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[Kyubee]

In my experience, I'd personally say clothing and soap are the most overlooked. I've really never managed to get a successful clothing or soap industry set up; too many steps, i get overwhelmed and confused.

Economically, I'd say a lot of people sleep on pottery. Sure, it takes fuel, but its still an incredibly lucrative thing, in my experience. Clay is infinite, so as long as you either have your dorfs pumping out fuel, or access to magma, its a source of trade goods that literally never runs out, and never needs you to take a break to replenish it.


Activity-wise, I always tend to overlook bedrooms. I just throw together a dormitory for the starting seven, and put off making individual bedrooms until the late stages, though, I have been getting better about it in recent forts.

[NordicNooob]

The usefulness of minecarts is pretty often overlooked, perhaps because people are afraid of them. Not exactly as hauling machines (wheelbarrows are way more versatile and less effort for fast hauling), but for their prowess as weapons, their use in QSPs, their ability to easily make magma forges wherever you want, and their use in compact water reactors for large amounts of power.

I think metalworking is disregarded some as well. Not that people don't use it, but that people don't use it enough. In any embark with a reasonable amount of ore you can almost certainly afford a huge metal industry, which can replace stone furniture with high-value counterparts. Especially when an embark has gold, since gold is pretty close to useless otherwise. Other non-weapons-grade metals apply to that as well, but gold is quite common to have in large amounts and also actually valuable, unlike zinc, nickel, lead and whatever.

[Quarque]

It depends on the person.

Personally, I have always been afraid of nobles and never learned how to use a manager until yesterday. Wow.. it's a different game now.

The usefulness of minecarts is pretty often overlooked, perhaps because people are afraid of them. Not exactly as hauling machines (wheelbarrows are way more versatile and less effort for fast hauling)

Sad but true. Wheelbarrows are way better for the purpose of transportation. Still, my dreams is to have a fortress with a giant semi-realistic minecart transport system, it would be so dwarfy!

Not using them for other purposes, most of those are too exploity to my taste.

[PatrikLundell]

I have no problems with clothing or soap, although soap production starts a bit later, and it's annoying that the process requires buckets (lye production cancels due to lack of buckets: start soap production. Out of lye: start lye production).

I rarely do pottery because of the immense amount of work required: collect clay (easy), haul clay to the magma kiln (lots of work), produce pot, haul pot to stockpile. Clay bricks are even sillier, as the amount of hauling of the clay lumps to the kiln tends to be longer than hauling them directly to a building site. I don't care about value since there's no economy, and worn socks will buy you everything you want from the caravans anyway.

I've never used dye or encrusting, and I don't do milking (buckets!), cheese making (follows), milling (DF can't handle multiple use input products in any reasonable way), pressing (same issue).

Bee keeping is a pain because of the jug usage, but I still try to make mead, provided I can make jugs fast enough to actually have any free ones for the extraction.

Unless I get an emergency, I try to dig out bedrooms after the basics have been set up, which tends to be some time in the second year. However, I manage my migrant waves to be at most 10.

I don't use the Manager, as it's only capable of handling the things that are sufficiently simple to be managed by workshop orders (which have the added benefit of actually using the right workshops when there's more than one). It doesn't help that I run my fortress on a season based schedule.

[Quarque]

Heh, workshop orders are another thing I have yet to figure out. Maybe I should try those next.
edit: what do you mean by "workshop orders"? I thought for a moment that you were talking about some DFHack addon, or do you mean the 'o'rder menu?

Just for clothing alone a manager can automate everything. I just set a condition to produce 1 trouser whenever there is none available, same for socks and shirts. To ensure that cloth supply doesn't build up too much, I add conditional orders for other items when the available cloth surpasses certain thresholds. Now I never need to check dwarf clothing again.

I also streamlined soap production. Produce one ash whenever there is less than two. Produce one lye whenever there is less than one, and there is ash available. Produce one soap whenever there is less than ten, and lye + tallow is available. Never look at those workshops again.

About gold - building whole cities out of valuable metals is a favorite. If you donīt have massive amounts of gold or silver, brass can be good too. Still quite valuable, shiny and some maps can produce absolute tons of it.

[PatrikLundell]

Workshop orders: Placing the orders directly in the workshop "q" interface.

