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[thefinn]

So, trying to create a work order for this item seems a bit of a nightmare.

I tried changing the condition for requiring more Lye be

Lye Bearing Buckets.

The moment you change the item however, it puts "Frozen" in front of the item type - no matter what you change it to.

This is maddening. Surely someone has this working?

Edit: While I am not sure this will work anyhow yet, I did get rid of the "Frozen" tag by putting in and taking out the material type. No idea what that was about.

[anewaname]

Just use "lye-bearing" and do not use "bucket". I'm a couple of versions back but doubt it has changed.

[mikekchar]

Lye in work orders is broken.  I usually don't bother any more because 10 bars of soap lasts a long time :-)  Just do it every once in a while.  I try to automate everything, but soap is a gigantic PITA.  It's not just the lye.  If you want to have predictable production, you have to use vegetable oil, but jugs don't have stock piles, oil globs don't get counted properly (and you have to know that oil is a glob item), etc, etc, etc.

Having said that, my recollection is that there is a bug in the game where lye that is not in a barrel is not counted in the work orders.  This is the biggest hurdle you have to get over.  So you make the lye in buckets and then you have to create a stockpile that accepts barrels.  However, barrels can hold 100 lye, and you normally don't want to make 100 soap at a time (see below, however), so you make soap when you have more than X lye.  However, buckets of lye are heavy and by the time you haul the bucket of lye to the soapery (is that a word?) you're making more lye (because *all* of your lye is now unavailable while you are hauling it).  So the trick is to put the lye production right next to the lye stockpile which is right next to the soap making workshop so that you only have to haul it 1 tile.

The frozen thing is actually interesting.  It's another bug, but it highlights when you've done the order wrong.  All work orders *must* have an item type.  If you don't specify one, it basically will either not work or work kind of randomly.  For liquids, the way you notice you've done it wrong is that it changes it to "frozen".  So the key is to set the item to "liquid", and the material to lye (or as the other poster said the trait to lye-bearing).  This is also true for work orders with milk, and other things.

Anyway, the last thing you might do to make life easy for yourself is to make some soap by hand up front.  Then just set up a job to make a few lye each month.  When you have more than 100 lye, you know that you have 2 barrels with lye in them and you can make soap without screwing things up too badly.  Of course, again, there isn't much point because 100 soap is more soap than you will ever use, unless you are building structures out off it...

Yeah, I don't automate soap any more, sadly. I always think it would make a nice trade item since you can't buy soap when you embark (a bit of RP here), but it's such a pain that I don't think it's worth it.  Maybe if you have a cave crocodile leather farm and you have lots of rendered fat it might not be *too* bad...

[thefinn]

Lye in work orders is broken.  I usually don't bother any more because 10 bars of soap lasts a long time :-)  Just do it every once in a while.  I try to automate everything, but soap is a gigantic PITA.  It's not just the lye.  If you want to have predictable production, you have to use vegetable oil, but jugs don't have stock piles, oil globs don't get counted properly (and you have to know that oil is a glob item), etc, etc, etc.

Having said that, my recollection is that there is a bug in the game where lye that is not in a barrel is not counted in the work orders.  This is the biggest hurdle you have to get over.  So you make the lye in buckets and then you have to create a stockpile that accepts barrels.  However, barrels can hold 100 lye, and you normally don't want to make 100 soap at a time (see below, however), so you make soap when you have more than X lye.  However, buckets of lye are heavy and by the time you haul the bucket of lye to the soapery (is that a word?) you're making more lye (because *all* of your lye is now unavailable while you are hauling it).  So the trick is to put the lye production right next to the lye stockpile which is right next to the soap making workshop so that you only have to haul it 1 tile.

The frozen thing is actually interesting.  It's another bug, but it highlights when you've done the order wrong.  All work orders *must* have an item type.  If you don't specify one, it basically will either not work or work kind of randomly.  For liquids, the way you notice you've done it wrong is that it changes it to "frozen".  So the key is to set the item to "liquid", and the material to lye (or as the other poster said the trait to lye-bearing).  This is also true for work orders with milk, and other things.

Anyway, the last thing you might do to make life easy for yourself is to make some soap by hand up front.  Then just set up a job to make a few lye each month.  When you have more than 100 lye, you know that you have 2 barrels with lye in them and you can make soap without screwing things up too badly.  Of course, again, there isn't much point because 100 soap is more soap than you will ever use, unless you are building structures out off it...

Yeah, I don't automate soap any more, sadly. I always think it would make a nice trade item since you can't buy soap when you embark (a bit of RP here), but it's such a pain that I don't think it's worth it.  Maybe if you have a cave crocodile leather farm and you have lots of rendered fat it might not be *too* bad...

Yeah I gave up, as it can't be done. May as well be wishing for a stockpile for worn clothing or something.

[Eschar]

snip

Yeah I gave up, as it can't be done. May as well be wishing for a stockpile for worn clothing or something.

You can do that.
Set a refuse stockpile, which accepts worn clothing, to only accept clothing. This will degrade the clothes further over time, so set the refuse pile to give to a clothing-only stockpile that only takes from links.

