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[Dwarfus]

I have been playing for a year and made my account today in order to try to understand a couple of problems I am having.

One of these is efficient textile industry design. My biggest problem is running out of bags while dealing with pigtail crops and thus the whole system shutting down due to this bottle neck. This can happen when processing plants and grinding up my cave wheat inadvertently, which terminates my bag. From my research this morning, it looks like I need a closer pig tail only stockpile next to my querns.

This however leads me to another question: where is our knowledge on how to efficiently run industries kept. I often have to go to this forum and find very different information, or very specific stuff like processing plants goes to the closest stockpile first, than what I find on Dwarf Wiki. The information here is more of the type of collective knowledge, where we all share information.

Is there anywhere where we collect this information into writeups, like efficiency studies? The closest thing I've found is some of the materials around DigFort, where some blueprints were described as efficient or non-efficient. In particular I'm thinking of the designs for apartment levels that try to reduce the avg number of footsteps between the bed and stairwells by avoiding fractal designs and whatnots.

Is there any where I can find "deeper secrets" on correct industry setup? The issue with pig tails is a fairly major one that would impact many people I imagine, so I was surprised it was not included in the Dwarf wiki.

[Fishbulb]

I'm a little confused. You don't process pig tails to bags. You process pig tails and rope reeds straight to thread at a farmer's workshop. Bags aren't needed for textiles except for dye.

[Dwarfus]

Ack! Dimple Dye! I meant Dimple Dye!

It was early when I wrote this...

I meant the bags are getting caught up in the dimple dye process for pig tail cloth assembly line, tying it up since I want to restrict to dyed cloth usage. I can't make more blue bags if I restrict to dyed cloth.

I also read somewhere there's a method that is more efficient: dying cloth vs dying thread, but I don't recall where I read that.

Sorry for the confusing post! My original inquiry still is more the focus: is there someplace better to look for efficiency information?

[Patchy]

I find it easier to jus make all my bags out of leather, usually dog leather. And after 1 or 2 caravans if you buy all their leather too, you'll have plenty of bags too.

[Nan]

I find it easier to jus make all my bags out of leather, usually dog leather. And after 1 or 2 caravans if you buy all their leather too, you'll have plenty of bags too.

Since cloth is a cheap, abundant resource due to caravans (especially elves), I prefer to make bags out of cloth. As for leather, I make some bags pre-caravan (because it's cheaper to embark with leather than cloth), but mostly I horde it. If I get a high level leatherworker from immigration or a mood I turn it all into cloaks so my military has masterwork cloaks, or possibly shields if masterwork wood/metal shields aren't probable.

To the OP:
I suspect that there is no truly efficient way to do a lot of things, since most methods either require saturation at some level of the supply chain, or fiddliness. My final approach to dealing with bag industries is to massively mass-produce bags. That's not exactly a clever or efficient method, but it does work well.

[Dwarfus]

I agree that mass produced bags are the way to go. Just trying to get there quickly before I stop caring out them.

Thanks for the replies all, another really good "efficiency study" is what Root Infinity just posted with respect to farming! Check that thread out!

 http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=87721.0

[Qwernt]

While I tend to not dye my cloth, I have found that the easiest solution (beyond leather) to pigtail depletion is Rope Reed.  Find it and farm it (or get lucky and have the elves bring you some seed).  It grows in all seasons, unlike pigtail, which means you can get a bunch of it.

Moving raw materials closer should allow for quicker freeing of the blocking material (bags in this case), allowing for smoother running.  So, definitely put the the workshops right on top of each other.  ALSO, given that clutter will slow down a workshop, you can slow down the quern by NOT stockpiling the bags.  Add multiple dyeing workshops to further improve the relationship and you should be able to get to a point where the dyers are waiting on the quern, not the other way around.

[Jessoftherocks]

I like to dye just the thread, Plus with the (d) than (o) orders screen you can set it to just weave dyed thread at the looms. This was a facepalm when I  first got around to figuring it out.

[Duuvian]

I order tons and tons of leather most years, especially early, as it's extremely cheap and multipurpose (and thus good for bags)

[Fishbulb]

And good to have around for moods.

Dwarfus, I owe you an apology. In my original reply up yonder I was completely unhelpful. I just nitpicked instead of offering anything. That sucks and I regret it. I'm sorry.

