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[el Indio]

Ah. Go to Standing Orders tab. Turn off "Everyone Harvests", set it to Farmers only.

The good thing is this trains your farmers to harvest bigger stacks from farm plots, so you get more food and beer.

The bad thing is it keeps them busy so they might ignore indoor farms to go look at those damn trees.

So in a big fort you'll need a cadre of dedicated dwarves who have Planter and Gatherer enabled, and only those.

You should also really make some custom work details in general, they help a lot.

The standing orders change seems to have cleared up the behaviour, thanks I didn't even know it was there.  So that took precedence over the button that states "only do assigned tasks"?  The manager is one of my initial dwarfs and has the highest skill in farming in the fort.  Does this have an impact on how tasks are allocated? 

Trying to assign so many dwarfs to custom work details isn't something i really want to micro manage.  The labors system seems great for just getting stuff done with minimal input from the player, I would trade efficiency/quality for not having to mess around with that system but specialist dwarfs like doctors, managers, miners, woodcutters I obviously want doing their job as top priority.

[Putnam]

No, and the rest of the answers are basically just "it only accounts for raw skill". It takes the highest skilled available dwarf, basically.

and this is why labormanager will be updated for v50, since labormanager already does many of the things that people are wishing the default system used, and it would not be hard to add additional functionality after it gets updated

indeed

Ah. Go to Standing Orders tab. Turn off "Everyone Harvests", set it to Farmers only.

The good thing is this trains your farmers to harvest bigger stacks from farm plots, so you get more food and beer.

The bad thing is it keeps them busy so they might ignore indoor farms to go look at those damn trees.

So in a big fort you'll need a cadre of dedicated dwarves who have Planter and Gatherer enabled, and only those.

You should also really make some custom work details in general, they help a lot.

The standing orders change seems to have cleared up the behaviour, thanks I didn't even know it was there.  So that took precedence over the button that states "only do assigned tasks"?  The manager is one of my initial dwarfs and has the highest skill in farming in the fort.  Does this have an impact on how tasks are allocated? 

Trying to assign so many dwarfs to custom work details isn't something i really want to micro manage.  The labors system seems great for just getting stuff done with minimal input from the player, I would trade efficiency/quality for not having to mess around with that system but specialist dwarfs like doctors, managers, miners, woodcutters I obviously want doing their job as top priority.

It does take precedence and, in fact, always has, and yes, it has an impact on how tasks are allocated

You don't need to assign a single custom work detail for any of those dwarves, they all either do stuff unrelated to work details (manager), can't even have a work detail assigned for what they do (miners/woodcutters) or are auto-assigned to the correct labor without needing to touch work details (doctor)

[Ctesiphus]

admittedly i barely touched pre-steam version (and mostly watched my partner idly play it on stream), so i don't have that much experience to compare, but..

i think the labor system - at least, for total newbies like me - is like, decent-ish. i agree there should be an option (sad that there isn't!) to have a minimum proficiency limit, & i often find myself stalled on projects that require me to go in and finagle some tasks. which is fine, i guess, but it does put a bit of a wall in front of me while i figure out how to Make Them Do The Thing Once More(tm). i figure that's mostly an issue of experience than the labor system, maybe, though...

[Mungrul]

I really wish there was a way to find out why my dwarves have stopped building walls and floors, and deconstructing workshops, track stops (but not tracks), etc.
They won't empty the depot, or deconstruct it either, so an ever-increasing pile of useful crap appears to be tied up there.

I've been trying to quiz this out for days now

I realised I had a whole horde of poets, dancers and musicians resident thanks to saying "Yes" to every bugger who wanted to join the fortress, so I've been whittling their numbers down by enlisting them then sending them out to raid goblins without any armour or weapons. A few even come back!
The upside is that I'm now starting to see migration waves of "useful" dwarves again.

I've made sure all default labours that can be are set to "Everybody does this".
None are set to "Nobody does this".
All job locks have been removed.

And I've now created a custom labour that includes all the choices under the white option at the bottom of the list (which includes hauling, etc.), then made that an "Everyone does this" labour.

And I think something may be starting to happen, as one of my trackstops appears to have been deconstructed (although it was also close to a workshop that a dwarf toppled in a tantrum, soooo...)

But it's infuriating to not know why dwarves will deconstruct / construct one thing but not another.
Even more is why I can't prioritise things in the Task list, yet I can prioritise jobs at workshops (but not in the orders screen... and around and around we go).

I will admit, my orders screen was a little out of control, and I must have had close to a hundred standing orders set to repeat on certain conditions, but I've trimmed that down to essentials like food, drink, clothing and common furniture now.

