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[Murphy]

I request cut gems of every type from the liaison. This results in dwarven caravan bringing 100000+ dwarfbucks in gems. So I always have something to barter for, even with ridiculous amounts of crafts around. Then I train legendary gem setters with lower-value gems and have statues worth around 30000, and use them to buy more gems. Then I can record my whole fortress' history not in engravings, but in gem decorations on my furniture

[The Architect]

That's pretty cool. I suspect we all request every type of gem on high priority from the traders, but I doubt anyone else does it as hardcore as you.

[KylonOrina]

I don't bother with crafts at all. I'd rather just make one dwarven syrup roast worth 10k+ DB and buy out the entire caravan.

[Untelligent]

I don't bother "training" ANY non-military profession, let alone craftsdwarves. If they get to legendary after a couple years of mining or a decade of chefery on their own, good for them, but I don't really care about the quality of my goods.

Actually, I don't use craftsdwarves at all after the first few years. The goblins give me far more giant cave spider silk loot than I'll ever need, and by the time the goblins run out I generally ignore the caravans anyway (except for the elfs, they bring me Guard Bears). Better to give my dwarves useful jobs, like masons or miners, than silly jobs like pantsmakers.

[The Architect]

I don't bother with crafts at all. I'd rather just make one dwarven syrup roast worth 10k+ DB and buy out the entire caravan.

Crafts are for flavor. The only reason I trade with em is to get rid of low quality ones, just as I get rid of meals worth less than 10k each.

[Skorpion]

Crafts are so I don't have to worry about how I pay for my exotic meat, booze, and rocks.

[Fossaman]

I don't use stone crafts for this reason. Clothes making, when done right, produces 500-700 value goods, which can then be decorated with gems, leather, bone, cloth, etc to produce very valuable goods that don't take a lot of hauling. Then, set your finished goods pile to reject base quality goods to keep goblin crap from overflowing your stockpiles and you're set.

This. I recently found the 'Make plant fiber crafts' option at the craftsdwarf's workshop, and it is my new best friend. Even undecorated cloth items are more valuable than rock crafts, and the lighter weight means you never have to worry about overloading a caravan.

[KylonOrina]

Crafts are so I don't have to worry about how I pay for my exotic meat, booze, and rocks.

Well that's what I use the dwarven syrup roasts for. And anything else a caravan has that I want. 1 roast will usually get me everything I want along with giving the caravan like a 5k DB profit.

[Skorpion]

But that requires so many different steps. Crafts, once you have a decent amount of obsidian handy, can be churned out on repeat. You can even jam workshops in newly-mined areas and have the stone hauled out in trinket form.

In my last fort, I only SOLD the stone crafts because they had to be disposed of somehow.


Now I'm tempted to make a fort that only exports furniture. I fondly remember trading the cinnabar quern that menaced with spikes of toxic metals for an entire elven caravan.

[Murphy]

Crafts are for flavor. The only reason I trade with em is to get rid of low quality ones

This. Dwarves are renowned for their craftsdwarfship, you can survive without it, but why would one want to? And speaking of selling high-priced roasts, the easy way is hardly the dwarven way.

Also, there's this reason for training legendary craftsdwarves: no fort lasts forever, but you can perpetuate its history in various decorations. And these should be no less than masterwork decorations, or it's not dwarven!

EDIT: Clarified a bit, added a quote.

[KylonOrina]

Well I'll admit I do stonecrafters. Just for obsidian short swords. Especially if I have no flux for steel.

[Jake]

It's what I use to get rid of the massive piles of rubble cluttering the fortress that I haven't found another use for but can't be bothered to dump somewhere. I churn out stone crafts in bulk, supplemented with clothing once I've bought in rolls of cloth and eventually metalworking once I've got a reasonable military kitted out.

And the best way to get rid of the low-quality stuff that I've found is to sell it; keep the bins to save weight on the caravan and wood at your end, and then pad out the caravan's weight limit with a few bin-loads of undistinguished junk. It increases their profit margin, meaning bigger caravans with more potentially useful stuff next year, and doesn't cost you anything.

[darthbob88]

^ That. Stonecrafting, as far as I'm concerned, is primarily a way to get rid of bulk/gray stones, which are neither colourful nor extremely useful, save as trading items. Once I've sold a year's production, maybe two years, I'll turn to other methods, like cloth crafts, roasts, or naturalized gobbo crap.

[Shaostoul]

Anything that I normally don't want, I just throw away down the pit-o-doom or atom smash.

[Gertack]

I modded wagons and pack animals to have 10x the normal carrying capacity so it takes around one million dwarfbucks to buy out the entire dwarven caravan.  To fund that I have a massive farming operation for prepared meals, a horde of glassmakers/gem cutters/gem setters to decorate every thing with green glass, and a slew of weavers/dyers/clothesmakers to sew images onto everything.  This lets me buy out the caravan, naturalize it all, and then sell it back the next cycle.  It's also probably why I'm running at 0 FPS...