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[Halnoth]

The game is much more enjoyable now.

Before this update my play would be very limited until dfhack and therapist updated. Mostly because I would get tired of managing stockpiles, work orders, production chains, AND labor.

I have found that I do not mind assigning labors using the in game labor interface now that I don't have to do the other tedious stuff.

Not having these 3rd party tools has brought the fun back into the game for me. See I'm the type of player that will always use the cheat if its there. Things like reveal, autodump, and liquids are just too convenient. Unfortunately I found the game too tedious before without dfhack and therapist so these tools were always there.

This last weekend I logged around 20 hours on a fort. The lack of complete control over the game environment and my dwarves meant that I never felt completely secure in my fort which brought back to me the feeling I had when I was first learning the game. I hadn't played that long on 1 fort since before .4x.

I did not realize that the inefficient manager system was bogging down my play so much, but all of the little steps combined would bury me in minutiae until I would abandon the fort.

Bravo Toady for giving us this quality of life improvement!

I've added "donate to Tarn The Great Toady One" to my list of things to do tomorrow.

[Salmeuk]

I haven't had a chance to update yet but I'm excited. Perhaps you might share your production setups, or how exactly you've used the new workorder features?

[Halnoth]

Ya sure.

Basically, anytime I used the manager I set up the job with conditions. You can do the following;

1. Specify the material
2. Create product constraints
3. Create reagent constraints

Before I give some examples I should say that it helps if you have done some modding and know some of the tokens but these are laid out on the wiki so you should be able to figure it out.

Ok so I'll give an example.

Step 1: I wanted 10 wood chests and so I went to the manager and started a work order as per normal for wood chests. So j --> m --> q --> wood chest --> enter --> 10 --> enter

Step 2: I wanted these chests to be yellow so I selected the work order and hit "d" then "f" to filter and typed in fungi to bring up fungiwood and then enter. I now have a work order for 10 fungiwood chests.

Step 3: I want this to repeat so that I always have 10 fungiwood chests on hand so I hit c --> p this adds a product constraint. Then select the product restraint and you can change the number and the amount as well as the specific material. I don't remember what these keys are in game but they are at the bottom and should be obvious. Now I want to make sure that the work order is not counting bags (in case I want to change the material to general wood) so I add that I want the final product to have the "hard" tag so as not to include bags. (Note: when I made a work order for bags later I selected I think it was called production container or something like that to specify bags over chests.)

Step 4: I hit "r" to add a reagent constraint. I specify that I only want this order to happen when I have 20 fungiwood.

Step 5: Profit! The game will now make fungiwood chests when I no longer have 10 chests in stock and have at least 20 fungiwood. Now you can forget about chests forever because so long as you have the mats and the necessary buildings etc you will always have the proper number of chests.

By hour 20 I had like 2 pages of automated work orders. All of my thrones were microline and all of my tables cobaltite. Every door was alunite and every cabinet orthoclase. At no point did I have to do anything with stockpiles other than to set up my normal stone qps, wood qps, and general everything qps. What used to take me probably a good hour now took me maybe 15 minutes spread out over game play.

[Bumber]

I have found that I do not mind assigning labors using the in game labor interface now that I don't have to do the other tedious stuff.

Umm... have the huge migrant waves hit yet?

I don't mind in-game labors for a couple of dwarves, but fort-wide management still requires DT.

[Halnoth]

fort-wide management still requires DT.

That's your opinion. Mine is now different. I did not create this thread to discuss DT, but to point out that, from my point of view and I hope others, this one change has impacted ease of play to such an extant that I was able to play and enjoy doing so without what I had considered to be requirements to play the game.

I wanted to point it out because I think that there are probably people like me who hold out to download until the utilities are updated and I think that those people should give this version a shot without their normal tools and see how it goes. I was very happy to find that dwarf mode was so so much easier to play now. Easier in terms of UI that is.

You can even specify which workshops get what jobs so if you set up the workshop profile you don't really have to worry about disabling that lvl 1 weapon smith skill on that random migrant. The only thing I did with new migrants, that I didn't immediately need to do something, was disable fishing and hunting. I did this as I found individuals hunting and fishing. The play of .43 is very refreshing.

I found that the benefit of not having a labor program running is that I got to know the few dwarves I cared about and then I had this mass of peasant throw away dwarves that I could care less about. I used to save scum all the time because if a dwarf died then it messed up my labor ratios. In .43 I have save scummed once, and only because my smith died. My used coffins before .43 was maybe 2 or 3, normally military dwarves. Now (and this is much more fun in my opinion) I have 20 used coffins. I can safely say I am having much more fun of both varieties (normal and dwarf fortress).

TL:DR Version: Dwarf Fortress is much more fun when you don't really care about 80% of your dwarves.

[Bumber]

TL:DR Version: Dwarf Fortress is much more fun when you don't really care about 80% of your dwarves.

Well, it's fine an dandy until stuff stops getting done because you didn't realize the dwarf that just died was your last <insert labor here> dwarf.

[Halnoth]

TL:DR Version: Dwarf Fortress is much more fun when you don't really care about 80% of your dwarves.

Well, it's fine an dandy until stuff stops getting done because you didn't realize the dwarf that just died was your last <insert labor here> dwarf.

Oh I understand, but if the dwarf is given a custom name he is important. If he was just <insert random name here> then coffin it is. It was nice to go from all dwarves being named zzWhatever to maybe 20 named dwarves and 80 random unnamed dwarves.

[Bumber]

TL:DR Version: Dwarf Fortress is much more fun when you don't really care about 80% of your dwarves.

Well, it's fine an dandy until stuff stops getting done because you didn't realize the dwarf that just died was your last <insert labor here> dwarf.

Oh I understand, but if the dwarf is given a custom name he is important. If he was just <insert random name here> then coffin it is. It was nice to go from all dwarves being named zzWhatever to maybe 20 named dwarves and 80 random unnamed dwarves.

I prefer to use custom profession names, as taking away names is dehumanizing (debeardizing?) I give endearing nicknames to my starting 7, squad leaders, and repeat tantrumer ("Waluigi", the Menace.)

But I digress. I haven't touched DFHack since before 0.42.01, due to slow updates and instability. I've been sorely missing workflow each time the booze runs out, but now that's one less thing on my mind. DT updates fairly quickly in comparison, and is less likely to bungle things up, so I just resume using it on my fort whenever it updates. I'm still going to be missing dfhack's "clean owned" command for all the worn clothes.