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[PatrikLundell]

Currently you can specify detailed material and detailed size (based on race) when making clothing and armor. I suggest the addition of a second race list that only contains the races that are present among the residents of your fortress, making it easier to find the desired one than searching a rather long list. The alternative to that would be a toggle to specify whether the list should be complete or filtered down to resident races.

[Bumber]

Might be more useful to restrict it to the size ranges that your citizens can wear. For instance, hyena man-sized clothes can actually be worn interchangeably by all four standard races.

What's more important, IMO, is being able to automate the production of properly sized clothes. Currently, work order conditions can't check the sizes of available clothes. You can't tell when, for example, your ant man-sized clothes are running low.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Might be more useful to restrict it to the size ranges that your citizens can wear. For instance, hyena man-sized clothes can actually be worn interchangeably by all four standard races.

But then you wouldn't be able to make suits of armour to store for your animal person adventurers. Or even just for the human mercenaries you intend of hiring in a couple of year.

[voliol]

When specifying materials for an order, those you have are at the top, and the others are greyed out and disabled. Granted, you might want to make armor for races that are not in your fortress (e.g. for adventurer setups), so you couldn't make the menus identical... Dwarves are already at the very top iirc.

[PatrikLundell]

Yes, it would be even better if DF would take size into consideration and group races. It works fine with the standard (i.e. unmodded) dwarves, elves, and goblins, as they're exactly the same size, but it gets messy when you have partially overlapping size ranges, so it might be tricky to implement (as well as to display). Of course, DF could go in the opposite direction and make clothes race specific (bean pole even clothes wouldn't be able to house the broad dwarven torso, while, dwarven clothing would be like sacks covering only the top of the elven trunks) or even caste specific for species with radically differently sized castes (like e.g. queen/warror/worker, ... ants).

The difference between materials and races is that unavailable materials are actually unavailable, so the production orders will fail, while while races not present just means you currently have no users for those items in the fortress (all elephant men are out on a raid, for instance [although I hope that will change eventually so they will still remain tied to the fortress, rather than losing all possessions when away temporarily]).

A possibility with a single race menu would be to list the present races at the top with a divider between them and the rest (retaining the civ race as the top one).

I know the Manager is deficient when it comes to many things (such as race, quality, and wear for clothing armor alone), and I don't use it (although someone managed to find a case where it actually would be useful for me). When it's overhauled (which would be a much larger task than some minor UI modification), that ought to be addressed, together with the ability to brew specific kinds of booze based on their inputs, issue shearing orders based on the actual availability of creatures ready to be sheared, etc. That monster pile of work has no chance to fit within the Premium release schedule, though.

I currently mostly work around the race issue by having a clothier of each relevant race and set the clothier workshop profiles to dedicate each shop to each clothier (or set of clothiers), allowing me to just give standard "make dress R" etc. orders.

[Iä! RIAKTOR!]

I suggest clothes to be made for special body part size. Example, molemarian is bigger than dwarf but have not too big hands (because big lower body and four legs), so molemarian can wear gloves from struck down dwarf, manera is the same size with dwarf, but has bigger hands, so cannot wear dwarven gloves, but can wear troll gloves.

[knutor]

I like this recommendation, that list is unwieldly.

Something like: air, land, sea, magma, and multiple, main clothing catagories.

[Starver]

I see in my mind a "To fit.." selector that has top levels of (something like)...

"Named individuals" - list, maybe subdivided to resident/guest/etc, of all those currently on-site (or should be), or just ordered like that, alphabetically/whatever within each section
"Size range" - By the existing "small"/(unspecified Dwarf-sized)/”large" categories, which are essentially best-guess where this is an abstraction, and can be doubled up or more with thin/fat, quadruped, whatever might make a difference to the item concerned
"Race" - Maybe a refinement of the current list (dwarf at top, other fortress-resident types next,... all others off the bottom in case you're determined to be proactive to non-obvious needs).

Intuitive, unverbose start, drill down into the bit(s) that you require, with the ability to stick at any useful level without having to go entirely to a branch-end. Exactly same tree of selections available to Manager-matching checks and balances as with the production orders themselves, if written from the start in suitably cross-functional code to create and navigate through in each circumstance. A spec that evfectively phrases as "If number of unrotten socks available to residents is less than 20 pairs, make another five pairs" might make all the socks fit or not fit a peculiarly-sized resident, to the chagrin of someone, but should perhaps be proportional enough for a good start. (Add "if %individual% has less than two pairs of suitable socks, make some of %their% size" and "if %individual% has more than ten pairs (...) make several of %dwarf% size", to cover such exceptions when discovered to be possible.)

SMOP! (Maybe.)

[Leonidas]

It's definitely an awkward list. Maybe push the five most recently used sizes to the top.

[knutor]

Biology has a good division, but its Latin. Maybe start gear breakdowns with zone type, like underworld for Reptile Man, good for Fairy Man, magma for Fire Man and evil for Blood Man. Put zone we embark in ontop, with its zipper submenu open.

[Pillbo]

Unless I'm mistaken there are only 3 sizes. So perhaps it would be easier to have the three size options for clothing and when selecting a size it could display the standard creatures along with any others in your fort that the size would fit. Also maintaining the option to see a full list or search by creature like it does now.

article              sized for

small tunic -     rat men
                       cave fish men
                       gorlaks
                       kobolds
                       [tab for full list]

tunic -             dwarves
                       elves
                       goblins
                       [tab for full list]

large tunic -     humans
                       trolls
                       elephant men
                       [tab for full list]

[Shonai_Dweller]

Unless I'm mistaken there are only 3 sizes. So perhaps it would be easier to have the three size options for clothing and when selecting a size it could display the standard creatures along with any others in your fort that the size would fit. Also maintaining the option to see a full list or search by creature like it does now.

article              sized for

small tunic -     rat men
                       cave fish men
                       gorlaks
                       kobolds
                       [tab for full list]

tunic -             dwarves
                       elves
                       goblins
                       [tab for full list]

large tunic -     humans
                       trolls
                       elephant men
                       [tab for full list]

You are mistaken.
Size is small or large in comparison to whoever is making the item. So that won't really work in mixed race fortresses. Well, it depends how mixed up things are after Mythgen I suppose. It might still be handy to have small/regular/large in comparison to your main race.

[PatrikLundell]

I believe items are described as small/large/nothing compared to the fortress building civ's race, rather than the manufacturing individual. The copper helmets my gremlin armorer made as training are not described as large, even though they were actually made for dwarves. However, if you issue an order to make helmets without specifying size and you have differently sized armorers in the fortress you're going to get the size of the armorer (and if one leaves the smithy and another one takes over you can get mixed sizes if the smithy isn't profiled to members of a specific size).

[Leonidas]

I believe items are described as small/large/nothing compared to the fortress building civ's race, rather than the manufacturing individual.

In adventure mode, item size is relative to the currently controlled adventurer. So the same hood will appear large, normal or small depending on who's looking at it.

[PatrikLundell]

I believe items are described as small/large/nothing compared to the fortress building civ's race, rather than the manufacturing individual.

In adventure mode, item size is relative to the currently controlled adventurer. So the same hood will appear large, normal or small depending on who's looking at it.

It makes a lot of sense to have character based focus in adventure mode and entity based focus in fortress mode.

This suggestion was made with fortress mode in mind. However, of adventure mode supports/will support tailoring/armor smithing (I don't know, as I don't play it) it would make sense to have the corresponding list being party centric, i.e. listing the party member races in the first section and everything else in the second one.