Manager for clothing: Sure. You're going to produce pant until all the pants needs are met, then you're going to produce socks until all the sock needs are met (interrupted by additional pants, occasionally), i.e. manager production orders are process starting from the top, so you'll produce the same things over and over again, rather than engage in a round robin production, so everyone's going to have new pants and socks while the dresses (last of the clothing items in this imaginary list) are rotting off their bodies. Also, I think the manager knows as much about wear and creature sizes for its production criteria as stockpiles do, i.e. nothing, and less about quality (at least stockpiles know about quality). However, I strive to give my multi racial population masterworks clothing (it takes quite a few years to get there). Also, it can't handle multiple workshops of the same kind if it works as auto loom does (constant cancellations as the thread produced orders production of cloth in all looms at the same time, resulting in cancelled orders for all but one of them).

You're probably right about soap production, though: that's a case (the first one I've encountered) where the manager might actually achieve something that's better than manual handling. It might actually be possible to apply that to the mead production chain as well. (Although I'll still have to manage the ash production manually, as I want to disable it during sieges and the catching up/R&R seasons, but the following steps should be able to use criteria).

[knutor]

Vermin. Dissection. Extract trade.

Last thing before Dye, I make is Kennels. Why? Because I like trap fish and trap land animal on /R. I lose more dorfs to that than to cave-ins. Baiting traps is stupidly micromngt, the dorfs should know how to bait their own trap. My answer to all the entertainment lost by Trapping bugs? dfHack /catsplosion, just let the cats handle vermin, and never door them out.

Also, I've completely stopped making rope, prefering chain, since new development strategy, seems to resolve around a surface volcano and waterfall, at every embark, to pleasure enough away, the STRESS, on the bearded psychos.

[anewaname]

It depends on the person.

Oh yeah! Everyone values things differently and sometimes they try something new and it becomes their new joy.

I used to use animal trappers and no longer do. Same with pottery. Only one functioning beehive existed in my forts, so only one waxworker as well. I used to ignore glass making because the limitless source of sand seemed cheesy, but now glassworking is used to keep dwarfs supplied with happy crafting thoughts.

For soap, after enough embarks in evil areas, 2 to 10 lye is always included in my embark items, to speed up soap production.

[Staalo]

For me its siege engines. I never even build siege workshops in my forts unless I get one of those Very Stupid ideas like autofiring ballistae through common areas for civilian Dodge training. I have never managed to use siege engines successfully for fortress defence.

Another is dwarven justice; although in recent versions it is now possible for a dwarf to survive their brush with the Law, I'm still wary of implementing any justice features in my forts. I prefer exile for those few really unmanageable dwarves.

[recon1o6]

If there's one industry I see completely forgotten about, its glass and rare metal crafting. I'm talking aluminium, platinum etc and glass crafts and statues. Infinite if embarked near water or a desert for the former, good cash in the latter and keeps them out of your smith's hands when they go into a strange mood so you can get a nice platinum whip or something

Besides, what's more dwarfy tomb for a noble than casting a likeness of him in obsidian studded with glass and gold?

[Leonidas]

Missions. People seem scared of the bugs, but I've done hundreds of them without any problem. It's a great way to steal livestock and artifacts.

[HungThir]

Manager for clothing: Sure. You're going to produce pant until all the pants needs are met, then you're going to produce socks until all the sock needs are met (interrupted by additional pants, occasionally), i.e. manager production orders are process starting from the top, so you'll produce the same things over and over again, rather than engage in a round robin production, so everyone's going to have new pants and socks while the dresses (last of the clothing items in this imaginary list) are rotting off their bodies.

nope, it processes them sensibly.  queue up a "make 10 if less than 10" order for each type of garment, do something else for a little while, then check in on the orders list, and you'll see most of the clothing orders are at, say, 3/10 remaining.  same applies for forging armor, weapons, etc

Also, I think the manager knows as much about wear and creature sizes for its production criteria as stockpiles do, i.e. nothing, and less about quality (at least stockpiles know about quality).

you can have the manager create clothes in whatever sizes you need, but you will need a separate order for each item for each size, which is a pain in the arse.  you can load and save orders lists (dfhack feature, i think?), so you could hypothetically set it all up once, save the list, and reuse it in future forts... but this may only work within the same world.

