There's closely related stuff to this in several of the popular job-related suggestions, but I haven't seen exactly this, so...
Some things your dwarves can make are at the end of long chains of production operations. For instance, take glass blocks:
- Chop wood
- Wood furnace: make ash
- Ashery: make potash
- Kiln: make pearlash
- (Glass furnace:) gather sand
- Glass furnace: make clear glass blocks
If you don't have magma, you also have to produce fuel for three of these operations, and if you don't have bags for the sand, you have to make those too. Every link in the chain currently has to be scheduled individually and micro-managed lest jobs get canceled for lack of raw materials. This is silly. The dwarves should be able to handle job dependencies for you (I envision this being a Manager function).
There's two aspects to this. First, if the appropriate raw materials are lacking for any job, it goes into a new "waiting for materials" state and does not try to assign a dwarf; it automatically comes off the "waiting for materials" state when materials become available. The jobs screen sorts "waiting for materials" jobs separate from all others, and shows you what is missing for each. This, all by itself, would be a significant improvement over the present situation.
Second, if you queue a production order via the Manager, she checks the stocks and automatically queues production of whatever that job needs that you don't already have. She does this recursively, so a single request for clear glass blocks would schedule everything on the above list, but she stops when you hit true raw materials (ore, wood, stone, sand, plants, etc). If you don't have enough of those, the manager will still let you queue the order but she'll tell you (as best she can given the state of the stockpile records) how much of which things are required. You then go designate more mining or whatever.
If you can't make something because you are missing a workshop for something on the dependency chain, or a dwarf with the necessary labor enabled, the manager should also be able to tell you that.
Relatedly, it would be nice to be able queue construction of furniture in advance of its production (as long as you don't care which chair goes where) -- each construction would just take whatever furniture of the appropriate type is next produced. This should *not* auto-queue furniture production, since you probably care what materials are used, but the manager screen should have a second list of all the furniture that needs production. (Noble mandates, trade good requests, and undersupply of bins/barrels/bags could also show up there.)
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Topic: Job dependencies (Read 571 times)