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[Tarlin]

I'm new to the game and play it for about a week so maybe i just don't know some basic things. If so treat items as questions instead of suggestions please.

1. I'd like to see items in building in "k" mode just as it is in "t" mode. Now "k" mode over building show nothing of interest except its name. Why not call for building the same function as in "t" excluding "lock at nearest building" part of it?

2. Many jobs su as fishing are not interruptibe. I see "no fish in the river" message, turn off fishing in my fisher's active skills screen and have to wait for him to go drinking or sleeping... It would be great if pressing "r" in "j" mode transfer a dwarf occupied with anything to "no job" state immediately. On adding some job as construct floodgate at the mason workshop and seeing my mason just start to go for stone 2 screen away i want him to stop and reveiw available job list.

3. What about job list ordering?
I'd like hauling have the least priority despite job creation time or i dont know what else is matter now. If dwarf has repositioned some stone i'd like that he catch newly appeared jobs in workshop instead of going for the next stone.

4. May be hauling jobs inside one obect type have to be prioritized according to pathlength to be hauled? Or even including starting pathlength for the dwarf in question to initial location of the object? Now they tend to run for the farthest stone.

5. The same for mining. If the dwarf decide to mine he should mine nearest location. Current behavior is not obvoius and somtimes just dumb.
Typical situation: i mine starting living rooms of 5 points cross-form each. If two miners excavate middle points in their rooms simultaneously one of them suddenly decides to run to the other, stand him on the head and then they mine from one point in two directions severely hindering each other. WHY?? Adjacent point has to be mined too so why he run half a screen away and why to run to occupied point?

[w]

I recently had an extreme case of the mining thing.

I had previously dug two long, narrow halls, running parallel to each other, a few screens apart from each other.

I suddenly realized that I also wanted to put little notches into them, periodically.  So I paused, and on each channel, every five squares or so, selected a square just north of it for mining.

Unpaused, and my miners go at it.  One goes for the north hall, the other goes for the south hall.  So far so good.

The guy doing the first notch of the north hall finishes it, and goes on to the second notch of the north hall.  Great.

Similarly, the southern guy moves down one notch.  Great.

But when the guy in the north hall finishes the second notch, instead of going on to the third notch, he decides to walk back out the hall, walk down the couple of screens to the southern hall, walk into the southern hall, and do the third notch there.

The southern guy, meanwhile, has decided that the third northern notch must be dug out now now now.

This ping-ponging continued indefinitely, getting worse each time (since they had to walk further out of the hall they were in, and further into the other hall, to get to their next job, than the last time).

I know, I could've just turned off mining for one of the halls.  But ideally, I shouldn't have to be paying attention for things like this.

[Silveron]

Engraving works similar to that. With one engraver you can see more of the way the code breaks down the next selected job.
It seems Toady has the map split into smaller sections say 20x20 for designation jobs. The NW most block of 20x20 is selected, then the engraver works north to south on the job. The engraver will travel in and out of rooms to maintain this north to south progression until he reaches the edge of the 20x20 zone. Then he returns to the north edge and starts again. Even if there is one more tile outside the southern edge of the 20x20 it will wait until the engraver completes the first 20x20 zone and proceeds to the next 20x20 zone.

I have not checked this with just one miner yet.

[Draxxalon]

Engraving and mining use different algorithms for their "next job".

Somewhere Toady has a "make engraving work more like mining" as REQ33 on the dev section.

Engraving uses grid sections, and does them in order.
IE:
147
258
369

They will engrave the squares in the order of 1-9.   Even if there is a wall in squares 2,5 and 8 it will still do 1,3,4,6,7,9, no matter how far they have to walk to do it.

The mining algorithm could definately stand some tweaking (along with many many others that use "closest") as far as what "closest" is.