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[KillHour]

Sure, adding components/tools would create some needless difficulty.  but so does having to chop wood for charcoal to smelt ore to make the bars you forge into metal goods...

of course, how it handles Strange Moods would be one stumbling block. if they took over your main workhouse...

It would actually be less of a problem, since multiple dwarves working side by side would become a possibility. They'll just nudge anyone out of the way if the only anvil happens to be occupied when they need it

Unless, of course, they go into a secretive mood, at which point they should guard their creation from prying eyes until it's finished.  It would be nice to have little things like that differentiating the different mood types, rather than just how they word their demands.

[antymattar]

Hey, yeah! I didnt think of that! That sounds like a good idea! So a macabre dwarf would freak the hell out of every dwarf in the workshop.

[Silverionmox]

Sure, adding components/tools would create some needless difficulty.  but so does having to chop wood for charcoal to smelt ore to make the bars you forge into metal goods...

of course, how it handles Strange Moods would be one stumbling block. if they took over your main workhouse...

It would actually be less of a problem, since multiple dwarves working side by side would become a possibility. They'll just nudge anyone out of the way if the only anvil happens to be occupied when they need it

Unless, of course, they go into a secretive mood, at which point they should guard their creation from prying eyes until it's finished.  It would be nice to have little things like that differentiating the different mood types, rather than just how they word their demands.

Oh yes, secretive dwarves should secretly hoard the ingredients of their creation under their bed until they're ready. The player shouldn't even know they are doing so until it's finished (and even then...). If the workshop is in a normal room with doors, they might as well barricade or lock the doors, or just snatch the right equipment and do it in their private chambers altogether.

[drilltooth]

just as long as we get firefighting first.. as !!fun!! as dorfs forging in their bedchambers could be.. I think I'd want them to thing to grab buckets if things to horribly wrong.

EDIT: of course, if you DID have a legendary metalcrafter he might ENJOY sleeping in the smithy..

[Neowulf]

Easy fix for the bootstrapping problem.

1: Add designation to scavenge dead trees for logs and surface boulders for stones. Done by hand, removes the dead tree/boulder from the surface.

2: Expand the possible materials for tools. Stone anvils, axes, picks, ect...

3: Give materials a suitability modifier, which limits the max skill of any job performed with it. Tool quality would affect the suitability. Mining chance to get stones/ores would need to be reworked somehow so it wouldn't completely stop a new embark from getting the materials it needs to upgrade.

4: Have a way to designate how much a tool affects a particular reaction (either in the tools per industry, or the reactions as a "needs tools:" definition). Tools that provide a bonus are marked as non-essential.


A no-quality shale pickaxe may have a suitability modified of .25, meaning any miner using that pickaxe will mine as if his still was 1/4th what it actually is. A smith using a stone anvil and copper hammer would average the suitability modifiers.

[O11O1]

Easy fix for the bootstrapping problem.

1: Add designation to scavenge dead trees for logs and surface boulders for stones. Done by hand, removes the dead tree/boulder from the surface.

2: Expand the possible materials for tools. Stone anvils, axes, picks, ect...

3: Give materials a suitability modifier, which limits the max skill of any job performed with it. Tool quality would affect the suitability. Mining chance to get stones/ores would need to be reworked somehow so it wouldn't completely stop a new embark from getting the materials it needs to upgrade.

4: Have a way to designate how much a tool affects a particular reaction (either in the tools per industry, or the reactions as a "needs tools:" definition). Tools that provide a bonus are marked as non-essential.


A no-quality shale pickaxe may have a suitability modified of .25, meaning any miner using that pickaxe will mine as if his still was 1/4th what it actually is. A smith using a stone anvil and copper hammer would average the suitability modifiers.

Items 1, 2 I like as written. Items 3 and 4 you could tie into the condition of the tool, and make stone tools degrade through use, so a brand new is just fine, but when you try to take a limestone pick to a granite outcropping, you soon don't have a usable pick anymore.

Expanding that, as the condition goes down, the skill cap/multiplier goes down with it, which may or may not take enough processing power to be worth the detail. (This -is- DF though) Of course, if it happens with stone tools, that might also spread out to wooden and even metal tools. Copper is kinda soft, relative to steel and bronze.

[Silverionmox]

Some rules may be combined, or used separately (modding flexibility):

- put a cap on the maximum possible quality of items, depending on the material class. Eg. a non-metal anvil will never be more than basic quality.
- require a minimum physical characteristic for items to be crafted. eg. picks have a minimum hardness requirement, so wax and leather will not be a (standard) option to make a pick. *
- wear and tear: softer items obviously wear faster through use.
- minimal hardness: a copper pick is useless to mine granite, but it's okay for mining soil and chalk. This just requires a comparison of the hardness of the target material and the equipment material to determine, but teaching the dwarves what they can and can't do might be trickier.

* However, I would like to see the option to make wax picks. Because if you have a mage that knows how to transmute wax into steel, you're set. DF would be the perfect environment for a transmute spell... (Technically it could be available from the manager screen, but not from the standard multiple choice lists in the workshops themselves, to ease the learning curve a bit.)

[O11O1]

Some rules may be combined, or used separately (modding flexibility):

- put a cap on the maximum possible quality of items, depending on the material class. Eg. a non-metal anvil will never be more than basic quality.
....