As to the actual question, though … I don't know. I haven't figured it out yet, and I've been reading the real answers with interest. I had the same problem you described at Bannerskies, only with rope reed and sliver dye instead. I always, always ran out of empty bags. However, this little mod to the game is incredibly helpful. It makes the milling-wheat-to-flour-and-filling-bags problem go away by giving you custom reactions at the quern or millstone. You can order only that dye plants be milled to dye — specific dye plants, at that. Your millers will mill just what your order, and leave your cave wheat alone.

Now, there's a school of thought that says making a change like this to the game to get around a built-in mechanic is cheating. I don't think so, though. I think it's just an oversight. If you look at the jeweler's workshop, you can order specific gems to be cut, and used to encrust specific things. This is the same idea, only applied to a workshop that doesn't, by default, have those kinds of specific orders built in. Why should jewelers be able to take specific orders while millers can't? I don't have a good in-game reason. So I don't see it as cheating. In my game I even went so far as to add a bunch of similar custom reactions to the brewery, one for each type of booze in the game, because I sometimes like to micromanage what my dwarves are drinking. If I could figure out how to add custom reactions to the crafter's workshop to order my metalcrafters to stud only specific objects with metals rather than whatever happens to be near the forge, I'd do that too.

So while I don't have an answer for your, cause I have the same problem, maybe those custom reactions will help you find your own answer in your next game. (You can't add them to an existing game; adding new reactions requires a new world be generated.)

[Squirrelloid]

If the goal is just to avoid cave wheat taking over your bags, do one of the following:

(1) Don't grow cave wheat!
(2) Use burrows so the millstones being used for dimple dye aren't accessible to anyone who mills and has access to cave wheat.  Then you can just tell them to run and only dimple dye will get ground.

[Dwarfus]

@Fishbulb: No worries! The thread was still informative!

After reviewing the Farming Analysis thread it seems like Plump Helmets and Pig Tails are a good focus for the first 5 years of a fortress, diversifying my crops later when I have created billions of bags. A similiar problem I used to have with running out of barrels, before I learned pots were equivalent to barrels and all I needed was to keep a repeat task on a craftdwarf's workshop to pretty much solve that issue.

[Azure]

order all the leather and cheaper yarn for the second caravan as well as bags made from cheaper materials. When they arrive in year 2 drown them in roasts. Now you have bags and plenty of leather/yarn to make more.

[hermano]

@Fishbulb: No worries! The thread was still informative!

After reviewing the Farming Analysis thread it seems like Plump Helmets and Pig Tails are a good focus for the first 5 years of a fortress, diversifying my crops later when I have created billions of bags. A similiar problem I used to have with running out of barrels, before I learned pots were equivalent to barrels and all I needed was to keep a repeat task on a craftdwarf's workshop to pretty much solve that issue.

Well, Plump Helmets and Pig Tails are most efficient regarding the number of fed/drunk dwarfs per farm plot.
Adding a few Quarry Bush plots will give you huge stacks of high quality food (at least with a decent cook) that do not only feed your dwarfs but can be exported too. With the current high food prices this makes other export industries unneccessary. This is important for those with slow computers as carrying a few meals around uses much fewer dwarfs than stonecrafting or clothing industries. It's also much less annoying to trade as you won't have to select hundreds or thousands of items to sell.
In my current fort I have just 6 Quarry Bush plots but more food than my dwarfs could ever eat or could export (with also using meat and eggs for cooking). In the third year I bought stuff worth 90k from the caravan and gave them another 90k worth of food for their effort, plus 50k worth of food as a present for the king. It is actually ridicolous, I still have lots of the stuff lying around, most of it legendary meals. But it allows my small fort of 60 dwarfs to have 30 dwarfs in the military and much of the rest in the metal industry. Everybody should try all other export industries too, as it's fun, but in the end Quarry Bush cooking is most efficient regarding the number of dwarfs in export production (including needed haulers).

[Psieye]

Your question is somewhat odd as if a fort is considering a major textile industry, then you've got a lot of dwarves already. If there is a shortage of bags, then short of having stockpiles in close proximity so hauling distances are minimised the basic solution is "throw more dwarves at it". How many tailor workshops do you have running "make bag /R"? For glass industries in my forts, I prefer about 4 tailors going at it non-stop until I have hundreds upon hundreds of bags. Then I have around 12 glass workshops on "gather sand /R" so my 2~3 legendary glassmakers don't get interrupted with shortages.

Perhaps your issue is that you're trying to start dyeing too early. The dyeing industry has a pre-requisite of lots and lots of bags, even more if you run other industries which also need bags. Don't restrict bag making to dyed cloth, you want quantity at first unless you really insist that every bag (and barrel and bin) in use in your fort is a shining vessel of wealth.