Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[VerdantSF]

I never really think about the weight of items that my dwarves have to haul.  Would it really hurt anything to store all my non-cooked food and booze in pots rather than wood barrels?

[Girlinhat]

In theory: Yes, stone is much much much heavier than wood.
In practice: Barrels don't get hauled much at all.  Their contents get shifted, but the barrel itself remains still.  And the marginal hauling time increase is just that, very small.  It would take as much (or less) effort than hauling a raw boulder from place to place.

[NecroRebel]

Food and booze typically aren't that heavy in the first place, so it's fairly unlikely that you'll overweight your haulers with uncooked food or booze. Even if you do, they really just have to haul them to the food/booze stockpile once, so it shouldn't be too big a deal.

Myself, I prefer to use barrels just out of habit more than anything else. That, and I find carpenters more useful than stonecrafters because of wooden bins and beds and my specific avoidance of using stone crafts for trade.

[rutsber]

Why do you avoid stone crafts for trade? I just started using them because for the mega project I'm working on I want all the gems I can get but I don't see why you wouldn't use them.

[NecroRebel]

Why do you avoid stone crafts for trade? I just started using them because for the mega project I'm working on I want all the gems I can get but I don't see why you wouldn't use them.

Too easy, too readily available. I prefer trading things that take a bit of effort on my part to create, like cloth, leather, or bone crafts, or even metal crafts on established forts once I don't have any better uses for invader metal.

Once you get good at this game, it's really quite easy, so veterans will do anything for a challenge 

[Supernerd]

Stone Pots are wonderful! Now I don't need to wipe out my forest to store all my junk! So yeah. Its nice to be able to wipe out my forests for other things like beds and entirely too many cheap yet effective trap components.

[evileeyore]

Stone Pots are wonderful! Now I don't need to wipe out my forest to store all my junk! So yeah. Its nice to be able to wipe out my forests for other things like beds and entirely too many cheap yet effective trap components.

I tend to wipe out my forests for the purpose of pissing off Elves.

[thegoatgod_pan]

I just avoid boring surface wood; third cavern trees make such lovely trees and barrels

[AutomataKittay]

Container weights don't really matters much, since they tend to stay where they're set up for a long time until emptied out or transferred to another stockpile. At least I've never had any issues with slow-down for them ( I have finished good stockpile right next to trade deport, so I wouldn't see much effect of bin weight, and massively shortened hauling distance ). Lighter's preferred, but I makes bins and barrels out of anything I can grab, that's not too useful otherwise!

Why do you avoid stone crafts for trade? I just started using them because for the mega project I'm working on I want all the gems I can get but I don't see why you wouldn't use them.

Too easy, too readily available. I prefer trading things that take a bit of effort on my part to create, like cloth, leather, or bone crafts, or even metal crafts on established forts once I don't have any better uses for invader metal.

Once you get good at this game, it's really quite easy, so veterans will do anything for a challenge 

Too easy? All of those you mentioned are easy, with exception of metal crafts. Cloth crafts and ropes are very profitible, leather uses up excess stock, totems and hooves abounds in my fortress with just a -bit- of animal husbandry. I'm buying caravans out of useful materials just with totems and hooves/horns crafts, occasional bone armors and crossbows

Heck I -have- to export every totems and hoof/horn crafts just because I can't stand to waste materials, and I still give anywhere from 4x to 10x profit to human and dwarf caravans.

[NecroRebel]

Are those things as easy as stone crafts, though? I mean, in the course of an ordinary fort, you'll have the resources to make stone crafts by the thousands without any extra effort. For cloth, you at least need to set up a textile industry. For leather and bone you either need to hunt or (largely manually) do animal husbandry. Those industries I mentioned might be fire-and-forget, but at least you have to start them up! Stone crafts you don't even really have to do that; you have to go out of your way not to use them, which is, I feel, slightly more challenging than the alternative.

[AutomataKittay]

Are those things as easy as stone crafts, though? I mean, in the course of an ordinary fort, you'll have the resources to make stone crafts by the thousands without any extra effort. For cloth, you at least need to set up a textile industry. For leather and bone you either need to hunt or (largely manually) do animal husbandry. Those industries I mentioned might be fire-and-forget, but at least you have to start them up! Stone crafts you don't even really have to do that; you have to go out of your way not to use them, which is, I feel, slightly more challenging than the alternative.

Actually, once you really get things running, you can run out of stone pretty fast, or at least faster than you can dig it up. Animal husbandery's pretty minimumal effort if you go the cheap route ( using animal part of status screen to designate all but one male and some females adults to be slaughtered ) and you can make a lot of prepared food from them to be sold, I mostly do animal husbandry for the bone bolts, but the byproducts are everywhere. Farming's easy and I tend to need rope for restraints anyway, so the industry's already in the place and with big enough plant stockpile and farm output, it IS fire and forget with repeat jobs and small enough interim material stockpile to clutter shops.

[NecroRebel]

Actually, once you really get things running, you can run out of stone pretty fast, or at least faster than you can dig it up. Animal husbandery's pretty minimumal effort if you go the cheap route ( using animal part of status screen to designate all but one male and some females adults to be slaughtered ) and you can make a lot of prepared food from them to be sold, I mostly do animal husbandry for the bone bolts, but the byproducts are everywhere. Farming's easy and I tend to need rope for restraints anyway, so the industry's already in the place and with big enough plant stockpile and farm output, it IS fire and forget with repeat jobs and small enough interim material stockpile to clutter shops.

I didn't mention prepared food as something I export, though; I avoid that, too. Fair enough, overall, though. I guess to a certain extent it's personal preference. I rarely find myself running out of stone prior to starting to do megaprojects, even if I restrict my stone-using dwarves to only one type. Animal husbandry is often my primary food source, and running a bone/leather/horn/tooth/totem craft industry without actually overproducing food is usually my problem. As a result, I've deemphasized farming, to the point where I'm thinking about just not doing it except for booze in my coming forts. My restraints are usually metal, but, again, that's personal preference. Regardless, one's ways are one's own 

[Psieye]

Why do you avoid stone crafts for trade? I just started using them because for the mega project I'm working on I want all the gems I can get but I don't see why you wouldn't use them.

Waste of dwarf time - other industries offer better profits for comparatively less dwarf time (in the workshops and then in hauling).

[Werdna]

I don't think stonecrafts are a total waste of time, as it is an easy way to get a legendary stonecrafter without a mood.  On most embarks I can set a dwarf to stonecrafting pots nonstop right from the start as long as I remember to keep the miners busy.  I just steadily smash the lesser pieces until I have stockpiles of exceptional/masterwork pots.  Sometimes I sell them if I've been neglectful on cooking but prepared food and other stuff is normally just way more profitable than stonecraft.  It keeps stockpiles small at the start and the eventual result is that whenever dwarves go to get food or drink, they're grabbing it from a high quality item.  I could do the same for wood barrels but keeping a carpenter supplied with wood requires more micro-management; wood-cutting is inherently more dangerous and wood is a scarcer resource.  For my dwarves, wood is for burning, and sadly, beds - wish there was a dwarfy alternative here, like a soft clay futon... 

As for hauling weight, I regularly use stone pots, and dump my lead bars into making bins, and I've never had a hauling problem even when moving stockpiles around.  I'm sure its slower, but its not slow enough to be that noticeable.  If I were playing very low-pop forts where I can only spare a few haulers, maybe.