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Author Topic: Are Burrows Broken?  (Read 1047 times)

darkflagrance

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Are Burrows Broken?
« on: November 06, 2010, 10:01:40 pm »

True, dwarves will obey burrow designations just fine. That part I'm not concerned about.

However, if you assign all your haulers to a burrow, and then hauling jobs are generated elsewhere outside that burrow, the !!CANCEL SPAM!! lags your fort so badly that you end up turning the burrows off. This is tolerable for short periods of time like sieges, but it means that you can never have a long term burrow set-up and decent FPS at the same time.

Is there a way around this? Or are burrows, though mostly functional, still affected by a glaring bug that effectively renders them sub-optimal?
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tolkafox

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Re: Are Burrows Broken?
« Reply #1 on: November 06, 2010, 10:15:53 pm »

True, dwarves will obey burrow designations just fine. That part I'm not concerned about.

However, if you assign all your haulers to a burrow, and then hauling jobs are generated elsewhere outside that burrow, the !!CANCEL SPAM!! lags your fort so badly that you end up turning the burrows off. This is tolerable for short periods of time like sieges, but it means that you can never have a long term burrow set-up and decent FPS at the same time.

Is there a way around this? Or are burrows, though mostly functional, still affected by a glaring bug that effectively renders them sub-optimal?

Yes, dwarfs will still try to haul items outside of their burrows, I'm afraid the coding is too far along to make it worthwhile to change currently.

Only way around this is to assign dwarfs to individual burrows that includes their bed, dining area, food, drink, and materials they need for their jobs; stockpiling materials they need or you want them to use helps. Assigning a team of 'haulers' to collect wood and stone outside of the burrows should take care of most misc hauling jobs, although if you are using the civilian burrows and not individual ones you will be spammed.

Another way to handle this with civilian burrows is to find out what item they are trying to haul and expand a path to said item, or during sieges forbid the item outright. Putting floodgates/hatches preventing access outside of your fortress, calling everyone in and shutting floodgates/hatches will help you determine what they are trying to haul without the danger of sieges. Cancel all mining/woodcutting/building jobs. Also, make sure no stockpiles (refuse, for instance) are outside of the burrows, if they are expand the burrows or delete the stockpile.

For the most part, I harvest all wood every winter and stockpile it inside of my fortress, and all ores are mined from the safety of inside my fortress so I rarely get jobs outside of my civilian burrows.
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FleshForge

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Re: Are Burrows Broken?
« Reply #2 on: November 06, 2010, 10:41:08 pm »

Forbidding stuff outside the main civilian burrow works, although it makes the detailed inventory provided by a bookkeeper a lot less useful.  If you wall up your surface level or just don't bother to control it at all then mass forbidding stuff outside your perimeter is less of a hassle, but you have that kind of problem without burrows anyway.
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tolkafox

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Re: Are Burrows Broken?
« Reply #3 on: November 06, 2010, 10:52:56 pm »

Forbidding stuff outside the main civilian burrow works, although it makes the detailed inventory provided by a bookkeeper a lot less useful.  If you wall up your surface level or just don't bother to control it at all then mass forbidding stuff outside your perimeter is less of a hassle, but you have that kind of problem without burrows anyway.

Just take a look at {j}obs to see what hauling jobs are up that are outside of the fortress, and then manually forbid them with {d}{b}{f}. You can use the stocks screen to unforbid them. The usual problem is outside wood, ores, or stockpiles; designing your fortress to operate mainly inside a contained burrow will solved most of this. Traps may also cause a problem when it comes to maintaining them, as well as dead animals that get caught in said traps. Turn off any hunters as well.
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Uzu Bash

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Re: Are Burrows Broken?
« Reply #4 on: November 06, 2010, 11:25:51 pm »

Assigning a team of 'haulers' to collect wood and stone outside of the burrows should take care of most misc hauling jobs
Yeah, should, but when they already need something, they task it. And they task the hell out of it, they task it so thoroughly that no hauler is going to be able to provide them the exact items they're going to spam you for. And that's probably the same item they'd haul it if weren't already tasked.

EDIT: Short answer is yes, burrows are currently broken, they're functional enough only when your population is light enough that you don't actually need them. The problems with them scale up immensely with population and spatial occupation so that when they'd be most useful, they increase micromanagement demands immensely.
« Last Edit: November 06, 2010, 11:37:21 pm by Uzu Bash »
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tolkafox

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Re: Are Burrows Broken?
« Reply #5 on: November 07, 2010, 12:18:05 am »

Assigning a team of 'haulers' to collect wood and stone outside of the burrows should take care of most misc hauling jobs
Yeah, should, but when they already need something, they task it. And they task the hell out of it, they task it so thoroughly that no hauler is going to be able to provide them the exact items they're going to spam you for. And that's probably the same item they'd haul it if weren't already tasked.

EDIT: Short answer is yes, burrows are currently broken, they're functional enough only when your population is light enough that you don't actually need them. The problems with them scale up immensely with population and spatial occupation so that when they'd be most useful, they increase micromanagement demands immensely.

Not entirely true, burrows are hard and menial to set up last minute or with a large population. If you scrap the old 'living quarter' plans everyone uses and opt for individual workshops with a room, food and drink stockpile, material and finished good stockpile, and a path to a common dining room or personal dining room from the beginning you will find that they work quite well. The haulers/miners/woodcutters are those that aren't restricted by any burrows other than civilian and haul goods between burrows. I won't post the exact specifics because part of the fun is figuring things out, and I agree that there is a very steep learning curve in learning how to use them and getting them to work correctly, but it is possible and is very useful when you get it right; IE individual stone stockpiles near a masons workshop holding various kinds of stone allows more control by moving the mason's burrow over the stone you want him to use.

The main problem that everyone faces is that you have to do it from the beginning of the game and assign individual burrows for every dwarf or at least every work class, and there are problems you may find with not having enough haulers but after some tinkering you're sure to get it right. And don't even get me started with the military :/ Parameter burrows anyone?
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