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[themel]

Hi,

does anyone know how distances for item selection are calculated? I get the impression that it is "as the dwarf burrows" instead of the more appropriate "as the dwarf walks".

Case in point: For aesthetic reasons, my graveyard is a labyrinth that expands outward from the central shaft of the fortress, with a lot of meandering built in, so that one passes each and every tomb before reaching the burial site for a newly deceased dwarf. I find the respectful silence much disturbed by the grunting of siege operators, who seem to prefer walking for hundreds of dwarf steps in the labyrinth and finding the stones left from digging the tombs to the many quicker alternatives available from long straight mining shafts. Is this just dwarven superstition ("This felsite runs with the soul-shards of your brother's slayer, goblin scum!") or are they dumber than I thought?

[Grimlocke]

What I do know is that when the dwarf picks a rock to fling he looks only at X and Y distance, not at Z distance. He also doesnt seem to care about walls at all. So if your catapult is build directelly above some rock thats miles below in the mines/labyrinth/depths of hell then he will get that one instead of the one laying next to the catapult.

All workshops do this. Only building designations where you have to select your material manualy do this a bit more cleverly. The reason is probably the time it takes to load the whole list of every rock in your fortress, and the distance to that rock.

So you might want to move your catapults. If they are just practising you can dig out some 3x3 squares in your mines and put them there.

[Dorf3000]

.... or are they dumber than I thought?

This is always the answer when asking a question about odd dwarf behavior.  Case in point, my jeweller immigrant decided to retrieve a single bone bolt lying in a small valley near the edge of the map.  The same small valley that I was using as a magma overflow area at the time.  The first thing I noticed was a trail of smoke heading rapidly towards my other dwarves...

[random51]

Dwarves seem to do those calculation with the dwarven equivalent of no clip enabled.

The z-level ignorance is particularly annoying, which is the main reason I advocate mining one level at a time and locking the doors to each level when you finish it.

You still have to deal with it for your multistage industries but you can take advantage with them by building each phase on the level above/below the previous one and making liberal use of staircases.

For instance, with food production you could do this:

level 1: farm plot/seed stockpile
level 2: raw foodstuff storage
level 3: kitchen/still/farm workshop
level 4: barrel/bag storage

Then just make sure there is a staircase next to each workshop, a staircase that connects all 4 levels. I find this works fairly well, particularly as you often don't have the room to really spread out on the first level due to inconveniently placed lakes. :p

[themel]

Thanks. I'll set about reorganizing things vertically once the fort recovers from the miasma/vomit chaos induced by my decision to just dump all the stones from the entire graveyard labyrinth on the surface. I guess I'll just forbid them the next time round.

[Grendus]

You could forbid the stone you don't want your haulers to use. I keep all my fort in a central core, and have haulers supply stockpiles with things like ore, dolomite, etc. My haulers walk all over the map for stuff, but nobody cares about their time, and my crafters naturally path to the nearest resource in my stockpiles.