For some reason, from time to time some dwarves mix up their routes when looking for an object and start walking towards the upper left corner of the map - probably all the way to tile [1,1], though I can't be sure since some wilderness creature always scared them away when I followed them. Still, the point is - there is nothing in the upper half of the wilderness. But judging by the "job item misplaced" I get from time to time - with everything else being relatively in order - I bet some of them get there, find nothing and someone else takes that item haul job later, ad infinitum.
And what's even more odd- that has been happening for a while. I remember one dwarf walking in that direction not long after starting the game. For a while I thought they were going to snatch some random refuse from outside, but I already turned "gather refuse from outside" off for a while and not much changed.
Could it be that some items, for some reason, are creating "out-of-borders" placement information, and prompting dwarves to look for them in the first valid tile? Or maybe some pathfinding loop, which passes through tile [1,1] or near it?
EDIT: ok, so now there's a dwarf coming back from the top corner with an iron shield... which, I'm 99% sure, wasn't there. there is a lot of caravan-guard and goblin-sieger equipment near the road, but nobody ventured that far up north - some were elephant-stomped south of the road, but not to the north.
I'm not sure if I'm understanding it at all anymore.
[ January 30, 2007: Message edited by: j.brigante ]