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[Ihtomyt]

I'm sure similar questions have been asked many times, but I've gone over everything I can think of or find on the wiki myself. I have a dwarf clothier with a strange mood. They have been possessed. They want  "tree... life", "cloth... thread", "leather... skin", "blocks...  bricks", "bones...  yes" in that order. I have logs, I have cloth, I have tanned hides, I have blocks, I have bones. She is just sitting there waiting to go insane.

At first I thought it was because I didn't have plant cloth specifically, so I made several pig tail cloth, and put it in a stockpile right next to her. No change.

I thought it might be because all the leather I had was from trading, so I butchered some chickens and tanned their hides. No change.

I thought it might be because all the bones were in the butcher shop and had not been moved to a refuse stockpile, so I moved them. No change.

I thought it might be because all the blocks I had were pilfered from the fortress floor that I reclaimed to build walls with. I made a bunch of rock blocks of my own. No change.

I thought it might be because she wants blocks that aren't stone. I made iron blocks. No change. I made clay blocks. No change. I made glass blocks. No change.

I thought it might be because I'm in the middle of siege and have a burrow active, although I had already checked that every single type of thing she could possibly want is 100% absolutely inside the burrow. I tried securing the perimeter in a different way and deactivated the burrow. No change.

I'm going to keep trying to make more blocks, but I can't really think of anything else. This makes no sense.

Edit: Another thing I thought of that is an oddity about this fort, there is absolutely no surface wood. I have chopped down fungiwood in the caverns. I have traded for wood. I have various logs free, but none of it is technically "trees" that are from this fortress originally. I do have above ground tree logs, but only ones that were traded for. Could this even possibly be the problem? If so, I'd say that's a bug, but I have no idea if that's the problem.

Edit: And she's gone insane. I guess we'll never know what the hell she wanted.

[Quietust]

At first I thought it was because I didn't have plant cloth specifically, so I made several pig tail cloth, and put it in a stockpile right next to her. No change.

There are several things you need to know about Clothier strange moods:

• If you have any cloth made of Adamantine (or any other [DEEP_SPECIAL] material), then you're going to need that.
• If your dwarf has a preference for any type of cloth, then you're going to need that general type (e.g. if there's a preference for Phantom Spider Silk, then any type of Silk will work).
• Otherwise, the dwarf will randomly demand either Plant Fiber cloth, Silk cloth, or Yarn cloth.

Also, just knowing what items are being demanded doesn't help by itself - you also need to know what's already been collected in the workshop, because the demands are listed in order.

Additionally, you need to pay attention to the duration of each demand - if an item shows up for more than 2 seconds in a row, the dwarf wants multiple. For example, if "leather... skin" shows up for 4 seconds, you need 2 pieces, and if it shows up for 6 seconds you need 3 pieces. The only special note is that this does not apply to the first item, which will always show up for 2 seconds regardless of how many you need (unless you're playing version 0.28.181.40d or earlier - back then, all material demands were timed properly).

More detailed information can be found on the wiki.

Edit: And she's gone insane. I guess we'll never know what the hell she wanted.

If you were just going to continue playing without waiting for a response, you could've done us all a favor and not bothered posting in the first place, since all you've managed to do here is waste our time.

[Ihtomyt]

Thank you for the substantive reply. I saved in a manner that I can go back and the restore my save. What happens, happens, I'm not trying to save this dwarf anymore and other more important events in the war have transpired in the meantime. For research, I loaded up the backup save to see. The only type of item that was lasting more than 2 seconds was bones, and I have plenty of those. Even if the other items needed multiples, I had dozens of most of the items and at least 3 if not more of the others before the time of her breakdown.

The dwarf in question's preferences:
Likes cassiterite, copper, dendritic agate, the color azure, chains, and the words of the Lyrical Flute. When possible she prefers to consume donkey, cave lobster, and quinoa beer. She absolutely detests flies.

I have not mined any candy. If there is any other thing with DEEP_SPECIAL I am unaware of it. It seemed like she was requesting plant fiber cloth, and has no preference for any type of cloth. She was a clothier just because of being a migrant. I had several or much more of each plant, yarn, and silk cloth available at the time she went insane. I had at least 3 if not more of each type of block I was making.

If she wanted copper or cassiterite blocks specifically (I don't think you can even make cassiterite blocks?), she was certainly out of luck, as there is none on the map and none came in the previous caravan.

