Wait a minute, if I can dump everything onto one tile, what's the point of the stockpiles?
Good question. About the only thing that absolutely wont work for quantum dumping is food, in that it will rot if not stored in a stockpile, so you theoretically could use dumping zones for storage of everything else in your fort. However this comes with a major caveat due to the fact that you will end up spending 90% of your time futzing about menus and modes trying to set everything to be dumped or reclaiming it when you need to use it. For the most part I and I assume many others use quantum stockpiles for stone and have normal stockpiles set up for everything else. This just makes things easier to manage. One trick I have used with these quantum dumps is to set one up over a stockpile that is nearing capacity, then have everything from that stockpile dumped into the 1 square of the dumping zone, then reclaim everything and remove the zone. since the items are still on the appropriate stockpile they will not be moved when reclaimed, and you have more room for storing stuff now.
This trick works just fine for food too. I typically use a single large stockpile, about 21x11 squares, with one of these squares (originally I used the exact center, now I use a corner edge) marked as my garbage dump. This stockpile allows for no barrels or bins at all, but stores almost everything.
A few exceptions are handled by other stockpiles elsewhere, such as
- liquid foodstuffs (drinks, milk, lye, which all have their barrel-enabled stockpile elsewhere)
- corpses and remains (no icky blinding miasma in the center of my main work and living area, noooo!)
- empty animal traps (these get reused a lot in my fortress, with everything trapped transfered to a set cage. The time these spend being dumped can cause that job to be canceled, thus these need their own, non-forbidding place.)
- seeds (lacking a stockpile that accepts these, each seed is auto-marked for dumping into my garbage pile, and from there planted when the time comes. Prevents dwarves from trying to stuff them into all of my bags too)
- stones (There's to many stones. Way to many stones, to allow dwarves to carry them one by one whenever they happen to feel like it. When I want an area cleared of stones I designate just that area for mass dumping, whenever I have reason and there's not to much else going on)
Thus, whenever the stockpile starts to fill up, it's mass dump, then reclaim that single dumping square. By placing the single dumping square on the corner, it allows me to surround that little space with the workshop types most needed at the moment, right on the edge of a vast pile of needed resources. And I rebuild different workshops over time in those spots as my needs change.
If you're comfortable with the idea of a single square being piled with tens of thousands of different sorts of goods, and with your goods seeing wear from trampling (this square gets extremely heavy traffic, all the time), then this might work well for you too!
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Topic: You got your stone in my wood stockpile! (Read 1217 times)