Print

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

[Callista]

You know how when you get a bunch of peasant migrants, and you really really need a master weaponsmith, so you spam unimportant projects at him until he's half-decent at making what you need? Training.

The best training techniques would:
1. Not use up any important, scarce resources
2. Produce few, if any, useless low-quality products; or else produce low-quality products that are easily got rid of.
3. Progress quickly
4. Require little micromanagement

Here's what I've discovered (mind you, I'm an absolute newbie and you guys probably already know this):
Carpenter: Make bins and barrels. It doesn't matter how well-made these are, and you'll need them anyway.
Mason: Make stone blocks, which don't have a quality.
Miner: Mine out soil, clay, sand, etc., because that's faster.
Butcher: Slaughter livestock, rather than butchering hunters' kills, because the butcher can go at his own pace.
Woodcutter: Turn off wood hauling while he trains by cutting down everything in sight and your haulers can retrieve the logs. I much prefer underground trees in a cleared soil/clay/sand level because on the surface, my woodcutters keep getting spooked by foxes and badgers.
Cook: Have him make lots of tallow, to get a start on cooking skill
Engraving: Smoothing stone.

What are your training techniques? I have some trouble with metals; they're scarce enough that training up metalcrafters risks using up valuable resources. Which metals are low-value and can be used for training?

If we got a good list of techniques, I think a wiki page on training would be a good idea. Unless there already is one and I fail at finding it.

[Jenniretta]

For metalsmiths on low-metal maps, I trade the humans and dwarves for every bar they bring and train them on those, that way you don't use up any materials on your map, and metal tools and objects are usually useful, the ones that aren't useful can be traded for a fair bit even with cheaper metals, so you can usually benefit from or make back your money on the bars. This saves on fuel, too, since you don't have to smelt the bars yourself. It can get expensive, but you should have no shortage of trinkets and baubles to trade away for it anyway. the only real problem is the limited quantities, but if you train the smiths one at a time, then you can make a fair bit of progress with each caravan.

[Sutremaine]

Generally speaking, the best metal for training is the one you have most of and can use with the skill you're training. Value is unimportant. Masterpieces have to be sold and not melted unless you're confident it won't affect the creator's mood too much, but they're rare enough that it's not really worth worring about. Maybe I'd make an exception for zinc / copper vs. brass, since brass is much more valuble and the component metals are abundant when present.

Weaponsmithing: Probably copper, maybe silver. Trap weapons are the best things to make because they take 1 bar and return 0.5 bars when melted.
Armoursmithing: Probably copper. Gauntlets give 90XP a bar and melt back into 0.4 bars per pair, taking extra fuel to melt if you're not using magma. Leggings return 0.5 bars when melted and plate mail returns 0.9 bars. Plate mail should take 3 bars to make but currently only requires 1, though you do still need to have the 3 available.
Blacksmithing: Anything but weapon / armour materials. Buckets return 0.5 bars and most other items of furniture 1 bar, and as with armoursmithing this is because some items take fewer bars to make than they should.
Metalcrafting: Anything but weapon / armour materials. Goblets are always made in batches of three and return 0.6 bars in total. Chains return 0.5 bars and take less fuel to melt than a batch of goblets.

[Anathema]

For metal-using skills you can always make some useless item and then melt it to reuse the bar (post above beat me to it, see there for recommendations of specific items). Very metal efficient, but heavy on the micromanagement: first you have to melt-designate all the items produced, which is made easier if you set up a stockpile that only takes items below a certain quality and periodically mass designate (d-b) the whole thing, but it still requires your manual intervention. Then you have to keep re-adding the 'melt designated item' labor to your smelter (you can set it to repeat, but your furnacers will cancel the job every time they run out of items to melt, forcing you to re-add it). So you wind up in this cycle of queue new items -> designate old items for melting -> add melt item job to smelter.

If you want to make something actually useable, the best option is bolt production (or similarly ballista heads). You need tons of them, they're expendable, and in sufficient quantities they're effective even when they're low quality or made of a subpar metal like copper or silver. They're the only weapon/armorsmith product where quantity legitimately wins over quality/material - in fact lower quality is slightly better in a way, your weaponsmith gets upset if his masterwork bolts are lost, but doesn't care about shoddy ones.