[Ihtomyt]

I only saw the edit about this being a waste of time later on. Well, in general playing games is a waste of time, that's the point. There's no need to be rude about someone asking questions. I have a backup of the save for research purposes. Just because this dwarf, not a real person, just an abstraction represented by interaction between a computer program and the player, went insane, doesn't mean I haven't learned anything. I thanked you for the substantive reply previously, and the information there was still useful, in a general sense. It didn't seem like that was the issue in this particular case, but knowing that you need to use candy cloth if you have it is helpful, for example. I am not an expert at this game, but neither a total noob, so I had tried a lot of things and looked up or already knew a lot of information, but some of what you posted was either new to me or finally stood out to me in a way that made sense, so it was helpful. Questions are asked to learn, not just to succeed in the moment. I don't really care that much that a single dwarf in a virtual world went insane, I care more that I know why the mechanics of the game were working as they were.

I can still load up that save to figure it out, but I have already exhausted all ideas so far to try to do it for "Science!!" etc. By all accounts, including the extra info you provided, I have everything in place that the dwarf should need. I have no further ideas to try without additional input, since I absolutely have many logs, many cloth of all base types, many leather, at least 4 or 5 of every major category of block (stone, wood, metal, clay, glass), and many bones, all easily accessible with no active burrow (and not blocked by tasks, I triple-checked and set up stockpiles dedicated to the purpose). Your input was welcome, and I don't have any candy and the dwarf has no relevant preferences (unless copper is relevant?). I just have no copper with which to test... well, I have some copper now, as goblinite but there was absolutely no way to get it before she went crazy.

Is it possible she wanted copper blocks specifically? I'm actually curious about that mechanic for future reference.

[Quietust]

Knowing that you kept a save backup, I suppose your question was still worthwhile - when you said "I guess we'll never know what the hell she wanted", I assumed you had no save backup and that all of my suggestions had effectively gone to waste.

If you have DFHack installed, you can run the showmood command to see exactly what your dwarf was demanding; if not, you could upload the save backup to the Dwarf Fortress File Depot and let somebody else take a look at it.

Is it possible she wanted copper blocks specifically? I'm actually curious about that mechanic for future reference.

No - the mechanics of strange moods are well-understood and extensively documented on the wiki page linked above, and requests for blocks are never material-specific.

Are you certain that you had all 3 types of cloth present in your fortress, and that they were all available and suitable for crafting purposes (i.e. they hadn't been claimed or partially consumed by a Hospital)?

[Ihtomyt]

Thanks for confirming about the blocks. I thought that was the case, I was just pulling at straws to figure out why things weren't working as expected.

Thank you for the command for showmood. It is hard to tell which thing is "first" on the list in game, but it makes sense cloth would be first for a clothier. I checked things very carefully, and she only needed 1 cloth, and it was actually yarn, not plant. However, I had two free and available sheep wool cloth. The other yarn cloth was indeed in the hospital, but there were 2 yarn cloth completely free, not tasked or in a tasked bin. The showmood command revealed that despite there being 2 yarn cloth, it was reported as there being 0. If I moved the yarn cloth from the hospital onto the ground, things worked and she went and started picking things up.

I knew about hospitals hogging cloth previously, but I just didn't get what was happening (and still don't really) because even though hospitals do that, I had a bunch of other cloth free not in the hospital, 2 of which were the type she actually needed. So, I am still confused. Is there something wrong with the 2 sheep wool cloth that were available? Is it because they were somehow no longer 100% (10000 units?). They weren't in the hospital, and no other sheep wool cloth was in the hospital (there was alpaca in the hospital). I'm not sure how those 2 sheep wool cloth were invalid for her to select, but for some reason, they were...?

[anewaname]

Reclaimed sites do not start with surface trees but if the biomes support trees then you will have saplings on the surface that will take two years to grow in.

[Quietust]

Is there something wrong with the 2 sheep wool cloth that were available? Is it because they were somehow no longer 100% (10000 units?). They weren't in the hospital, and no other sheep wool cloth was in the hospital (there was alpaca in the hospital). I'm not sure how those 2 sheep wool cloth were invalid for her to select, but for some reason, they were...?

It's very likely that that was the problem, and since you do have DFHack, you can actually examine the items to see if that's what was wrong with them.
Locate the suspected pieces of cloth (ideally by highlighting them in the Stocks screen) and then type the command ":lua ~dfhack.gui.getSelectedItem().dimension" - if you see a number other than "10000", then part of the cloth got used for making bandages at some point (and maybe got removed from the hospital and replaced by fresh cloth, because dwarves can be stupid sometimes).

