it takes far too long to generate multiple sets of connectivity maps, which are honestly slow enough to generate that fluids breaking them is already a major FPS killer.

What happens when you try to set up a map where every dwarf has keys to different doors, and the capacity to go out looking for keys valid for them to find?  A godawful clusterfuck of either pathfinding failures or the demand for every single dwarf to have their own individual connectivity map, which would literally cause lag on the order of several seconds so the game can regenerate connectivity maps every single time a new door is locked, a drawbridge is raised or lowered, or water crosses the transition from being 4/7 to 3/7 or back again, forcing a redraw.

So yes, there's a minor benefit of realism, but I still can't see how that could possibly outweigh the utterly massive amount of coding work it would take to try to mitigate the performance loss or fix the inevitable AI failures to use keys properly, or the insane amounts of micromangement it takes to manage tens of thousands of individual keys assigned to a hundred dwarves.

[Bumber]

If you expect to lock a dwarf in a lever room, then you basically ensure they will become unhappy as they fail to attend to their social needs, which will result in tantrums, which will result in wild lever-pulling. What could possibly go wrong?!

Worse than that, they can destroy levers, meaning whatever it was connected to will need to be re-linked.

[SixOfSpades]

If you expect to lock a dwarf in a lever room, then you basically ensure they will become unhappy as they fail to attend to their social needs . . .
If you expect to leave a lever room unlocked, you open up the possibility of random tantruming dwarves running in . . .
If you expect, for that matter to have just one dwarf who is assigned the duty of lever pulling, you're putting the fate of your fortress in the hands of a single dwarf . . .
The only sane way to manage your levers is to have multiple dwarves ready for lever-pulling duties, and draft a few that are in handy locations and ready for jobs when the need strikes, usually locking them in as well as locking everything else out at the same time.

The only sane way? Really, the only sane way? How about a married couple sealed away in their own little isolation level, where the only input is raw materials dumped down to them, and the only output is an airlock stockpile / bedroom, that pumps out a regular supply of finished goods and 12-year-old Peasants. Between the parents & their oldest child, that's easily enough for dwarfpower for their material & social needs, and easily enough idle time for there always to be a bored lever-puller near at hand. You don't even need a locking door, it's just handy to have one for the Mechanic to get in & out if she needs to install a new lever, or if the lever family somehow dies from FB contamination or something.

My whole army can die, and I'm still in the game.

If my fort suffers huge casualties that I could have prevented but didn't, I have failed as an overseer and my settlement is destined to crumble to its end. (Unless I'm playing the very last holdout of dwarves on the planet, that is.) Playstyles vary, of course, I was just using the Main Gate of a fort as a good example of a door to which several dwarves might have a key, and the "1 per militia captain" rule as a good example of reasonable distribution of said keys.

Also, I don't care about locking bedrooms, and neither do dwarves. That's trying to create an overcomplicated solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Dwarves should/will care about locks once personal property, and (potential) theft of said property, start to loom on the horizon. And the pathing problem is hardly complicated if, instead of pathing to their bedroom, every dwarf simply paths to the door to their bedroom. If the dwarf's workshop / stockpile are also behind a lockable door, it should be quite doable to allow the door to be similarly be linked to any walkable space adjacent to it, so that a dwarf pathing to any tile within that space will instead path to the door first.

Which is a potentially massive problem if you have hundreds of doors, including multi-layered doors, all of which need to be locked.  Right now, especially, you need doors at least two layers thick just to stop people from dodging through locked doors. . . . you need a few dozen keys just to get a patrol through their commute to work in the morning.  A single dwarf could need hundreds of keys to get through their standard paths in my fortress.

Aaaaaah, I think this is the problem. You read me as suggesting that EVERY door in the fort must have its own lock & at least one key. Heck no--I was only thinking of 1 per bedroom, plus a few more for certain important rooms (like the Governmental Suite), and of course a safety layer around security areas, like any path leading outside or granting access to the pitting arena. In most of those cases, those lockable doors would be kept UNlocked most of the time, and guarded by militia with that specific duty--and 1 of whom would be holding that specific key, IF indeed there is a key at all, as most "security" doors would be better served by a bolt.

You nonetheless want to break a basic functionality of doors as they currently exist without even bothering to consider the existing functionality valid, much less even attempt to propose a solution to maintain it.

Forcing a mandatory lock and/or bar upon the dwarven version of a revolving door would indeed break its existing functionality: If it's locked for anyone, it's locked for everyone, and somebody's gonna wind up sleeping in the hospital, and/or die of thirst. For this reason, I understandably (and still correctly, IMO) assumed that if the dwarves directly involved in this setup do not currently give a damn about their own privacy, they most likely also won't give a damn about their own security, and the revolving door can be operated just as freely as it always has been. Keys and bolts are optional. I very, VERY much doubt there will ever be anything even remotely like "tens of thousands of individual keys".