14:29 Forbidden bars do not count in the work order condition. You may forbid those walls with the "i" menu. You will not see the small lock icon on the construction, but it will mark as such the bars in the stocks window.
Tip : Check your conditions and be specific. For jobs such as "make soap from tallow" if you are trying to prevent overproduction it might be tempting to accept the default "if bars is less than 10". This condition is useless unless you add the "material" parameter to make it "if SOAP bars is less than 10". Another over-production trap is in the millstone when making bags of dye powder. It is so easy to end up with a recurring demand for excessive numbers of empty bags if you don't limit the amount of dye powder you produce. Add a new "item" condition and add the adjective "dye items" to it and then apply a quantity limit. Do the same for buckets of lye.
You should use the soap ADJECTIVE not the material as the material list does not have a general soap, only each type of soap. Also, have a reoccurring order for new bags so you don’t run out of them.
@Sabizos-TheSacredCowTipper I know the feeling! I have to stop myself from doing it most times or else I end up in an optimization loop hole and my fort ends up lagging behind!
The fun thing about production orders is, when you make heavy use of them ... think about the life of your Manager :> I mean, seriously, I've met such a high number of regularily repeating orders and chain orders, that I see Urist McLobomite sitting in some barely lit, extremely cramped room somewhere in the last corner of the fortress at a desk, which has 2 meter high stackes of losely sorted paper on it and he is just frantically signing of one after another and somewhere in his broken, desperate mind a slight rememberance of his past life flickers, proud and adventurous he arrives 15 years ago as the Expedition Leader but about 10 years after the arrival, the orders took overhand and he just lost his mind xD EDIT: Oh and every season Urist McNoblesucker storms in, yells at him "MoAh ShOrT SwOrDs!" and throws another order on his desk xD
I was going to add... To add make sure early on that the manager is free to actually do the job and not mining, cutting trees, killing goblins fetching water and as well doing the admin. By the time you have 50 dwarves should be the managers only task so WO flow smoother
As a player new with the Steam Edition, the Work Order screen would definitely be #1 on my list of places where refinement could really help the game. Tabs dividing work orders by applicable shop. Defaulting new work orders to have the "do I actually have the applicable required materials" clauses included by default. Referenceable variables like Population, Pop /2, Pop /4, Pop /10, Pop / 50, so you can say things like "Make drinks until there are as many as my population" or "Make a number of stone blocks each day equal to population /10". A way to just pause a given work order. A default basic work orders list that gets set up automatically every game. Every smelter that gets built gets the make-coke and smelt-ores jobs every single fortress. Could start paused, maybe unpausing when you build the relevant shop, or even just having them put in at 1 quantity to start with would make things a lot easier. Bonus points if this is in a config file of some sort so that we could modify what our own favorite starting jobs list would be.
Just one clarification to point out. At 4:40 you say the workshop-specific work orders are always "one-time" orders, but that's not at all true. You can configure them exactly the same as any general work order, including daily/monthly repeats. Personally, I avoid using general work orders if at all possible. I assign all of my work orders directly to the specific workshop I want to do that job, and turn the "General work orders allowed" to 0 so I know that workshop is only going to do exactly what I want it to. I tend to make small "modules" for each industry that operate as independently as possible. Makes it a lot easier to quarantine areas in a pinch. And whenever a work order starts throwing up alerts for things going wrong, I know EXACTLY which workshop is having a problem and can diagnose a whole lot faster. I typically also set up a separate room filled entirely with workshops, one of each type. They're not restricted or tied to specific stockpiles or anything. That way I know I will always have 1 empty workshop of a given type should the need arise (like a weird strange mood request). I can just go to that room, choose the workshop, and say "do this now" and someone will come and do it immediately without disturbing any other work orders.
Great tips, thanks! One that I like to do (if you can afford the laborers) is to use the "more than" inequality. For example, if there are more than 200 non economic stones, turn 20 into blocks/toys/mugs/etc. I hadn't noticed the last thing where constructed blocks were counted, but it could mitigate that. In the same vein, if there are more than five shells, make three shell crafts (leave a couple for moods). You can do this with any "waste" products by turning them into something smaller and that you can sell, and it will keep stockpiles from overflowing. You can also combine this with an earlier recipe making the same thing, for example first smelt 10 magnetite when you have 10 ore only up to 100 iron bars, but later once each metal bar smelting job has a chance to run, then lower on the list smelt some of the extra ores sitting around as well. That way they won't get busy smelting all the magnetite when you really wanted some copper bars too.
