Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[IceShade]

Haven't been able to find anything yet, though I can imagine this isn't the first time someone has wondered this...

Regardless, I'd like to know what options there are to optimizing stockpiles. My situation: a stockpile for blocks. Pretty large, about 90 bins max. I used a ton of these blocks, about 90% of what I had. I noticed that only 5 to 6 bins were removed, even though I used up around 200 to 300 blocks. I had a quick glance through my bins and I saw that in most bins there were only two blocks, one block, three blocks, etc.

The stockpile was almost filled with bins, and the majority only had a tiny amount of blocks inside. I "fixed" this by selecting (d-b-d) dump on the entire stockpile (so the contents would be dumped) and remove-dump every bin. All the blocks were moved to the dump pile, the empty bins moved to a bin stockpile and then I reclaimed all the blocks. This achieved what I wanted, but it took a lot of effort.

Are there no more efficient ways to do this? I noticed the same problem with my metal bar bins (about 600 bars) and I seriously do not feel like dumping 600 bars and reclaiming them all. That's probably going to be a whole season of hauling..

[Jim Groovester]

Stockpiling experiments are what keep dwarves busy. At least my dwarves

You could try dumping the bins, and maybe the dwarves will haul the unforbidden contents to the stockpile. Although before you do this, I'd suggest dumping a test bin and finding out whether or not it will actually work.

It'd be the same amount of hauling, roughly, but dwarves exist to pander to the whims of their player overlords.

[Albedo]

You could try using <q> over the stockpile and reducing the number of bins/barrels allowed, see if they don't get emptied and then carted away.  (Make sure you have a stockpile for empty bins, or some other stockpile that's short on them.)

(edit - nm, added below)

[LegacyCWAL]

Also, try mass-forbidding and then mass-reclaiming the stockpile.  That sometimes helps.

[zchris13]

Take from stockpile on another stockpile.

[Mount]

I don't suppose there's a way to consolidate beer barrels...  I tend to end up with lots and lots of barrels with one unit of booze in 'em -- I guess the dwarfs are worried about falling in when they try to get that last bit -- but I just can't bring myself to commit the sacrilege of marking the beer for (d)umping. 

[DennyTom]

You could try using <q> over the stockpile and reducing the number of bins/barrels allowed, see if they don't get emptied and then carted away.  (Make sure you have a stockpile for empty bins, or some other stockpile that's short on them.)

This is pretty good solution - it does not need much effort and results are quite good.

[IceShade]

You could try using <q> over the stockpile and reducing the number of bins/barrels allowed, see if they don't get emptied and then carted away.  (Make sure you have a stockpile for empty bins, or some other stockpile that's short on them.)

This is pretty good solution - it does not need much effort and results are quite good.

I tried that.. but no bins were being removed at all.

I'll try the "move to different stockpile" next time. I wonder whether they will drag every item individually, or whether they will simply drag all the bins (thus making no difference).

Or I could just set up a dump zone right next to the stockpile, dump, recover. That worked. The stockpile with about 50 to 60 bins with next to nothing in them was reduced to 8 or 9 bins that way. I'm not kidding.

I guess efficiency is not in the dwarven vocabulary

I don't suppose there's a way to consolidate beer barrels...  I tend to end up with lots and lots of barrels with one unit of booze in 'em -- I guess the dwarfs are worried about falling in when they try to get that last bit -- but I just can't bring myself to commit the sacrilege of marking the beer for (d)umping. 

I suppose the only way to fix that is to .. make more beer and have them fill up those half empty barrels again. I usually keep producing booze until the stockpile is completely full anyway.

[Mount]

I don't suppose there's a way to consolidate beer barrels...  I tend to end up with lots and lots of barrels with one unit of booze in 'em -- I guess the dwarfs are worried about falling in when they try to get that last bit -- but I just can't bring myself to commit the sacrilege of marking the beer for (d)umping. 

I suppose the only way to fix that is to .. make more beer and have them fill up those half empty barrels again. I usually keep producing booze until the stockpile is completely full anyway.

Can't do it, you need an empty barrel to make more beer.  I guess the only cure for it is to (f)orbid the full barrels until someone drinks the nearly-empty ones. 

[Albedo]

I tried that.. but no bins were being removed at all.

Moving bins/barrels is fairly low priority - if your dorfs are hauling almost anything else, they won't find time for those.  But it will get done - mine do it.

The obvious problem with any "shifting around" is that it's an extra job order for a dorf to figure out - and that's time wasted.  They think, they move the barrel, they think, they go back to the rec-room and play some pingpong, they think, they move the barrel/bin where it was meant to go all along... eventually.

With perfect 20/20 hindsight ( ), when you create your very first stockpiles (<p>), they should be limited with an eye toward how many bins/barrels are currently, and where you ~really~ want those to go.  Otherwise, that convenient weapons dump at your front door could have all 5 of your available bins, and then you're screwed.

[Core Xii]

Wonder if this has anything to do with these init options...:

Alter these options to control how aggressively your dwarves place objects in a container with like items (rather than an empty container).  The default options are very aggressive.  STORE_DIST_ITEM_DECREASE controls the cap on objects it will consider -- for each object it finds in a container, one tile is removed from its apparent distance to the dwarf, up to this cap.  The others control how many tiles are removed for each combination type for any match at all.  For instance, if ITEM_DECREASE is set to 20, and SEED_COMBINE is set to 100, a dwarf carrying seeds will see a seed bag with 15 seeds as 115 tiles closer than it actually is (and thus pass up any empties within that distance), whereas a seed bag with 30 seeds would be treated as 120 tiles closer (because it hits the ITEM_DECREASE cap).  Values from 2 to 1000 are permitted.  Before these init options, the behavior was roughly ITEM_DECREASE 2, SEED_COMBINE 2 and the rest at 1000.

[STORE_DIST_ITEM_DECREASE:20]
[STORE_DIST_SEED_COMBINE:1000]
[STORE_DIST_BUCKET_COMBINE:1000]
[STORE_DIST_BARREL_COMBINE:1000]
[STORE_DIST_BIN_COMBINE:1000]

[Walliard]

I don't suppose there's a way to consolidate beer barrels...  I tend to end up with lots and lots of barrels with one unit of booze in 'em -- I guess the dwarfs are worried about falling in when they try to get that last bit -- but I just can't bring myself to commit the sacrilege of marking the beer for (d)umping. 

That's actually a good thing; only one dwarf can drink from a barrel at a time, so if a bunch of dwarves get thirsty at once, you can sometimes end up with plenty of booze getting tied up, resulting in the surplus dwarves drinking from the cave river or someplace equally stupid.