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[Compassionate727]

Hello all! Newb player here, I could use some help troubleshooting.

Since I don't know what I'm doing, I let the game roll for my dwarves skills randomly and ended up without a miner or a woodcutter. Not a problem, I thought, I'll just order a specific dwarf to do those things. But my when I change a dwarf's labor preferences, it doesn't stick: after at most a couple of seconds, it reverts to the default.

I know it isn't negative preferences, I already checked that. I looked this problem up online, and I keep finding that it's caused by having autolabor enabled. But I don't have DFHack, so that doesn't seem right. Could anyone give me so guidance?

[Loci]

Mining, woodcutting, and hunting are mutually exclusive jobs. The game won't let you enable more than one of them on any dwarf; if you try, it automatically disables the other two labors.

Tools like Therapist may allow you to enable more than one of those labors, but the behavior when doing so is buggy, ill-defined, and definitely not recommended.

[Pancakes]

Mining, woodcutting, and hunting are mutually exclusive jobs. The game won't let you enable more than one of them on any dwarf; if you try, it automatically disables the other two labors.

Tools like Therapist may allow you to enable more than one of those labors, but the behavior when doing so is buggy, ill-defined, and definitely not recommended.

Also, something to keep in mind if / when you start making a military: there is presently a uniform bug where there are major issues when assigning a miner, woodcutter, or hunter to military squads. Dwarves without those specific labors enabled will be fine, however.

[Hyndis]

I've found great luck setting up different "castes" in my fortress using Therapist. You can make a new custom profession name with assigned labors, then save that setting and easily apply it to many dwarves all at the same time. This helps avoid the woodcutting/mining/hunting uniform issues.

The castes I use are:

Thanes: mining, stoneworking, metalworking, engineering, jewelers.
Woodsmen: woodcutting, carpentry, bow making.
Commoners: farming and craftsdwarves.
(Everyone does all hauling and all medical jobs.)

Note that commoners do not have either mining or woodcutting assigned. Commoners also have only the blue craftsdwarves professions assigned, and these are the generally low skill ones that have effectively unlimited resources to train on, such as making clothes from pig tail fiber. Commoners are recruited in to the military. Commoners are expendable.

Woodsmen are expendable because woodcutting is dangerous and carpentry is easy to train up, but because they have woodcutting assigned they do not join the military. Woodsmen also double as hunters when I want to do some hunting. I'll use Therapist and change out woodcutting to hunting for a while. Then back to woodcutting if I need more trees chopped.

Thanes are the valuable dwarves with the least replaceable skills. Thanes get all the best treatment and are also capable of defending themselves very well. A masterwork steel pick in the hands of a legendary+5 miner is devastating.