I used to treat trap components the same way as bolts, training smiths by mass producing low-quality silver and copper ones for actual use in fort defense, in the hopes that quantity would win over quality and a lucky hit would get through occasionally.. very, very bad idea. You end up with several unlucky dead goblins and a few lucky live ones that make it past dozens of 10x weapon traps with barely a scratch and legendary dodging; your bad traps act like a danger room for them. Don't do this unless you deliberately want to apply a Darwinian selection process to invaders, leaving only truly challenging ones for your military to face.

[Garath]

many people train their weapon smith up on bolts

If you dont have too many trade goods, too much stones and want better mechanics, pump out mechanisms constantly. They're a decent trade good and youll finally get some decent mechanisms for your traps/wells/etc that people can admire

[hermano]

Metalsmithing can be trained by building metal bridges. After deconstructing the bridge you will recover all the materials (will also train building designer).

Cooking can be trained by cooking easy meals with seeds. If the way to the seed storage is short you will have a legendary cook in no time (forbid some seeds so you don't cook all of them accidentally).

If you are desperate for metal you can produce metal from melting single bolts. Have a wall behind your archery targets and a ditch in front of the wall. You will get lots of single metal bolts. Melting these will gain you 1/10th metal - i.e. 2.5 metal bars from a stack of bolts that used 1 bar to produce, also trains your weaponsmith. Actually I have never been desperate enough to use this exploit.

Gemcutters and gemsetters can be trained with green glass if you have sand and a volcano. If you decorate furniture you will improve the wealth of your fortress and have happier dwarves, decorating tradegoods will improve your financial situation.

Marksdwarfship will be trained best by attacking enemies. Drop/release enemies caught with cagetraps in front of your marksdwarves. Or have them hunt before adding them to your militia.

Grower skill of your farmers will improve faster if you disallow harvesting for non farmers.

But in the end your dwarves will get good with their trade anyway if you let them specialize and concentrate on their job. In most forts you should have enough materials to just let them learn on the job, useless products can be smashed under a bridge.

[Nan]

The most resource efficient ways to train up skills is to cheese strange moods, weaponsmith is probably the best skill to do this for, metalsmith is another good choice.
When new immigrants come, examine them for any existing moodable skills. If they have an undesirable moodable skill, such as tanner, TANNER or OH MY GOD WHY MUST YOU BE A TANNER?! Or glassmaker, gemcutter, clothier or something, then figure out a way to make sure it doesn't turn into a strange mood. The most obvious way is to execute them for their crime of having a useless moodable skill. However an arguably more beneficial thing to do is to recruit them into a squad which never gets any time off, because a dwarf actively on duty will never mood - they will probably still end up dead, but at least will soak up some bolts before dying. The final thing you can do is to train them in another, higher skill which is actually useful, such as miner or mason, while this isn't as useful as getting the skill you're actually aiming for, it's better than getting a useless mood. You can also just not bother purifying the mood pool, but it will be less efficient.
Now as for all dwarves who are peasants, or just have non-moodable skills like most farming skills, turn on the profession you're trying to cheese - for example weaponsmithing, DON'T give them other skills which are moodable - avoid masonry, carpentry, crafts, other smithing skills etc - but farming (except tanning), hauling and medical skills are fine.
Set up a forge which has the profile set to max:dabbling. Now forge weapons and bolts at that forge (if you're really short of materials, let them forge one item, then turn off weaponsmithing for them). In no time you'll have half a dozen or more, dwarves with their highest moodable skill being weaponsmith. It's then almost inevitable that one of the first few strange moods will be a weaponsmithing mood. You'll get a neat artifact weapon (hopefully!) and a legendary weaponsmith (hopefully!) and future weaponsmith moods will give you more chances of a neat artifact weapon.

