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[Itnetlolor]

Instead of assigning burrows just forbid the items you don't want hauled.

This is the kind of response coming from someone that either has infinite patience, or just never makes a large castle.

Use the d-b-f menu for mass forbidding. Then post in the facepalm thread.

The stocks screen can also do mass-forbidding/dumping/claiming as well, but for more specific things (all wood, stone, remains, all bones but not the skulls...).

[hulbral]

Applying a bit of common sense into the burrow matter (dedicated hauling), use dedicated areas (like tree farms) and mark those with the same burrows, assign the dedicated task to the dedicated dwarves, and wa-la, your dwarves shouldn't be as thick-headed.

This is the kind of things I used to do in .40 -

I do similar with a sort of immigration office

That's so funny. I also call it the immigration office.

Sub-classing can also work. You can have dedicated outer-rim haulers collect from the wilds the wood/stone supply (huge burrow covering a safe enough area that yields plenty of work), and then have the inner-core dwarves haul from the outer's stockpile into the inner stockpile (where the crafters and such reside).

I don't quite understand. Having a relay-like hauling system is exactly what I've been wanting to do. But without working burrows, no kind of complicated take from pile system will solve the problem of UristMcHauler going to one end of the world to haul an item and then to the complete opposite end of the world. (Unless the kind of item being hauled only exists at one location.) As far as I can see, the alternatives are as follows:

• Only have haulable items in one category exist at one site.
• Have 10 times as many haulers that move all over everywhere, destroying FPS.
• Use the broken burrows and turn off job cancellations. This is bad, and dwarves will still stand around attempting to haul inaccessible stuff even though you don't get the messages.

This is a sorry state of affairs. Sure I could cram all production into a single octahedron shape so everything is really close to everything, but I want to build cool fortresses damnit!!! :<

[hulbral]

I ignore this whole problem.

With the sheer number of dwarves one can employ, this is actually a good solution. It just so happens it kills FPS brutally when an army of 100 dwarves path back and forth, which could easily be replaced with 10 dwarves doing dedicated hauling in one spot.

I mean, to illustrate how bad it can be, imagine you have a glass industry on one side of the map, and a milling industry somewhere else. 1 dwarf on each site could probably move the bags used for sand/seeds/flour. But if the distance between them is great, you couldn't even manage the bags with 20 dwarves with the current system, as they would criss-cross back and forth most of the time.

But this game has always required a high annoyance tolerance.  If you are terminally bothered by the hauling thing, you're doomed.  The game will probably never change fully enough for you, so you're going to have to quit playing, change yourself, or apply alcohol.

I agree entirely. I keep up with it because I love the game. And I can deal with most of it. But seeing a fort grind down to 5 FPS, knowing that working burrows would eliminate most of the CPU strain, that just pushes it too far for me.

[Shoku]

Here's an idea: get rid of the stockpiles.

When you want to set up a nice area of wood logs go ahead and lay one down while everyone rushes to supply it but letting them constantly trickle new items into it for the rest of the life of your fort? Well that's just going to tie up your haulers and pretty soon nothing is getting done yet the game is slowing down thanks to it. You can probably tell what you want where and even set up a few major stockpiles that you really do want tended constantly but you don't need them all of the time for so many odds and ends.

[hulbral]

This is the kind of stuff I have been doing forever, including methods you haven't even dreamed of. And it's not fun, in any sense of the word.

[Trouserman]

Simple solution: Don't use burrows, use forbidding.

This is not a solution.  It is a work-around, and a poor one.  If forbidding items or any other work-around that was possible without burrow works better than burrows for managing hauling jobs, then burrows have failed at the stated goal of making the management of large fortresses easier.  If dwarves stand around trying to take jobs outside their burrows and spam cancellation messages, that is a problem, and I share Hulbral's surprise that it is not even mentioned as a drawback on the wiki.  I find it tolerable for temporary alert states, but would not find it tolerable for continuous operation of what should be a smoothly running fortress.  Apart from the productivity loss from dwarves attempting to take jobs they are not allowed to perform, any constant spam of unimportant messages inevitably leads to missing notices I would have wanted to respond to.

The goals for burrows have not been fully met, anyway.  Maybe Toady intends to address this along with other planned features when "improved hauling" comes up on the great to-do list.  Until then, at least burrows are a lot more useful (though also a lot more tedious to set up) than "dwarves stay indoors" ever was.  The order to defend a burrow seems to work pretty well, too, though I've been using stations instead.  It's still disappointing to learn that you can't use burrows for specialized work areas as advertised without cancellation spam, though.

[MagmaMcFry]

Sorry Trouserman, but the dev list isn't a "to-do" list but rather a "will-do-if-feels-like-it" list. Toady One will, eventually, fix all the bugs that are currently stuck in DF like a few billion cats in the danger room, but someday he will look again at burrows, fix the issues, and we will be able to use burrows like Toady One intended us to be able to do since April 1, 2010. Until then, you can either have your dwarves work slowly and inefficiently as they were created to, generously donating red text to the announcement log, or use forbidding, generously donating green paper to the Toady One.

Please always have in mind: DF is in alpha. It is not able to simulate a complete universe with bugs occurring only on dwarves' hairy buttocks.    Yet.

[Trouserman]

Please always have in mind: DF is in alpha. It is not able to simulate a complete universe with bugs occurring only on dwarves' hairy buttocks.    Yet.

Of course.  There are finite resources that Toady can allocate to development of the program, from new features to bug fixes and improvements in the interface.  As such, some things will necessarily have to take priority over others, and ultimately the decisions about what gets attention first are Toady's.  However, that does not mean people shouldn't talk about what parts of the program they think need improvement.  Quite the opposite, I'd say.  A public alpha is meant to solicit feedback.  It's also a good time to ask if things are currently buggy, or just being misapplied.  Here, we have both.  We have feedback about DF itself, as well as the wiki, which ought to have a note about this known bug.  The OP was also a question about whether it could be made to work as intended, the answer to which so far appears to be "no".

On an unimportant semantic note...

Sorry Trouserman, but the dev list isn't a "to-do" list but rather a "will-do-if-feels-like-it" list.

A "will-do-if-feels-like-it" list is a kind of to-do list.  It is not a prioritized list of the items he's planning to do in the immediate future (which is what I meant by "the great to-do list"), but it is a list of   the things he would like to do eventually, and in general terms how he currently thinks the features should work.  It serves as a decent approximation of his goals.  You say eventually he'll fix the issues; I merely speculated that he might tackle them around the same time he deals with other hauling issues.  I don't see any actual disagreement here, apart from the small semantic quibble about to-do lists.

[MagmaMcFry]

No sweat, man. I was just pissed off because you heavily criticized the unfinished-ness of the burrow implementation without actually mentioning that it was, in fact, unfinished. I seem to have overlooked your second paragraph. You are always free to add the bugs to the bug tracker, where Footkerchief will point you to several related bug reports, or to the wiki, whereupon people such as I will cease to worry about whether they did something wrong with their burrows. There are actually no bugs at all reported in the DF2010:Burrow article, so you are able to put in there everything that has ever bothered you about burrows, and people such as I will thank you for this.

[Trouserman]

Hulbral already checked the bug tracker and said it's been reported repeatedly, so that much is already done, at least.

[MagmaMcFry]

I put the stuff in the wiki.