Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Xinael]

Hey,

I want to create a work order that checks the amount of quarry bush leaves already processed before creating more. I don't want to use every bag in the fortress for quarry bushes and take them away from other jobs.

But I can't find how to specify "quarry bush leaf" as an item condition. It's available as a material but that doesn't seem to work - I guess because the item isn't actually made from quarry bush leaves? There doesn't seem to be any other way to specify them. Does anyone know how to do it? Is it just not possible?

Thanks.

[Mostali]

quarry bush leaf is a (m)aterial, though I got a weird interaction when I tried it.  First, I had to change the item type back to "item".  Second, It seems to think I have 10 in the fortress right now, when my stock screens says I don't have any (neither leaves nor bushes).  There are 5 in the trade depot owned by the caravan, but that doesn't help solve the mystery.

Anyway, to keep from using all the bags you could instead use that as your limiter.  For my quarry bushes I have "Amount of empty bag available is at least 4" and another work order at my clothier to produce bags when they're lower than 10.

[Xinael]

Anyway, to keep from using all the bags you could instead use that as your limiter.  For my quarry bushes I have "Amount of empty bag available is at least 4" and another work order at my clothier to produce bags when they're lower than 10.

I already do this; the challenge is that there are a lot of other draws on bags (sand, milling) and on cloth (clothing, obviously) so there aren't always bags available. I'd rather not end up with a massive stockpile of processed food items with 400 bags in it if I can! It's already doable with millable products but doesn't seem possible with quarry bushes.

[mikekchar]

If quarry bushes are not working, perhaps you can make a condition on rock nuts.  Every time you process to bag, you will produce a rock nut.  So you could say "at most 10 rock nuts".  Of course you will have to occasionally use the rock nuts to ensure that you process quarry bushes.  Personally, I tend to avoid quarry bushes (and on my latest embark I brought *no* rock nuts).  Unless you really want the rock nut oil, I can't think of a reason for growing quarry bushes.  There is already waaaaay too much food even in the most difficult embarks.

[Valkyrie]

*Solution* Use all three traits to filter for the processed version:
material: "quarry bush leaf"
item: "leaves"
trait: "cookable"

That gave me the right readouts, so I'm hopeful it will for you.  Below's some of the data I got enroute to that.

--- Data gathering, from my current mess of a fort ---

With the stock screen listing these quantities:
225 quarry bushes [plant] (~approximately 85 itemstacks)
626 quarry bush leaves [leaf]  (~approximately 140 itemstacks)
329 rock nuts [seed] (9 of which are planted)
(sums to 1180 quarry-bush-related items, in ~545 itemstacks)

I also have various other leaves (694 total, including quarry), plants (1768 total, including quarry, in z-Stocks; plain z-screen's "Plants" is 339), and seeds (2967 total, including rock nuts), along with uncounted roasts using quarry bush leaves as ingredients, which inevitably makes this harder to narrow down.

The conditions interface says I have:
1208 material-"quarry bush leaf" item-unspecified
1208 material-"quarry bush plant" item-unspecified
1208 material-"rock nut" item-unspecified

359 material-unspecified item-"leaves"
291 material-"quarry bush leaf" item-"leaves"
0 material-"quarry bush plant" item-"leaves"
0 material-"rock nut" item-"leaves"

1707 material-unspecified item-"plants"
0 material-"quarry bush leaf" item-"plants"
225 material-"quarry bush plant" item-"plants"
0 material-"rock nut" item-"plants"

2661 material-unspecified item-"seeds"
0 material-"quarry bush leaf" item-"seeds"
0 material-"quarry bush plant" item-"seeds"
320 material-"rock nut" item-"seeds"

626 material-"quarry bush leaf" item-"leaves" trait-"cookable"

So, it seems to sum together the quarry-bush-related materials (1208 is close enough to 1180, I'm assuming an active job or somesuch accounts for the discrepancy), until you start specifying items as well.  Item type without materials seems to be approximately accurate for plants and seeds, slightly lower than the expected values - probably what jobs have reserved and not counting items still in the FarmPlots, which seems reasonable to me.  Item type + material type also seems to work sensibly for seeds and plants.  But in both cases, leaves are a mystery - where the 359 'leaves' and 291 'quarry bush leaf leaves' come from, I'm at a loss to explain.  As well as why adding the restriction of "cookable" /increases/ the value it finds - I guess it means thinking of these as narrowing restrictions is the wrong paradigm, but what to replace that view with is an open question.

Unless you really want the rock nut oil, I can't think of a reason for growing quarry bushes.

You can get stacks of 20 leaves relatively easily, which classically was a very useful way to make larger-quantity roasts, much more reliably and 'easily' (ymmv, preferred playstyles/systems/industries, etc) than large meat stacks.  I don't pay nearly as much attention to my roast outputs anymore (since, as you said, its easy to drown in food), but it stills seems to fill that niche rather well.  (it was desirable both for stretching high value ingredients (titan meat, etc), and for consuming less stockpile space (if you avoid barrelling prepared meals, which is probably another outdated habit)). 

(producing rock nut press cakes is neat to do as a challenge, but given how little it rewards, that actually rather /supports/ your point I think :p.  Plus, with all the other seeds you can now turn into press cakes & oil, that's no longer a specific reason to pursue quarry bushes)

[mikekchar]

Hmm... My guess is that "cookable" is counting total quarry bush leaves, while without the cookable, it is counting the total number of stacks of things with quarry bushes in them.  I've noticed that the manager tends to mix units very badly.  For example soap seems to use the hospital units.  Bolts, again, use some mysterious unit which I have yet to figure out.

Good work on this, though!  I have found that you can *usually* find the thing you are looking for, but it helps if there is something else in the production chain to tell you what it is :-P

The one thing I can think of to use for rock oil is for when you want to make soap in a vegetarian fort :-).  I think extending prepared meals made more sense in previous versions.  Right now, prepared meals are so overpriced that you can easily buy out the caravan without trying hard.  Also it seems that dwarfs only get the good feeling for meals if you include an ingredient that they like -- which is virtually impossible.  And because it's pretty easy to get the manager to schedule cooking, I'll probably only have 100 or so prepared meals for a fortress of 200 dwarfs.  On average they will only eat about 7 a day, so there is plenty of time cook more.