I don't remember all the quality options for piles, so you might be able to just make a clothing pile and set the qualities to various amounts of wear and tear.

[Bumber]

I tend to use the order completion condition for soap production. You can usually check how much soap you have available to start the production chain, although bars in hospital zones tend not to be counted, which leads to overproduction even if you check for soap <1.

[Urist McNobody]

I don't have any trouble at all with the lye branch of the pipeline.  I never have managed to get an oil branch to work out reliably, so we rely exclusively on tallow-based soap.

Ashery: make 4 lye when lye available (the default option) < 10.

The soap-maker's workshop has adjacent stockpiles for lye and tallow.  Lye makes its way (slowly) into a large pot, which right now is holding 13 lye.

The soap-maker's order is: make 1x soap from tallow, when lye-containing items at least 1 and soap bars is less than 20.  By fiddling with the manager's criteria, I can observe that the one pot of 13 lye counts as exactly one lye-containing item.

One job "make soap from tallow" consumes a stack of tallow and a lye-containing item, producing min(n_tallow, n_lye) from them, returning excess to their stockpiles.

We're currently sitting on 44 bars of soap, 6 of which are currently in the hospital.  That's more over-production than I'd like.  Based on fiddling with the quantity criteria, I'm quite certain that partial bars of soap are not being counted by the manager when figuring out how many bars of soap are in the fort: the manager only "sees" 25 bars.  I'm pretty sure that this is the root cause of so many soap over-production issues, combined with the hospital's flow for partial items.  When a caretaker checks out a bar of soap to clean a patient, the hospital goes out and fetches another fresh bar, returning the partial bar to the general stock.  This leads to an accumulation of partial soap bars which are also not observed by the manager, which triggers the production of more fresh soap.  Rinse and repeat.  Thread and cloth have the same issue, leading to slow accumulation of partial spools of thread and bolts of cloth which cannot be turned into cloth/clothing. 

[anewaname]

... I'm quite certain that partial bars of soap are not being counted by the manager when figuring out how many bars of soap are in the fort: the manager only "sees" 25 bars.  I'm pretty sure that this is the root cause of so many soap over-production issues, combined with the hospital's flow for partial items. 
...

I made it a habit to put the soap maker's shop a distance away from the fort's water sources, because dwarfs will seek the nearest bar of soap and will take a partial bar from the washing area if the new bars are farther away.

[Urist McNobody]

> I never have managed to get an oil branch to work out reliably

For completeness's sake, the step in the oil pipeline that doesn't work out for me is accumulating the pressed oil into a large pot/barrel in specific storage.  The oil just stays in the jug, which gets sent back to hang out with musical instrument parts**.  Lye and milk both successfully accumulate from their buckets to space- and labor-efficient storage.  It would be nice if oil did so, too.

** I could be weirdly specific about how the jugs are made.  Make them from nickel silver or somesuch, just to artificially set aside a pair of tool stockpiles for empty/full jugs that would at least keep them separated from instrument parts.  But the important missing element is the accumulation.

[anewaname]

Back on the original topic, there are two ways to set up the work order's conditional trigger for lye, either based on (attribute=lye-containing) or based on "lye" (type=liquid, material=lye):
-   (attribute=lye-containing) counts the barrels and buckets containing lye, but not the ones that are currently tasked
-   (type=liquid, material=lye) counts the amount of liquid lye (possibly counting stacks of lye[10] as 1 item, if traders brought it)

So if you have a Food stockpile (that uses barrels and accepts lye) and start an order to make 100 lye, your dwarfs will empty buckets of lye into one barrel in the Food stockpile... which means you will have 1 (attribute=lye-containing) items but will have 50 (type=liquid, material=lye) items.

[Skorpion]

snip

Yeah I gave up, as it can't be done. May as well be wishing for a stockpile for worn clothing or something.

You can do that.
Set a refuse stockpile, which accepts worn clothing, to only accept clothing. This will degrade the clothes further over time, so set the refuse pile to give to a clothing-only stockpile that only takes from links.

I don't remember all the quality options for piles, so you might be able to just make a clothing pile and set the qualities to various amounts of wear and tear.

So, that will ONLY accept worn clothing?
I guess that and a magma flood is how you get rid of the stuff.

[anewaname]

The method others have posted is something like:
- create a binless stockpile that accepts clothing but only accepts from links, then set the clothier/leatherworker workshops to give to it.
- then set up a second binless stockpile that is both a Refuse stockpile (set all categories/items to None so other trash isn't put here) and a Clothing stockpile.

That should cause all new clothing to be stored either in the workshops or in the first stockpile, and the second stockpile will accept all other clothing (dwarfs may grab it from here but if they do not, it will rot fast).

[Bumber]

So, that will ONLY accept worn clothing?
I guess that and a magma flood is how you get rid of the stuff.

It will accept any clothing that's not directly from the workshop, which is close enough. There aren't any quality settings for wear.

The refuse setting should cause the clothes to rot away. Magma and trading are faster options. Avoid magma on masterworks to prevent negative thoughts.

[Mohreb el Yasim]

I would love if we were to get more settings in stockpiles and work orders (making algebra and boolean algebra would be useful)