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[The Architect]

You said stonecrafting. I just told you to make something else out of it, IE CHAIRS. Don't change your story. Masonry is not stonecrafting.

The point was, and is, not that stonecrafting is useless (it's not), but that it is NOT what you said it is: the best way to make money. In fact, if you are going for wealth, it's a waste of dwarven labor.

You can plant and harvest 10 10x2 farm plots, process all of it (to syrup, if you want to be rich) and make syrup roasts with proficient cook/grower and brewer/grow you embarked with, and have a wealth of well over 1 million in a year. That is with the labor of only 2 dwarves, you see. Or you could set all your dwarves to stonecrafting, and nothing else, and come up with a wealth of around 100k if they all embarked proficient and you aren't using flux or obsidian. If you are, big whoop, you're not getting anywhere near the wealth of food.

The same can be said for almost anything else. An engraver can be set to smooth stone for a year and then engrave all of it, and pull in around 200k in wealth. My point is that if you want to make money, you're way off base to say the best way to do it is with stonecrafting. Stonecrafting is one of the worst ways you could attempt it. A legendary stonecrafter with obsidian can turn out around what, 100k? 150? and then you have to use a ton of other dwarves to haul it, bins, lots of storage, and face lag from the huge number of items created.

Just trying to prevent your comment from misleading any newbies. I find it sad when people say "I'm on my 10th fort in year 14, and I have 1.32 million wealth" because they read some incorrect advice and take it to heart. For the record, my 6th and current fort was at 11 million at the beginning of year 6. And I'm focusing on military, NOT wealth.

[hitto]

I got lost along the discussion and thought we were talking wealth creation overall, and furniture, even shitty furniture, will count double towards your created wealth.
At no point did I imply that stonecrafts were good for anything else than "noble has mandated to make amulets/scepters/fucking un-[J]ob-[M]enu-[Q]manageable crafts so you're gonna have to pump out 10 generic crafts and you sure as hell don't wanna waste any good metal on it"...

You were thinking about the grandparent post. Or great-grandparent? Anyway.. I smooth the entire mountain all the time. I like how it looks. Also, exporting syrup roasts, if only for the 5 hauling jobs instead of hauling 50 bins of earrings!

But honestly, telling a newbie "oh, what you have to do is sell your food" ? And you talk about misleading? 

[The Architect]

My apologies, it looks like I responded to the wrong user. But in either case, selling your food is the best way to make money. Can you honestly say that you have ever come close to starvation in a fortress? If your answer is yes, I can only pity you.

In my opinion that would be the height of stupidity.

[Shrike]

It's probably already been mentioned, but stonecrafting: Best way to productively reduce massive amounts of stone to bin-ready items. Plonk down your bins.

In fact, I've put so many stone crafts into a trade (200k excess value) that I had to take apart the depot in order to keep the merchants from all going insane. Thank goodness for siege-based steel deliveries orcs. JMQ Steel Bin 30.

But yeah. This really comes down to how much time you want to spend hauling and how much stone you want to get rid of.
If you have sufficient replenishing bin-making material (ie, iron or steel),then trade away the bins as well.

[The Architect]

It's really not. In fact, all you need to do is set up an atom-smashing bridge near that stone, dump it all, and smash it. Then your dwarves can go about productive labors.

Stonecrafters are a good way to bog your whole fort's labor system down.

[Shrike]

Depends on how much exploiting you want to do, I suppose. Atom smasher is just about as cheesy as my typical one-tile dump pile that should suck the rest of reality into it...

[The Architect]

I don't consider it cheesy at all. It is for the sake of reducing lag. It doesn't really affect the game except to make it run faster; in fact if I were in charge you would be able to arbitrarily cause items to cease to exist. It literally has zero impact on the game except reducing lag and your available resources. If anything it's like cheating against yourself.

[Shrike]

Different opinions, I guess. In terms of absolute stone reduction, gotta say you're right... and I'd forgotten about using the smasher. Since my current fort is making a MASSIVE block construction, I've been making blocks by metric buttload and don't even have a smasher. I'll consider it once I've finished the dome.

[Derakon]

My prefered method of dealing with stone is to make it into stone blocks and build things out of it. I have a fort with over 6000 stone blocks in it so far...

[Vicomt]

My prefered method of dealing with stone is to make it into stone blocks and build things out of it. I have a fort with over 6000 stone blocks in it so far...

correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that helps the lag problems. 20k stones is just the same as 20k blocks, even if they've been built into something, the game still keeps track of them.

[assimilateur]

Don't you people ever embark at chasms? Or near lava? You don't need atom-smashers if you dump your shit there.

[The Architect]

My prefered method of dealing with stone is to make it into stone blocks and build things out of it. I have a fort with over 6000 stone blocks in it so far...

correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that helps the lag problems. 20k stones is just the same as 20k blocks, even if they've been built into something, the game still keeps track of them.

Actually, the stock menu treats those differently. They are ignored for all of the game features except the stock menu and building contents, so it cuts lag tremendously.

[Quietust]

Stonecrafters are a good way to bog your whole fort's labor system down.

If you have a lot of dwarves, that can potentially be seen as a good thing - it keeps them busy so they don't just sit around and party and make tons of friends. When you have 200 dwarves, it's next to impossible to keep them all busy unless you're making a huge megaconstruction (or tearing one down, as was the case for the 16 Z-level mold of my 47x47 obsidian tower).

[The Architect]

What, you mean the hauling? I could understand that point of view except that there are a ton of more productive things to do with them. I capped my fort at 130~140 (kiddies tend to screw with it) to reduce lag, since I am playing in a place with a ton of trees, a magma pipe, and constant wildlife activity. I have no trouble at all keeping them busy, namely reducing lag by dumping crap from siegers and megaproject byproducts.

[HatfieldCW]

Man, when hauling gets more streamlined, just a few guys with carts can do all the dumping and carrying, and we'll have nothing for them to do.  I hope the ability to deploy caravans and raiding parties comes along before we run into that problem.