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[UristMcHuman]

Sorry for asking yet another newbie question, but should I use stone stockpiles for my masons and mechanics, or should I just leave them sitting where they were mined?

[Tevish Szat]

Leave them or Quantum Stockpile them, a regular stone stockpile takes up too much room and fills too fast to be useful.

EDIT: The exception, of course, is if you make a custom stone stockpile to accept a particular type of stone you want to use: say, small microcline, cinnibar, olivine, and orthoclase stockpiles each with their own burrow, for when you want to specifically make yellow lever mechanisms, or such.

[UristMcHuman]

Leave them or Quantum Stockpile them, a regular stone stockpile takes up too much room and fills too fast to be useful.

EDIT: The exception, of course, is if you make a custom stone stockpile to accept a particular type of stone you want to use: say, small microcline, cinnibar, olivine, and orthoclase stockpiles each with their own burrow, for when you want to specifically make yellow lever mechanisms, or such.

A Quantum Stockpile, on these forums at least, is essentially a garbage dump zone, yes?

Using the Exception: I was thinkin' of customizing a stockpile to only allow flux stones, coal, and metal ores. I've done this when gathering clay for a surface fort before. Plus, I don't appear to have any of those stones in my mountain (as far as I know), so multi-coloured mechanisms are out the window.

[Tevish Szat]

Generally a 1x1 garbage dump zone, yeah.  You could also use the trade depot: any number of items brought to the depot will stay there if you have no stockpile for them to be hauled back to.

[Girlinhat]

I frequently have ore stockpiles for the furnaces, but that's another matter.  I had a mason with no leg once, so I made a stockpile for him and he spent his time making specially colored blocks for construction.  For color coding mechanisms, I usually burrow and selectively dump stone to generate a specific color, as that's a one-time action, or should be.

I do use color coded stockpiles if, say, I want an olivine door to fit in the olivine walls of my olivine trade depot.

[khearn]

In my current fort, I have a couple of small stockpiles just above the mason/mechanic shops. One is for any magma-safe stone, one is for any non-magma-safe stone. Each one takes from a larger stockpile of the same types. Having a feed stockpile very close to each shop is important. If your stones are left in the quarry, the shop worker has to travel all the way there and back for each item he makes. If there is a stockpile a few steps away, hr can grab the next stone and be back in the shop with hardly any wasted time. Let the haulers spend their time carrying stones a long ways.

[Reudh]

I've got a quantum stockpile next to my mason and craftsdwarf workshop. It's just far too useful. I haven't counted but there's presumably at LEAST 1000 stone there.

[nttea]

quantum stockpiles are abusing! What you do want is a small stone stockpiles next to your workshops; make sure they don't accept metal ores or other stone you dont want used by your masons, your idle peasants will make the work for your masons and mechanists go much faster

[Girlinhat]

Quantum stockpiles are almost essential to running a fort.  There's not really a viable alternative to moving the miles and miles of stones left over.

[nttea]

yeah but it's not abuse to just dump stuff, but it's abuse if you start using them afterwards! But it's not like i judge..... much.

[Girlinhat]

If boulders would fit into bins, then I'd use that, but as it stands they simply consume too much floorspace for any other realistic option.

[Mister Always]

I put my mason's workshop and mechanic's workshop right next to eachother, so they're both close to the furniture stocpkile (the carpenter's workshop is on the other side of the mason's shop, and the wood pile is next to the furniture pile, so, yeah!). Here's how my workshops look:

 X
XXX
XXX
XXX
 X

So as you can see there's 2 1x1 entrances into the workshop (one leads to the furniture stockpile, the other to the main hallway). What I do is quantum dump all the stone I want my mason to use (I shoot for one colour furniture, usually, and NEVER microcline) in the path between the main hallway and the workshop proper, claim it, and hide it (to save some FPS). The masons only have to walk like, two tiles to fetch a stone and make a table out of it, and the mechanics only have to walk a few more. Works pretty well.

(Psst. Microcline melts. Fun times if you have a volcano.)

And, seriously, abuse? I just like to imagine that there's a huge pile of rocks in the entrance to the workshop and the mason has to clamber over it to get at the workshop

"Soddin' boulders, all th' dang time...my kingdom fer a fortress where they can jus' leave well enuff alone an' th' stones bloody spread out. Also, maybe some stones wot aren't grey."

[Doomchild-]

the only impractical use of quantum stockpiles is that if you have multiple garbage dump zones you have to keep track of which ones you want to use.
last time i tried to quantum stockpile the stones from a large room which was to become a furniture stockpile, my dwarves tossed an entire vein worth of gold nuggets into a magma pit because i forgot to deactivate that dump after i finished clearing all the rope reed and wooden crafts/clothing left by the elven caravan when they tried to make off with the tame honeybadger i wanted because they were offended by the rope reed clothing from the previous elven caravan which i tried to trade back to them...

well... its not like i got a shortage of gold on my map anyway... aside from galena, it's all i've got

[dr_random]

I have small stockpiles like 3x3 or 4x4 for the ores near the smithies. I have extended this for raw materials in general. For two mason-shops a small patch like 12-16 stockpile squares is ok for the things I want to have done in a certain material. I use the quantum stockpiles only for cleaning up and have several of them around so that haulers don't have to walk long ways. I couldn't get work the sorting by dumping everything into one spot.

The small stockpiles work as buffer and do also indicate if some ores or resources are running low.   

[kardwill]

I often use small regular stone stockpiles around my mason, craft and mechanic workshop. Kinda like this :
swww
swww
swww
ssss

It allows me to have them working on specific rocks, but also to limit the time lost by the crafter : They tend to use the nearest rock in x and y term, but do not acount for z, so instead of taking the rock 5 squares away, they will take the one 2 squares away, but 35 z level below, in the middle of my exploratory-mining labyrinth. Too much time lost, and it can put a legendary mason or mecanics at risk. Instead, if they have a rock stockpile all around their workshop (or just under it, with a nearby stair), they will mostly take from it, and the useless wastes of proteins haulers will get off their lardass and resupply it. The craftsdwarf works faster, and the meatshields haulers get some work. Win-win.

I know quantum piles are equicker and more efficient, but they feel cheaty, and they need some micromanagement. Normal piles are fully automated.  I mostly use quantum only for real dumping and clearing some space.

And I have some gigantic ore stockpiles around my smelters, but it's as much about style and vanity than it is about efficiency