Macros:
Ctrl+r
<keystroke series>
Ctrl+r
Ctrl+p to playback.
This works anywhere keystrokes work. Designate standard bedrooms by 5 or 10 at a time. One touch flags an entire screen of goods to be traded. Designate 2 levels of pump stack, then designate the other 40 in under a minute.
You can save and reuse them as well, but it's ridiculously good for tedium like trading all on its own. I almost never hear anyone mention macros.
whoa dude.
you just said a bunch of stuff that i WANT to understand, but dont. Would you mind repeating that last bit in way more detail?
You got it.
The simplest example is trading. Say you have 10 screens of stone mugs, all in bins at the depot.On the trade screen, with the first item selected, press ctrl+r to begin macro recording. Then press enter, down, enter, down, etc. to select a full page, move the selector down to the next screen, and press ctrl+r to stop recording. Now the select-one-trade-screen macro is active, so you can press ctrl+p to play it back, and it will do exactly what you just did, select an entire page for trade and end with the cursor on the first entry of the following page. The current macro is active until you load another one (ctrl+s, ctrl+l for save/load macro, respectively), record another one, or leave the game.
This works with anything that takes keystrokes, so if you wanted, you could have an entire macro series to designate->dig a workshop complex, another to build all the shops and create/designate stockpiles, dig pump stacks, whatever.
For advanced reading and/or manual control, try
the wiki page for macros.
To see the idea taken to its glorious, time-saving extreme, check out everything related to
Quickfort.
Now watch as I reply to two posts at once!
Eh I've been playing for a while and haven't used dwarf therapist ever. 
Is it really that good?
Anway I wish I knew the trick of locking a jeweler in a room of the stuff you want encrusted sooner, to many random barrels and bins encrusted with every gemstone imaginable.
Therapist is awesome. It's that good and better.
For jewelers, just make large-ish room with the jeweler's shop, a gem stockpile, and a whatever you want encrusted stockpile. Order the gem stock to take whatever you want to encrust with from the main pile, the target pile to take from whatever you want, and put a door on the room. while the jeweler is working, Query and Lock the door. The same thing can be done by making a burrow that encompasses the cut gem stockpile, the jeweler's shop, and a (for example) furniture stockpile that only accepts masterwork gold statues, and assigning your best gem setter to it.
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Topic: Things you wish you knew earlier (Read 5717 times)