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Basically - certain skills, such as butchery, farming (planting seeds at low levels) for instance take too long time to complete.
I fear I haven't seen that problem with farming, but I also notice by the time I have a large amount of farmers going, I've normally had several children grow up who started out their adult lives as competent growers from harvesting tasks, so things go smoothly in that department.
Butchery, however, comes with a few issues. As previously noted, clutter is a large issue. Some animals' corpses are almost enough by themselves to clutter the butcher's shop, so any items not hauled can slow butcher training incredibly. And I have heard someone state that even the lowest level of clutter doubles the amount of time that it takes to finish a task. (There are multiple colors as the shop becomes more and more cluttered.)
The issue with clutter generation this are threefold.
- Food - Fat and meat which must be hauled to a food stockpile. If possible, have a nearby food stockpile with appropriate barrels in it. Possibly just set up a couple of tiny stockpiles: one which takes only fat and one which takes only meat. Hauling meat and fat is complicated by the same hauling issue that affects cleaning up clothing after raids -- multiple objects of the same type at the same location destined for the same location are not carried at the same time. It'd be desirable if dwarves would haul a barrel with enough space in it (empty/meat) to the butcher's shop, add all meat present to it (up to 10), and then haul it back. We'll have to wait on this one.
A few dedicated food haulers are almost always a good idea, and should hopefully make the meat and fat go to good purpose. However, be sure not to have too many general purpose haulers with food turned on. Only as many food hauling tasks are made as there are food haulers. If food is tasked for hauling, even if a hauler won't get to it forever, it is inedible. So try to make almost all dwarves with food hauling turned on specialist food haulers. Otherwise, regular old hungry dwarves won't help you haul your food.
- Skin - This is fairly light. However, tanning can become inefficient because this is normally tasked to refuse. I always turn off "skins" from all refuse piles so they never get hauled. Since they rot so fast and leather is so relatively rare, I want it to be as easy as possible to tan it. Build a tannery very near to the butcher's shop, and try to have a dedicated tanner. He'll idle a lot if you're not hunting or slaughtering a lot, but I find it worth it. If you're unable to spare a full-timer, you can make one of your butchers a tanner as well, but with a regular supply of dead animals, you may wind up with rotted skins and/or corpses as a result.
- Refuse - Skulls, bones and chunks. Unfortunately, if your butcher's shop is outside, this is a bit of a snag. Telling dwarves to haul outside refuse can be useful to get animal corpses butchered (*), but you then have to turn off "remains" in all your stockpiles or your dwarves will be endlessly hualing outside remains. Turning off remains gathering means you will regularly get miasmas in your fort as cats kill off vermin, and the vermin corpses decay. (Or you can trap all of your cats in cages, and then you will have people complain about being assaulted by vermin.)
Again, the suboptimal hauling behavior maks this slow. The propsed hauling solution doesn't work for refuse because there's no such thing as refuse bins or barrels. Sigh.
My suggestion is to move your butcher's shops indoors, separate them from hallways with multiple doors to prevent miasma from escaping, and place a refuse pile nearby which is further doored off, all of it indoors. Place a bone/skull pile directly next to the butcher's shop. Place a craftsdwarf's workshop next to that and have it do two tasks on repeat: make bone bolts, make skull totem.
Corpses that don't get dealt with in time are still behind closed doors in the refuse pile, so no worries about those miasming all over the place, and the chunks rot there in peace as well. (You can always have an outside refuse pile which takes chunks, but this is potentially dangerous and means your workers are hauling their chunks farther. You might be able to get around this by making a permanent moat-guarded refuse pile just outside the cliff face, and hope random archers don't eat these already badly off dwarves...)
Hopefully a few dedicated refuse haulers will keep the chunks in your locked-away refuse pile, the bones in the stockpile right next to it, and only those hauler will have to endure unhappy miasma thoughts. Give them pretty coffers and nicen up the communal dining room to keep 'em happy.
Meanwhile, I don't know if larger animal butchering gives more experience due to its larger time requirements, or if an endless supply of foxes is actually the best route to butcher training.
Finally, I can't write short messages. Someone stop me!
(*) See the hunting article on the Dwarf Fortress Wiki for ways to keep animal corpses flowing without turning on outside refuse gathering.
edit: Doh! Forgot about skulls.
[ January 09, 2007: Message edited by: OldMiner ]
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Topic: Skills (Read 2549 times)