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[wlerin]

What's the point?

I was just going over plans for a new farming complex, planning out how much food, booze, cloth, and dye I would need to produce each year, when I realized: I don't need cloth. Don't get me wrong, I want cloth. I want to deck my dwarves out in emerald and midnight blue finery, possibly transitioning to GCS silk at some point... but, let's face it, they aren't going to wear any of it.

So, aside from clothing, what good is cloth?

The hospital needs thread and cloth... but not *that* much.
Bags... but I don't need a never ending supply of bags.
Dwarves can't make backpacks or quivers out of cloth.
I could make cloth crafts... if I was really, really bored...
Oh, and of course I could decorate bags and crafts and clothing and backpacks and quivers and ... well, no, that's about it. Well, not so much clothing, since I won't be making any.

So, long story short, am I missing something? Is there a way to get my dwarves to wear clothing (aside from drafting them all)? Is there some use for mountains of cloth I am forgetting? Or should I just axe the dimple cup/blade weed plots and grow more sweet pods?

[Lectorog]

Cloth is a cheap and quick way to make a lot of trade goods. Socks, socks, and socks are the best to make, but mittens and socks work well too. Other than trade and *socks*, I don't know of any good in the cloth industry. You'll probably want to make some cloaks before you scrap it, though; cloaks are good military protection.

[Daetrin]

it's an industry that keeps an enormous number of dwarves employed (farming, harvesting, processing plants, dyeing, weaving, and finally making the cloth crafts) that doesn't require you to dig at all, and overall is very FPS friendly. 

That said, no, there's really no point to it.  Hopefully Toady fixes dwarves and clothing soon.
(Also, I'd love to see guilds return, and with them, preferred uniforms, but pie, sky, etc.)

[Girlinhat]

Right now?  Not really, no.  But once your dwarves buy and wear clothing, then it'll be very important.  Your armorsmith may earn enough to rent a mansion for a week, but your clothier will be in business forever.

[Lagslayer]

It's a lot of work. You need farmers to grow the stuff, plant processors to make the thread, weavers to make the cloth, millers to make the dye, dyers to dye the cloth, and clothesmakers to make/decorate the goods. On the plus side, the cloth industry is space efficient, can be done without any digging whatsoever, gives you something to do with all that clothing the invaders drop, has a lot of quality modifiers (the cloth, dying, item, and decoration all have their own modifiers), and effectively infinite resources to work with (because all the materials can be grown).

[Hyndis]

Exporting cloth is highly profitable and can be entirely automated.

Just grow cloth crops all year round. Have a farmer workshop on process plants running all the time. Then have several looms.

Ensure adequate bins are being made which has the side effect of giving your carpenters practice.

Export bins and bins full of cloth. Just cloth. You don't even need to make it into crafts. While each piece of cloth isn't particularly valuable, you can churn out thousands of units of cloth with incredible ease, and you can do it with great speed. Once you have a bunch of legendary weavers everything you make out of cloth will be highly valuable.

If you want to sort out what cloth you want to keep and what cloth you want to get rid of, make two cloth stockpiles. One next to the trade depot that accepts cloth below masterwork. Then have the real cloth stockpile next to the workshops that accepts only masterwork quality cloth but nothing else. This will automatically sort out the good stuff from the garbage, allowing you to offload huge amounts of garbage onto the traders.

I mostly due this quality segregation with finished goods, weapons, and armor, but it should work for anything else as well. I keep the masterworks. If its not a masterwork its crap. 

[Argonnek]

The cloth and clothing industry adds OBSCENE amounts of wealth to your fortress, especially if your crafters/dyers/weavers are skilled. Just think of how much it would cost to buy a robe that was masterfully crafted out of masterfully weaved cloth that happened to be masterfully dyed... you get the point. That's not even including decorations, which add an entire level of masterfulness to the piece.

[wuphonsreach]

Yeah, until Toady fixes the naked dwarf issue where they won't replace old clothing and where dwarves will discard and unclaim completely worn out clothing so it will go to a refuse pile... the purpose of the cloth industry is mostly for increasing fortress wealth.

I have yet to make anything out of cloth other then armor (cloaks / hoods) for my military.  My tailor generally ends up bored off her rocker.

[Girlinhat]

I do ropes for fun, mass producing silk or rope reed ropes, dyed with something on-hand.  I usually wrap this up into one dwarf who weaves, dyes, and clothmakes.  I color-code the ropes according to why the animal is chained there, sell or burn the rest (good for lighting a fire under goblins' feet!) or distracted a building destroyer for a few seconds.  Masterworks get put into special areas, like the new statue garden or zoo with a masterful midnight blue rope to keep the minotaur in place.

Sometimes I split my fort into makeshift guilds, and deck all my metalsmiths in black (modded sliver barb to appear anywhere) and my farmers in green, and soldiers in red.  Make a squad using one color and assign anyone of that profession to the squad.  Sure, no one is gonna even come close to realizing that I've decked all my farmers in green, but I enjoy the simple things...

Also, I sometimes like to burn the clothes while a dwarf is wearing it.  Get him to wear that one ugly troll leather loincloth, and tell him to go stand on the well-made ropes and catch them alight.  My doctors are always busy...

[Jetriot]

Am I missing something here? As long as my dwarfs have enough cabinets in their rooms they seem to always wear the new clothes that I make. If I don't have enough cabinets they leave their old ones in random places until I build more... Do they stop gathering clothes if I leave my fortress running long enough?

[Girlinhat]

They don't ever seem to stop gathering clothes, nor do they ever seem to put them on.  What version are you running?

[khearn]

Also, I sometimes like to burn the clothes while a dwarf is wearing it.  Get him to wear that one ugly troll leather loincloth, and tell him to go stand on the well-made ropes and catch them alight.  My doctors are always busy...

Are you referring to your Dwarven doctors, or your personal psychiatrists?

[wlerin]

Am I missing something here? As long as my dwarfs have enough cabinets in their rooms they seem to always wear the new clothes that I make. If I don't have enough cabinets they leave their old ones in random places until I build more... Do they stop gathering clothes if I leave my fortress running long enough?

Toady released a new version last year around this time. You should try it some time.

[wlerin]

and overall is very FPS friendly.

And buggy as all get out.

That said, I'll consider it. I'll most likely limit myself to dyeing cloth and stashing it in an ever-growing warehouse for the time being.

[Ganondwarf]

This has been quite helpful (although redundant)—I was wondering the same thing.
But it's got me wondering. What are the most popular trade goods industries? I've always been about cut gems and stone crafts on the side, but right now I'm not allowed to dig, and until this thread I was thinking I would have to trade from my mountains of food. So what are some good industries?