[Ihtomyt]

Thanks for that. I am actually a developer in my day job, but as a result my brain is quite full of code and commands for practical purposes and my time devoted to that, so researching DFHack when I'm not sure what I'm actually looking for is a bit tough. That's an obscure function (from my perspective) to need to use to figure out if cloth is whole, but thank you for pointing it out.

Indeed each of those sheep wool were 8000 units. Now, a couple of things... if there was no sheep wool in the hospital, and the hospital has never had any patients (this is a very new world), why would these be at less than 100%? One of them was purchased through trade, and one of them was created here in the fortress during fortress gameplay, so luckily we have both conditions there. I was making yarn clothes/bags etc., but is it not the case that an article made in the clothier's shop takes a full piece of cloth? How, if a full piece of cloth were created (and assuming the cloth that was purchased should have been full too?) and the hospital has never been utilized, and no cloth of the same kind was ever in the hospital, were these at less than 100% size?

I am interested in the answer to the question above about how this happened. Regardless of how it happened though, I think I may have found my second valid case for "cheating" with DFHack during try hard gameplay. I formerly only used the cleanowned command to be able to dump garbage items dwarves were keeping around just to kill FPS a little. Now I think I may have to add the command to check the dimensions of cloth to the list of approved "cheats". If it is relevant to gameplay in a way that could even lead to a dwarf's death, then the in-game GUI should show the remaining dimensions of a piece of cloth, so since it doesn't I think it is a valid thing to "cheat" to correct.

[Quietust]

Indeed each of those sheep wool were 8000 units. Now, a couple of things... if there was no sheep wool in the hospital, and the hospital has never had any patients (this is a very new world), why would these be at less than 100%? One of them was purchased through trade, and one of them was created here in the fortress during fortress gameplay, so luckily we have both conditions there. I was making yarn clothes/bags etc., but is it not the case that an article made in the clothier's shop takes a full piece of cloth? How, if a full piece of cloth were created (and assuming the cloth that was purchased should have been full too?) and the hospital has never been utilized, and no cloth of the same kind was ever in the hospital, were these at less than 100% size?

As far as we currently know, Hospitals are the only way that partial units of cloth can be consumed. Just because your fortress is very new does not mean you haven't had any patients - it's possible a dwarf got a minor scrape or cut and got bandaged so quickly that you didn't notice. Does your Z-Health screen list anything of interest?

Hopefully this shouldn't be as big of a mystery going forward - I just wrote a new plugin (technically an addtion to the "tweak" plugin) for the next version of DFHack which, when enabled, will display those items as "sheep wool (80%)" and make it less of a mystery as to why your dwarves refuse to use them.

[Ihtomyt]

Thanks for working on a solution to how cloth left is reported in the game.

I looked through health history, and sure enough there was a single dwarf miner that had a broken finger. I have no idea how it happened, no recent reports. It said he was "fighting" but that can be a fall or something too, or am I mistaken? There definitely were no cavern collapses of any sort, that I'm sure of. Until the goblins came all we fought were keas and giant tortoises... and I did pay attention while that was happening, and certainly neither of those things broke his finger. Not sure how he got hurt, but indeed he must have been helped so fast I didn't even see it. Ironic since I've had other forts where people have had arms ripped off and no one help them at all (though one of them did live after killing a giant with one arm left, praying for days pale and dying and then pulled through). I digress of course, but that's the kind of thing that is annoying... usually in my past experience, it is obvious when the hospital is being used, or not being used and it really should be.

Why that cloth was moved OUT of the hospital is another question. I didn't tear down and set up the hospital a second time. It was always the same hospital with the same coffers. That is also another thing that would be ideal to change, is that once cloth has been used in the hospital, it should STAY in the hospital.

[Naia]

Once a bandage have served it's purpose and the wound healed, it simply falls off. Meanwhile a new piece of cloth will have been stored in the hospital. So the used bandage get hauled as any other type of cloth to a stockpile.

A way to work around this issue, is not assign any materials to the hospital. The hospital still functions, but ofc. we want the medical process to go as fast as possible. It could be a matter of life and death. So instead place a one tile cloth stockpile whit only eg. wool cloth enabled in the hospital zone and room for one bin ( and disable wool cloth from other cloth stockpiles ) That ensures all your "hospital cloth" ends up back in the hospital and nowhere else.