i never had the chance to get into therapist does it work well?
Armok, yes!
The feature I use most frequently is the fact that you can sort by skill in a certain job. Suppose I just got a bunch of new immigrants and I want to finally get serious with high-quality weapon-manufacturing, I would do the following:
Sort all dwarves by weapon-making skill.
Look designate the two dwarves at the top of the list to have weapon-making to be active.
Disable weapon-making for all the dabbling idiots who will just waste my steel.
I can't even IMAGINE the amount of effort that would take doing it in-game. You can also sort by happiness and find out who is vulnerable to tantruming and take preventative measures (give them a pet cow for their haunting moos).
No Dwarf Therapist = No DF for me. They form an inseperable pair.
Early after I get my forges built I start picking out dwarves who only have any skill in farming type labors and send them each to go make one silver warhammer (which is nice for the early military too) but it would be pretty rough to figure out which ones these were in the standard interface. Very carefully handling migrants and giving them all a custom profession would still make it reasonably doable but again, DT makes it very easy and better fast.
Plus I don't care about quality on the prepared meals so I just enable it on all of that group so
somebody will zip over to the shop and start working on it instead of sleeping or eating.
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More about DT: It shows a row of boxes for each dwarf. If they are novices or such a small black square will be in that box and it gets bigger for each skill level. In addition to toggling these with a click you also have a box that shows how happy they are and tabs that sort out the military and social skills.
By right clicking their names you can set nicknames, profession names, or the most useful feature: set a custom profession. This is a particular set of labors enabled along with a custom profession name so that you can quite rapidly change what many dwarves do. You can highlt several at once and set them all to this same set of labors at once through that menu.
Want virtually everyone to run out to your fields and plant seeds when there is open space but also want the small army to rush out the gate to build whatever constructions and such you designate? DT.
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DT is the current king of this kind of program. There might has been other good ones way back when but they would have gone inactive during the long 40d period. If I recall Foreman was alright but I like the interface of DT more.