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[Eskielidder]

Had a very nice metal industry going, cranking out many steel bars for armour/weapons, however in the last couple of years I've not been able to make any at my smelters.

I know I must be missing something simple, so here's the checklist of what I have checked so far:
Have unforbidden/accessible Iron - Check
Have unforbidden/accessible Marble - Check
No burrows are in effect - Check (although the creation of an overall SafeBase burrow was round the same time as I noticed the problem)
Have unforbidden/accessible Charcoal - Check
All smelters are magma and operational - Check
Marble is set for Pig Iron/Steel production in stone option - Check

Anything I am missing?

[rephikul]

can you do anything else at the smelters (copper etc) or just iron is having problem?

[Eskielidder]

Everything else at the smelters works fine, it's just Pig Iron/Steel, and I've just discovered A pretty blue metal that doesn't show up either.

Might try deleting the burrow now to see if it fixes it.

EDIT: Yup was a burrow problem

[Quietust]

Since smelters only display tasks based on available materials, they occasionally have to check what materials are available to them. Back in 40d, this was done every time you [q]ueried the workshop (and would cause a noticeable delay if you had lots of items). It's possible that 0.31 is caching said information to improve performance but made a mistake at some point and decided it couldn't see the necessary materials - other methods that seem to fix this problem are rebuilding the workshop and issuing the job using the job manager.

[Ivan Issaccs]

The pretty blue stuff needs extracting at a workshop too so that could explain that issue.

[Hans Lemurson]

One issue I have noticed is that smelters seem to have difficulty with multiple-ingredient reactions if some of the materials are on a different z-level.

However, given that you said the problem has been resolved, I guess this probably isn't relevant.

[Fredd]

Hans, make sure coal is not forbidden, or flux

[narhiril]

This happened to me as well, but I was able to work around it using work orders through the manager.  This is known to also happen with soap makers.


In case you aren't familiar...

Assign a "manager" noble and give him a study (assigned through a chair).

hit j->m and narrow the tasks list by typing the order you desire.  Select the one you want with +/-, and enter a quantity.

For example, when I want to pump out a batch of Steel bars using flux, iron, and magma forges.  I order "Make charcoal" x30, "Smelt pig iron bars" x15 and then "smelt steel bars" x15 (this actually produces 30 bars, because steel is produced 2 bars at a time).  The great thing about work orders is that...

1) Job cancellations won't change their set quantity, so you can set them and forget them instead of having to wait for the first product (pig iron) to be done before ordering the second (steel).  As the pig iron bars roll out, jobs to turn them into steel will queue up automatically, and if no more pig iron is available to make steel, the orders to smelt steel will be removed until some is available.

2) If you are like me, you probably have smelters set to "smelt (some ore) /R."  Work orders for smelting will jump ahead of these smelting orders, but will leave them in place when the work order is done with no micro-management required, so you can get right back to pumping out iron bars to start the process over again without even having to look at your smelter(s).




This is REALLY useful for a certain spoiler-related metal, as it will allow you to turn strands into bars without giving the time for other dwarves (i.e. hospital) to waste the precious threads on mundane tasks.

I get a lot of mileage out of my manager.  Much more than his "meager office" would suggest.

[Eskielidder]

Still not sure why removing an inactive burrow fixed my problem, will re-create the burrow soon and see if it breaks again.

Yeah checked the wiki and started to extract the pretty blue stuff.

I've still not really used the manager to produce stuff. My main worry (not a prob with smelting) is that if I want to make weapons/armour I have the workshops restricted to legendary users only. Are you able to set this kind of restriction with a manager?

[narhiril]

Not through the manager, but I usually only allow the one or two legendary guys to make armor and queue up weapons on workshops individually, as I find that I don't need too many of them - and this is with a 200+ dwarf fortress with an active military of 60+.

I prefer to restrict certain "legendary" workshops to individual dwarves  through the workshop profile rather than setting the minimum skill level, as I have read that this is buggy (but it may have been fixed - I never tried it).

Also, I've found that a legendary axedwarf seems to one-hit cleave everything with just a -steel battle axe-, so it's usually not terribly important for me to give everyone a masterwork weapon.  I've found that skill goes much further than weapon quality.  I actually had a legendary lasher with a looted *bronze whip* and some mediocre iron armor hold his own against HFS just as well as a hammer lord in adamantine armor with a masterwork silver hammer.  When your dwarves get up to absurd combat levels, they tend to just dodge everything anyway. 

[Sutremaine]

Generally I set workshop profiles and order things at a specific forge, but if you want a massive job lot there is a way of ordering it via the manager.

First you order all the other forges to be removed, which prevents the manager from adding jobs to them. Then you forbid the other forges to stop the removal from taking place (this preserves workshop profiles and stops things from wandering up through any newly-exposed channels).

Then you add the job orders to the manager's screen.