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[Captain Mayday]

Since I always find it annoying that half my dwarven workforce ends up travelling across the outside map to pick up a single arrow at a time, I think it might be prudent to have ammo disappear if it is sitting outside, without being in a stack or pile.
I imagine this would be done in a similar fashion to how the blood cleanup has been done.

[Tamren]

Well right now when you miss with a bolt it has a very good chance to break. If it does it becomes trash and is ignored by all dwarves.

Problem is if it survives impact it becomes a stack of 1 bolt, it can no longer be combined with anything else.

One thing that would solve this is put in a "cleaning" command. You designate an area and any dwarves without other jobs will come and clean up the area.

Single bolts lying on the ground would be termed as "trash" but they would not dissapear at the end of the season like blood and other trash does.

Untill you order dwarves to gather up the bolts they will just sit there and not mess up your work order.

Would that work?

[0x517A5D]

UNtil proper restacking is in, I'd simply like to see bolts always disappear when fired, instead of half the time or whatever it is now.

0x517A5D

[JT]

I like 0x517A5D's idea a lot more than just having bolts disappear randomly; once we get restacking in, the current behaviour can be put back in and haulers could bring them back to stockpiles to be reconstituted.

Another possibility is to allow a person/being to pick up stacks of bolts/arrows until he or she has at least 20 bolts or there are no more bolts to be picked up.  For instance, if there are 20 stacks of 1 bolt, the dwarf will pick up those 20 stacks.  If there is 1 stack of 20 bolts, the dwarf will pick up that 1 stack.  The dwarf should also split the stack at a certain number of bolts (the maximum capacity of the quiver).

Maybe the best way to do this would be to enforce a minimum ammo load.  If a dwarf has less than [X] ammunition (user-specifiable, preferably), then the dwarf will go to reload if there are no more dwarves on the map "in danger" (defined as being within X number of tiles of an enemy, attempting to attack an enemy, being attacked by an enemy, having been interrupted by a hostile enemy within X number of seconds, and/or whatever else you can think of).  If you send a lone crossbowdwarf to repel an invasion, he'll expend all of his ammo and then go in swinging the crossbow as a club, but once all of the enemies are dead and no more dwarves are in danger, he'll load up again.  Note that this means that during a siege, if your wall archers run out of ammunition but there are still dwarves outside under assault, the dwarves on the walls will remain at their posts anyway.  Some sort of explicit order to resupply, even before the supplies are expended, would also be peachy for this case.

[ May 27, 2007: Message edited by: JT ]

[Tamren]

I posted a bunch of stuff about crossbows a while back. One thing that i suggested was arrows built by components, in which case stacks would no longer be so ackward

Instead of having "stack of 15 bone bolts" you would have "stack of 20 bone broadhead bolts", the individual bolts in the pile might be of different quality but they are bundled up together because they are made of similar components.

If a dwarf needed a stack of bolts he would pick up a handful of bolts suitable for what he wants to do. So if a bin contained metal tipped wood bolts and bone bolts he would take the metal ones to go hunting and the bone ones for training.

After a large fight or after a tranining session, the ground will be littered with damaged and broken bolts. These will just lay there but are not considered refuse. If you order your dwarves to gather up all the stuff in that area they will pick up the surviving bolt components and take them to the appropriate place. Good ammo goes back into the storage bin. Damaged arrowheads are taken to the forge for repair. Surviving components are taken to the fletching station so that they can be used again.

This way you would no longer have to deal with all this 1 bolt stack nonsense and far less arrows would be wasted.

If you wanted greater control, such as only giving your best bolts to your best marksman you can order your dwarves to fill quivers by type and quality of arrow. To do this you use a quiver rack as a customizable quiver box.

If you designate the rack as a training supply point the quivers put on it will only be loaded with the cheapy varieties.

If you wanted to supply an archers nest beside your main gate the rack would instead hold your best arrows and so on.

Problem is what if you run out of good arrows? we would need some sort of global toggle system to control what type of bolts and arrows are fit for each job.