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[Chaos Freeplumber]

This is already discussed in gameplay issues but I think it ought to be a bug report. Dwarves leave tiny stockpiles of 1-4 coins everywhere, keepin some important doors open and cluttering forges. Every suggested method of sorting this or dealing with it creates its own problems. Surely dwarves can simply stack their coins into their coffers? Isn't that what they KEEP chests in their rooms for?

[Xenomorph]

AFAIK, the main problem is that, at the moment, stacks can't be recombined, partly due to the amount of data the coins have to remember.  But I understand that it's being worked on.

[Veroule]

The solution I am trying is to mint only tin coins.

Yes that is right I am replicating the American economy in my fortress.  We will have an utterly valueless money, and I will ultimately chasm all the gold, silver, and platinum in the mountain just to make sure everyone is poor.  Then I will destroy all the gems and issue the dwarves shiny beads of glass.

In all seriousness, it seems any coins will work to activate the arrival of the Bookkeeper.  Hopefully dwarves won't take the valueless coins anywhere, and therefor I don't have to work to lock them up.

[Chaos Freeplumber]

Nice solution , except that the Bookkeeper makes constant demands for the manufacture of gold silver and copper coins so this method might leave you with a berserk accountant on your hands!

[0x517A5D]

The fix I would like to see is having the coins simply disappear when the dwarf picks them up, as if the dwarf is putting them in his pocket.  Then the game could track credit on hand as well as total credit per dwarf.  (Actually I'm not sure how total credit is handled... does the dwarf have to have the money in his coffer before he can use it?)  This method would at least get rid of the trips from coin stack to coffer, as well as the tiny stacks littering the floor.

0x517A5D

[Mechanoid]

quote:Originally posted by 517A5D:
The fix I would like to see is having the coins simply disappear when the dwarf picks them up, as if the dwarf is putting them in his pocket.

That is not a fix, especially since it breaks the game's consistency that it makes NO ASSUMPTIONS about what a dwarf does and doesn't have on hand. As well, if coins 'disappeared' into some magical account value, that would also mean that the same should happen in Adventure mode, and that the player could collect millions in coins and never be weighted down with them all...
Which is far too insane considering the already stated position of Dwarf Fortress; it makes no (or at most, few) assumptions. [If you're worth X value, you should have X value worn and stored somewhere... Not floating around in some magical area outside of space and time, and the reach of theives.]

So instead of having the coins disappear, new items should instead be constructable, such as a wallet or coin satchel... Or more simply, just the backpack.
In fact, i dont know why Toady doesn't allow all (or most) of the dwarves to carry backpacks (or indeed, arrive with backpacks) and then use them to store owned items like crafts and toys and coins.

[ May 10, 2007: Message edited by: Mechanoid ]

[Ookpik]

quote:Originally posted by Mechanoid:
<STRONG>As well, if coins 'disappeared' into some magical account value</STRONG>

But a dwarf's 'account' is not necessarily represented by how many coins she's carrying around.  Toady explained in an earlier thread that dwarves like owning the same number of coins as their accounts are worth, but they still have the same purchasing power even if they cannot access physical coins.  Moreover, they can still shop for whatever they can afford whether they have coins or not -- I seem to remember that physical money does not change hands when dwarves buy things in stores.

That's not quite the same as coins 'disappearing' into accounts, but it does mean that money can be at least somewhat abstract in this version of the game.

[Mechanoid]

Yeah, i know dwarves always know their bank ballance. I was stating that the coins themselves would *poof* disappear into thin air, no matter where the dwarf was, never to be seen again; probably should've just said that instead.

Well, that, and the book keeper would be driven insane as the number of coins in the fort dwindled from 10000s to none, almost immediately.

[Chaos Freeplumber]

I don't know anything about programming etc but the problem seems to be that restacking is complicated as the different coins dwarves pick up have different designs and years - maybe this bug can only be fixed by having all gold coins be just gold coins ,with no date or design or "separate identity" and silver coins and  so on, with metalsmithing skill only affecting speed of minting not quality.

[Entropy]

The problem is not so much with each coin being a separate item, and thus having thousands littering the fortress, but rather that they are not cleaned up.

Were the dwarfs to pickup a coin as soon as it is claimed and then carry it around until it can be put into a chest, that would end the problem of coin litter.  This also gives one incentive to provide a bedroom with a chest.  Without a chest to call one's own, they end up carrying it all around and eventually slowing them down.

[Chaos Freeplumber]

Ahh would that it was that simple- all my housed dwarfs have coffers and still litter coins all over their rooms-  the homeless ones don't seem to treat barracks with the same gilded contempt.I'm currently using the side of the river for coin storage in the hopes that some will wash away..

[Captain_Action]

This is the same problem that mixed bundles of arrows pose. Made even more complicated by the fact that coins have a mint date, which IIRC, raise their value based on their age. I wonder if masterpiece coinage is worth more too.

Agree on the wallet idea.

[Toady One]

The dwarves shouldn't carry around a backpack with all their possessions.  Most people don't do that when they have homes.

The current idea is to not abstract the information in the actual game, but just in the interface.  So you'd see "gold coins [23]" but it might be several stacks.  The part that's a bit more annoying is making the dwarves also carry groups of items in this fashion.  This doesn't solve the problems associated to the sheer number of items that are laying around, but one function for the bookkeeper was going to be to actively sort coins so that stacks could be formed without information loss.  If the bookkeeper is always wandering around doing that, stacks should only occur with currently owned coins for the most part.  It's still a large problem there, but not as large.  Ultimately, if you aren't a big adventure mode fan, then there might be an option to eliminate specific coin information, but it won't be the default.

[Chaos Freeplumber]

Please, please make the Book keeper walk around sorting coins - if he has to tidy them himself maybe he'll stop ordering me to make so many of the accursed things!!
Thing I still don't get is why don't they put them in the coffers?

Great game by the way,I'm losing huge chunks of my life to it XD

[Sowelu]

Seems like there's a hopefully-convenient midway point here...well, if it's possible anyway.  Make a stack of gold coins, regardless of year, just one object.  So it can be weighed as one chunk, moved as one chunk, etc.  But make it hold a list of the quantities and type-ids of each type of coin in the stack, so when a new year of gold is minted you just make a new type-id for them.

It just seems like one stack of a certain material of coins--no matter how many different models of those coins there are--should only be treated as a single stack, or the engine would have to do ridiculous things, ie, melt hundreds and hundreds of different stacks when you flood your king's room with lava.  Seems more sensible if multiple types of coin are at least still treated as a single, solid stack by most of the physics calculations.

It's quite possible this is what's already happening...but Toady, when you said you were only abstracting it in the interface, that sounded like a bad idea.  And besides...I don't know how big the header information for a single stack is, but it's gotta be way bigger than just adding a linked list or something containing quantity and coin types for each stack.

Great--Now I have visions of databases dancing in my head.