[Blue_Dwarf]

I realised I had a whole horde of poets, dancers and musicians resident thanks to saying "Yes" to every bugger who wanted to join the fortress, so I've been whittling their numbers down by enlisting them then sending them out to raid goblins without any armour or weapons. A few even come back!

Did you know there's a "banish" button in their overview screen?

But it's infuriating to not know why dwarves will deconstruct / construct one thing but not another.

Make sure you have a dwarf with mason labor, and that he has nothing else to do.

Sometimes I suspect that they also have to have carpentry or stone carving, depending on the material of the building, but I'm probably imagining things. They just need to have no other job.

[Mungrul]

Did you know there's a "banish" button in their overview screen?

I do, but where's the fun in that?

Make sure you have a dwarf with mason labor, and that he has nothing else to do.

Sometimes I suspect that they also have to have carpentry or stone carving, depending on the material of the building, but I'm probably imagining things. They just need to have no other job.

I'll give it a shot, but I suspect things are muddied somewhat by the fact that miners are now also responsible for certain deconstruct tasks.

[Putnam]

Sometimes I suspect that they also have to have carpentry or stone carving, depending on the material of the building, but I'm probably imagining things. They just need to have no other job.

Masonry, not stone carving, which is the labor for making furniture etc

I'll give it a shot, but I suspect things are muddied somewhat by the fact that miners are now also responsible for certain deconstruct tasks.

Better yet, just let everyone do stuff and don't fiddle with things, which only restricts things further from the default (except mining, but that's got a default detail anyway)

[Mungrul]

Okay, this is interesting. It would appear that the "Everyone Does This" feature is somewhat broken.
That custom manual labour I set up as "Everyone Does this"?
Because no floors or walls were still getting built (despite Wall/Floor Construction being explicitly ticked in the custom labour) I just assigned it manually to each and every occupant in the list.
As soon as I did that, I started getting a slew of construction cancellations, notifying me that "The dwarves were unable to complete the Wall/Floor".
That's more activity I've seen around these tasks than I have seen for the past few evenings of play, so I'm going to stick with this assignment.

Of course, there's no explanation as to why they couldn't complete construction; no, that would be too easy.

Edit: yup, can confirm that after the cancellations stopped, as soon as I started placing new construction orders, the dwarves started building again.

[Putnam]

Any dwarves that are specialized will not do "everyone does this" labors, because "specialization" means and only means "will not do things everyone does, only things they are explicitly assigned to"

[Mungrul]

The only specialised dwarves in my fort are miners and stonecutters / engravers.

[el Indio]

Any dwarves that are specialized will not do "everyone does this" labors, because "specialization" means and only means "will not do things everyone does, only things they are explicitly assigned to"

They will still do harvesting of plants though.  Unless you go into Labors > standing orders > Other :   and select "only farmers harvest".

[Blue_Dwarf]

Make sure you have a dwarf with mason labor, and that he has nothing else to do.

Sometimes I suspect that they also have to have carpentry or stone carving, depending on the material of the building, but I'm probably imagining things. They just need to have no other job.

I just confirmed my suspicion...

Out of all of my mason-enabled dwarves, only the carpenter was building my wells (out of wood blocks and a silver chain). As soon as I enabled carpentry on the other masons, they immediately queued up to build the wells.

Actually no, the carpenter did not have mason enabled. I guess wells don't require mason skill. It used to be one of the things an architect made. But my legendary carpenter just built a masterpiece well.

I am so confused.

[Putnam]

It depends on the actual material. Masons do what building designers used to if they're being made of stone, carpenters if made of wood, blacksmiths if metal.

[Mungrul]

I spent a lot of time this weekend trying numerous things to unbung my fortresses construction/deconstruction log jam, all to no avail.
Track stops still aren't being deconstructed, and I'm now at the stage where any construction outside of furniture seems to have ground to a halt (although walls and floors fare a little better, but still take a ridiculous amount of time to build).
I'm beginning to suspect it's a combination of new version features, like kids doing chores, Mining being responsible for deconstructing certain things, but not all, and the confusion about where Masonry lies in the new labour structure.
What's annoying is that it was fine up until a point, and I had a long period of time where I didn't fiddle with roles at all, but then everything just stopped.

I even resorted to downloading the beta of Dwarf Therapist and using that to try and fix things, but that got even more confusing, so I stopped, removed all jobs from everyone and cancelled any build or deconstruct orders, then restored just the standard jobs using the in-game labour menu.
Nothing.

I mean, it's not all bad, as the fortress still functions thanks to everything being set up before this happened, but it means I can't really build anything else.