However, I strive to give my multi racial population masterworks clothing (it takes quite a few years to get there).

just mass manufacture with basic "make 10 if less than 10" orders. your dwarves will upgrade eventually if there's better stuff available, so by the time you're spitting out masterworks regularly, your dwarves will generally be wearing masterworks.  every time a caravan arrives, sell them anything that's less than the quality you want your locals wearing, to kick off fresh production and thus fresh masterworks

Also, it can't handle multiple workshops of the same kind

it absolutely can.  if you have more than one dwarf in a profession, i highly recommend making more than one workshop, so that you can bang them work orders out faster.  the jobs created by the manager will be distributed among the workshops

if you don't want your legendary guy wasting time banging out rock blocks or whatever, designate one of your workshops as being for whatever skill threshold you want (in the workshop profile screen) and tell it to not accept general work orders.  then, for the products you want a regular supply of masterworks from, create orders through your legendary workshop's profile work orders screen (not the general manager screen, and not the explicit job list in the "q" screen), so that those jobs will only be scheduled at the restricted workshop, and therefore only completed by workers with your desired skill level

manager work orders are kind of a pain for soap, in that some of the automatic reagents/products are not quite right and need tweaking (you need "lye-containing items", not "lye", etc), but it's similarly a "once it's working, you can forget it, and just always have soap" kinda thing

the manager takes a bit of learning to figure out how to drive it, but it is very very good

[KevinM]

Dye.   I have not found a good use for it.  Especially if I want to keep my wealth low until I have good armor and weapons and defense.

I didn't use trappers, since I didn't realize that dwarves will eat untamed but captured vermin until now.  I was wondering why some of my dwarves showed these as their favorite meal.  Guess I'll put a few dwarves to work.

I don't use plant or animal extraction, since there isn't a vanilla use for it that I know of.

I use my manager for a lot of auto production, with some manual assistance since I don't have it that well set up.  The only part I struggle with is if I can set it to only produce when a linked stockpile has an item (for instance when stockpile1 has a single raw fish and stockpile2 has 3 or more liquid ingredients), since I'm not using dhack to make specialized foods and I'm trying to cover the favorite foods positive thoughts.

my metalcrafting tends to wait till later for the wealth reason, with my expensive things being clothes and food, with either pottery (statues) and glass (spikes) just for the sake of boosting rooms to acceptable.

[PatrikLundell]

@HungThir: The Manager does round robin for as long as you have the material, but once you're out of material the job allocation will start at the top, so you produce one cloth, one pant order is generated, and there's nothing for the others. Once you've produced a second piece of cloth the allocation starts at the top, i.e. pants.

The manager orders can PRODUCE different sizes, but it cannot base the production on the same size, so if you have 11 ogre sized pants from the last siege, the check will say that you have more than 10 pants, so your humies won't get any new ones.

Once I have 10 non masterworks pants production stops producing pants. There will be a short production spurt after you've sold off the garbage, typically consisting of 1 masterwork and 9 sub par quality ones.

Workshops: Exactly. The moronic manager will split the stone crafting jobs over all of the stone crafting, wood crafting, and bone crafting craftdwarf shops, resulting in all crafting grinding to a halt once a crafter gets a mood, gets to sleep, or goes on a socialization/prayer bender, because his type of job sits at the top of the list in all the workshops.

I strongly disagree about the quality of the Manager. It's got a number of elements for a powerful system, so the potential is there, but there are too many parts missing for it to actually work decently. Many of the problems lie in the input criteria (it doesn't know how to figure out if you have any shearable animals, for instance, resulting in a steady stream of cancellation reports if you try to use it), but you also have production deficiencies (want your still to top up your stocks of Swamp Whiskey? You're out of luck, unless you think producing random types of (plant based) booze until you've happened to produce enough Swamp Whiskey is rational). There is no support at all for time of year (fruit ripens during the summer, so you might want to cut down on some jobs and ramp up on others, for instance). Size, wear, quality: all missing. There's also no support for dedicating workshops to particular tasks, although you can work around it to some extent with skill limits, as mentioned. However, you'd want your web processing loom down by the cavern to handle web collection and processing, not the "ordinary" ones, for instance, and I want my Farmer's Workshop by the pasture to handle shearing/spinning, not the one down in the workshop area. Note that DF itself has the functionality for ordering the production of e.g. a particular type of booze, but neither the UI nor the Manager supports it. I've mentioned the lopsided handling of production orders on supply shortages: there's a need to be able to group production so round robin production is performed within the group even when the supply dries up: when supplies become available again production should continue where it was broken off. There's a need for multiple use input to be split into different production chains rather than have the production being random based on in which order dorfs happen to take the jobs (in particular if you're short of dorfs, so they have multiple hats). Try to use the Manager to split Pig Tails into cloth, booze, and food, for instance.

[Bumber]

I don't use plant or animal extraction, since there isn't a vanilla use for it that I know of.

Plant extraction has a use.