* However, I would like to see the option to make wax picks. Because if you have a mage that knows how to transmute wax into steel, you're set. DF would be the perfect environment for a transmute spell... (Technically it could be available from the manager screen, but not from the standard multiple choice lists in the workshops themselves, to ease the learning curve a bit.)

I want my Artifact Granite Anvils to be awesome. But the Manager screen trick sounds like a nice way to hide strange options from beginning users, and reduces accidental production.

[Waparius]

Another thing, which has probably been suggested in the past but could do with bringing up here, is to have workshop furniture built from multiple components - so for instance, a brewery is ordinarily furnished with regular barrels but to build a still, you put down a pipe section, blocks and two barrels. To improve your carpenter's shop you put in a large serrated disc and a mechanism to make a sawmill. That sort of thing.

[Iapetus]

If tool and equipment quality affects work speed and final product quality, then "workshops as areas" would make upgrading them less hastle, as you could just place a new anvil/table/etc in the area, rather than having to deconstruct and reconstruct the workshop building each time.

Another advantage would be is some jobs didn't use all the equipment in a workshop, then multiple dwarves could work there simultaneously.

Example: forges and smelters are combined into a single "smithy" workshop.  To create a smithy:
1) Create a "smithy" zone.
2) Place an anvil in it.
3) Place a furnace in it (this could be a mason-created item).
4) Optionally, place box in it.  (This is where tools, and possibly reagents would be stored).

Some metals can be beaten without heating, so you could have a smith beating out native copper blades while a furnace operator smelts ore to produce better metals.  Additional furnaces and anvils could be added as your industry expands.


The bootstrapping problem could be dealt with by making the "necessary" equipment not absolutely necessary, but giving a speed and quality penalty to any jobs done without them.  (E.g. 5x time and zero-quality only).

We can imagine Urist McMastersmith arriving as an imigrant to a fortress, only to find they embarked without any anvils or metalworking tools.  So after rolling his eyes, he dumps a pile of charcoal on the ground, ignites is, and uses to heat up some iron bars, which he then bashes into shape using some handy stones (which, as any adverturer knows, can be found just about anywhere).  After several days of this, he has a crappy, no-quality-modifier anvil and smith's hammer.

Now, he can get to work properly, although he still can't make his best items as his tools are sub-standard, so after banging out a few copper axes for the woodcutters (who had previously had to resort to pushing trees over, because they had traded their axes for booze on embark), he makes a better anvil and hammer, installs them in his smithy, and gets to work.

Meanwhile, he has also apponted an apprentice (i.e. the player has activated metalworking on another dwarf), who can use the old anvil.

If anvil quality affects product quality, e.g. by granting an effective skill boost, then the relationship between skill and product quality would need to be adjusted to keep the overall work quality balanced.  There could also be a limit to how much of a bonus a dwarf can get, based on their current skill.  So a dabbling smith gets no bonus from an anvil, and a small bonus an -anvil-, but higher quality anvils don't give any more benefit than a - one.  A legendary smith, on the other hand, would get increasing bonuses from anvils all the way up to masterwork (and/or, maybe get a penalty for using inferior quality anvils).

[peskyninja]

A legendary smith, on the other hand, would get increasing bonuses from anvils all the way up to masterwork (and/or, maybe get a penalty for using inferior quality anvils).
No penalty,he learned his first skill on a anvil not on a *anvil*,so he knows how to use all.

[Neowulf]

Bonus should only affect work speed and/or minimum quality, while the penalty for using inferior quality tools should drop the max quality the worker can produce.
Easiest thing to do would be to average the skill and the tool quality out, a 15 skill smith using no quality tools should average down to skill 8.

[zwei]

I like idea of zone-defined worshops. Imho, it works rather well for hospital.

I mostly like the fact that some workshops could be "merged" this way (for example butchery, fish clealing, etc...)

I see problem with queuing orders - where would you queue them? Manager, obviously. 'i'-zone screen for specific tasks?

Also, if you are dead-set on making built furniture/equipment quality impact production, there should be painless way to upgrade it easily and automatically, per this thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=50288.0

Also, I would hope that dwarves will simply use apropriate furniture piece if worshop area is not ready - much like doctor treating patients in onther beds, butcher, for example, could simply use table in dining hall to butcher animal if there is no free table in butchers workshop zone.

[antymattar]

Wow! So much ideas here! I like the ones about the tool degrade and value counter, however, I think that the 'non-esential' tools should be ones that do little detail or something to the item being made. Lets not delve into kitchens(I just learned about al the tools of the full kitchen... I am stunned) The forge problem with "a rock forge degrading" would be that they never do that. only non-placed items should degrade or need repair or something. all the built items should just need replacing.

[Jake]

Wow! So much ideas here! I like the ones about the tool degrade and value counter, however, I think that the 'non-esential' tools should be ones that do little detail or something to the item being made. Lets not delve into kitchens(I just learned about al the tools of the full kitchen... I am stunned) The forge problem with "a rock forge degrading" would be that they never do that. only non-placed items should degrade or need repair or something. all the built items should just need replacing.

Something else that would help is tools that can be used for multiple jobs. Separate hammers for masonry, metalsmithing etc don't make a lot of sense, for example, though the material from which the tool is made should be taken into account. It might create a certain amount of back-and-forth from dwarves grabbing tools out of other workshops and not putting tem back afterwards, but I don't view that as a bug -it is after all pretty true to life- and there would be no great dificulty including an option in the Orders screen telling dwarves not to do it.