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[Silverionmox]

The hospital would just become a room with the medical jobs enabled of course. Switching all workshops to rooms would force him to do better than the current hospital, which is more a placeholder.

[Waparius]

[MegaNecro]

Thinking over this suggestion last night it occurred to me that the real barrier to making rooms-as-workshops work properly is the way manufacturing jobs currently work. Right now, to make, say, a wooden chair, the dwarf takes a log into the workshop and turns it straight into a chair.

With that approach, the big benefit to having a room-based workshop is just that you can mass-produce a bunch of items at one time. That, and put Jewelers' and Bowyers' shops wherever you like.

IMO the people talking about how magma forges should work were on the right track - crafting goods should be broken up into several discrete steps, with specialised furniture useful for speeding up various steps, in much the same way that the cloth industry works right now.

So, here's how crafting should work in room-based workshops.

1) All current one-step craft jobs are broken up into 2 or more steps, depending on what you're making.

At the very least, you have to start by preparing your raw materials and end by putting the whole thing together. Most shops should have an optional final step that "finishes" the item somehow using extra materials, just like you can glaze stone and clay crafts - varnishing your wooden chairs for instance, or polishing metal armour. The final step should improve the quality of the object, and be necessary if you want a masterwork item.

So, say, for carpentry the steps would be 1) Cutting --> 2) Shaping --> 3) Assembly [--> 4) Sanding & Varnishing] ; for forging you'd go Heating --> Hammering --> Quenching --> Polishing/Sharpening, and so on.

2) All of the necessary steps can be performed on one piece of furniture. Additional furnishings speed up individual steps and increase item quality.

At the very least, carpenters, masons and other stage-one workers should be able to make their items on a crude workbench (the proverbial log or boulder), or (if tools are brought in) with just their required tools. But workers should take a long time to build items in crude conditions, and only be able to make items of a given quality. It takes much less time to cut wood on a powered +Large, Serrated Steel Disc+ than with a hand-saw.

As always, certain work just can't be done without the right furniture - you might be able to work bronze with just a forge and a crucible, but iron will take bellows, an anvil and quenching barrels. (To make things easier and remove the need for the Primordial Steel Anvil Tree, you should probably be able to make a crude anvil out of iron bars and a crude crucible from stone.)

3) Dwarves work together to make items if possible; some steps have less impact on item quality than others, and are assigned to lower-skilled apprentices if possible.

Apprentices dwarf the bellows and grab the boulders from the stockpile. Perhaps it's better to say that certain steps are less influenced by skill; I'm not sure whether or not certain finishing touches would really depend so much on mastery, for instance, polishing and the like, though I'm sure it's possible to ruin anything at any stage if the apprentice is inept or unlucky enough.

Either way this enables a proper apprenticeship system and prevents the problem of churning out a zillion wood blocks or whatever while your carpenters skill themselves up.

Ideally dwarf mode's time scale would be made more realistic, with production time and food/water/sleep needs drastically increased, while travel times drastically decreased, but that's for another thread.


tl:dr, by breaking production up into steps and using specialty furniture to speed up particular steps, room-based workshops can be constructed and upgraded logically and flexibly. If some steps are more important than others dwarves can have a proper apprenticeship. If some materials and jobs need specialty furniture, you lower the number of anvil-shaped bottlenecks to having a functional fortress.

Thoughts?

[GreatWyrmGold]

Interesting suggestion...to be honest I don't have any problems with the current workshop system at all, it's working flawlessly. However your suggestion would make it much more flexible and diverse. Ergo I like it. 

This pretty much sums up my feelings. Another nice thing is that it goes along well with tool useage.

Waparius: Necromancy is fine in Suggestions, and I fail to see why that would do anything except increase micromanagement needs. Which is easier, "Make 20 chairs and 20 tables," or "Make 40 masonry blocks, cut 20(*2) slabs and 20(* legs, and then turn the slabs and legs into 20 chairs and 20 tables?"

[Waparius]

...I fail to see why that would do anything except increase micromanagement needs. Which is easier, "Make 20 chairs and 20 tables," or "Make 40 masonry blocks, cut 20(*2) slabs and 20(* legs, and then turn the slabs and legs into 20 chairs and 20 tables?"

Forgot to mention that it would all be done automatically beyond queuing up your chairs or whatever. You put in, "construct 30 tables", and the workshop builds 30 tables, but the workers go through the different steps on their own. Sorry, my bad.

[edit]
If anything it would simplify some orders. Make 5 Clear Glass Portals instead of Gather 5 Sand, Make 10 Charcoal, Make 5 Ash, Make 5 Potash, Make 5 Pearlash, Make 5 Clear Glass Portals.

[GreatWyrmGold]

...I fail to see why that would do anything except increase micromanagement needs. Which is easier, "Make 20 chairs and 20 tables," or "Make 40 masonry blocks, cut 20(*2) slabs and 20(* legs, and then turn the slabs and legs into 20 chairs and 20 tables?"

Forgot to mention that it would all be done automatically beyond queuing up your chairs or whatever. You put in, "construct 30 tables", and the workshop builds 30 tables, but the workers go through the different steps on their own. Sorry, my bad.

[edit]
If anything it would simplify some orders. Make 5 Clear Glass Portals instead of Gather 5 Sand, Make 10 Charcoal, Make 5 Ash, Make 5 Potash, Make 5 Pearlash, Make 5 Clear Glass Portals.

That could work.

[Silverionmox]

That's more an extension of manager orders, and could be done without changing the concept of workshops. Nonetheless a good suggestion.

The substeps of making a chair, for example, would rather replace the "dwarf sits in his workshop for a few moments" behaviour we have now: you would see him running from cutting bench to polishing bench, for example. The interesting part of it is that now the layout of your workshop matters: efficient placement of tools lessens the need to run around and fastens production; alternatively, you could make a bigger workshop that accomodates multiple dwarves, who probably will need to run around more, but there's less downtime of machinery. It's a choice between optimizing labour and tool productivity. If a dwarf were to be interrupted between substeps, however, he would probably best still drop a block of stone rather than a half-finished throne. I'm a bit averse to include semi-finished products that have only one possible use, unless there's major flavor to be gained (for example if you need to build an iconic piece of equipment for it).