[Jenniretta]

Nan, why do you consider skills like clothier and tanner useless? sure the artifacts tend to be dull, but having them at legendary makes them work faster, and when you need to tan the hides of 60 kittens before they rot it makes a huge difference to have legendary tanners working on it full time.
As for clothier, silk and cloth clothes made by a legendary, dyed, and decorated pull in a lot of money + prevent dwarves from running around nude. Clothes also provide a (very)small amount of protection, so even if avoiding a nudist colony doesn't matter to you, having shoes to keep your dwarves out of the latest FBs "dangerous blood" can save you quite a bit of headache.

[Loud Whispers]

Carpenter + Mason - Build an above ground fortress.

Everything else has already been said, but in theory, wouldn't some particularly evil over seer be able to conscript a peasant, give him a pick and train him to legendary with his pick without ever having to strike dirt once?
(Maybe a few skulls though.)

[Person]

Mining is a weapon skill. Danger rooms train weapon skills. Or you could have them fight things. So yes.

[Garath]

I already have too much stone. If i really want to have a particular ore or stone, i disable my lesser miners. Otherwise I'm usually happy if they miss a stone or 2. So I hardly see any reason to train miners in any other way but by mining

[jcnorris00]

I'd rather have even more useless stone than lose even one platinum nugget or black opal, but I admit that that's just me efficiency fetish kicking in.  Since there's no "only legendary miners mine economic stone and gems" setting, I train up my miners to legendary before setting them lose to strike the earth.  I used to just micromanage the hell out of them, cancelling dig orders for economic stones and gems whenever they appeared, but that was mind-numbingly dull as well as error-prone.

[Jenniretta]

I'd rather have even more useless stone than lose even one platinum nugget or black opal, but I admit that that's just me efficiency fetish kicking in.  Since there's no "only legendary miners mine economic stone and gems" setting, I train up my miners to legendary before setting them lose to strike the earth.  I used to just micromanage the hell out of them, cancelling dig orders for economic stones and gems whenever they appeared, but that was mind-numbingly dull as well as error-prone.

I usually have my in-training miners dig around rare/important ores and such that I don't want them to not mine out, and re designate them when they're done.

[Nan]

Nan, why do you consider skills like clothier and tanner useless? sure the artifacts tend to be dull, but having them at legendary makes them work faster, and when you need to tan the hides of 60 kittens before they rot it makes a huge difference to have legendary tanners working on it full time.
As for clothier, silk and cloth clothes made by a legendary, dyed, and decorated pull in a lot of money + prevent dwarves from running around nude. Clothes also provide a (very)small amount of protection, so even if avoiding a nudist colony doesn't matter to you, having shoes to keep your dwarves out of the latest FBs "dangerous blood" can save you quite a bit of headache.

Contextually or comparatively useless, almost any skill could be useless or useful in the right context, so I'm more talking about "useful/less for you". And I'm also referring to being a waste of a good mood - the skill itself might be okay.
But to explain those two, for the most part all a legendary clothier does is create more fortress value, and the artifact is likely to be stunningly useless. Once clothes isn't bugged a legendary clothier might be more useful. But at the moment, unless you're maximizing fortress value by making cloth items, you can get by with low-skill clothiers for the one useful cloth item - bags. It's also easy, if you want to, to level up a clothier to legendary. Cloth is so easy to produce or buy, it's freely available in massive quantities if you so desire.
With tanners, again you're likely to get a stunningly useless artifact (although it might be a useful under-layer for a soldier). Furthermore a tanner's work doesn't have a quality level, this means you can just as easily stick a dozen haulers on tanning duty and get exactly the same results. You can't do that when making battle axes. You can also just order bucketloads of leather from the liaison including the top quality stuff, it's ridiculous how much leather you get it you ask for every type. And if you do have a major tanning operation going, you'll get a tanning mood for sure anyway, no reason to try to get one in favor of other skills like weaponsmith.

[Loud Whispers]

Leatherworkers - Make cloaks, quivers and waterskins which have QUALITY style. 

Clothiers - Cloaks, bags, but the most important of all...

Cloth crafts. Infinite Urist trade goods.