Another tip: be careful of material counts. Breastplates take three iron bars, greaves take two, and there's similar considerations for cloth iirr. So when adjusting the conditions on input materials, to avoid spurious job cancellations you need to adjust the adjust the value to the real amount of materials needed total, for all orders that use those materials.
Another good tip is to use job cancellations to your advantage, so that you don't get spammed for things that are working properly but also so that you get an alert when something does go wrong and needs your input. For instance, use a condition on available pig tails to process plants -- pig tails are seasonal and it's expected for them to not be available for half of the year and you don't want to be spammed a notification for that. Use a condition on pig iron bars for producing steel, you don't want to start making steel without having produced the pig iron for it. However, do NOT use a condition on flux available to start the steel making jobs. You want to know if you run out of flux ASAP, so that job cancellation alert is useful!
For point number 10, I believe you can use the adjective "unused" to isolate bars and blocks that aren't in constructions. It's the same with thread, if you add the default criteria for "make cloth" it's "unused collected plant thread" - collected removes webs that are out in the caverns and "unused" removes items that are already in use for something.
I think you are wrong in last tips. I have tens of build tables and chairs, but my order to build tables when less than 3 available trigger only when there is less than 3 not-build tables available. I am sure it works the same with blocks. I can not confirm with bars, as I use them to build wall very rare, but I would be suprised it they would work differently than everything else.
Yup he is wrong in that instance but if think I know why. Manager in order to set up the order with conditions checks how many things you have available around and in all of stockpiles to fullfil these conditions, but if a workshop or workshops are linked with stockpile that doesnt have any of those materials, the order wont progress because material wont be available for them. Excample: you have one stockpile with stone and other stockpile with wood. You link your craftsdwarf workshop to stockpile with stone. You set up the order to make wood crafts if there are 10 woods available. Manager starts the work order cuz there are 10 woods on the other stockpile but dwarf cant use them cuz stockpile linked to workshop has only stone, not wood.
Don't use bars for construction, forge blocks first! Only use bars as raw material, Stone too, that way you can safelly use stock bar levels as gauge for task activation.
For Steel I like to have a daily "make 1 steel" job that checks for a single pig iron bar, then I queue up pig iron jobs as needed. That way one smelter can handle the steel jobs in parallel with pig iron, whereas using work order links serializes the jobs. In general this is a good tip for any job where you only use a material as an intermediate.
furthermore using work order links is basically a "push-stream", contrasted with the "pull-stream" of just having a modest stock of pig iron bars and working from pig iron availability. Pull streams are more resilient to interruptions.
Excellent tips! I love that there is still (after months) so much left to learn and explore using. So many of these are going straight into use. I had figured out to stack things next to each other but not the 'tab label' trick. Hoping someone soon makes a mod that will break list into actual tabs by shop type.
0:48 I ran into issues with this when I made some one-time work orders for military gear. I had been limiting with perpetual work orders, but I didn't with my one-time orders and so my smiths and smelters were without coal, eager to continue their stuff like "make 10 steel bars" orders and immediately using fuel to the point where the smelters weren't starting the work orders to make more fuel out of coal. My options were cancel everything and start over or mass produce charcoal, luckily I had plenty of wood to spare.
One problem I always run into is that when there are multiple goods that require the same base material to make them oftentimes they both get queued up and the material is used up and then I get a work cancellation warning. The best example I can think of is charcoal. The only solution I have found so far is to make an excessive amount of the needed item (or add it all up, but that gets tricky when you keep adding orders), but it would be nice if there was a tool tip or something telling you how much of that item you needed. Or better yet if you could tell your work orders to wait to see if a previous one is completed or not before it does its condition checks. This is different than the chain option. The chain option makes the work order wait for for another work order to be completed. I would want an option that just waits for the connected order to be either finished or to fail its condition checks, before it does the condition check for its order. If that makes sense... Any other tips would be appreciated! This comment section has been the most useful comments section in RU-vid history lol
One hack to deal with this would be to put different requirement number for each charcoal use: - Make iron helm (only if there's 20 charcoal or more) - Make iron boots (only if there's 18 charcoal or more) - etc. It's still a pain in the a$$.
i hope they add search features to the work orders like if you click carpenter it shows your existing orders and the orders you could do (and add button to do all tasks because sometimes it is easier to delete what you don't want)
Also the ability to click and drag work order priorities. Or even to just create groups for the work orders (this wouldn't actually change when they are checked or how they work at all it would just purely be a visual qol improvement)
Good tips in this video. The check daily and chaining work orders are definitely things I need to make better use of. My personal pet peeve is that you can't constrain the orders on specific stockpiles as I often configure workshops that way and it can lead to lots of cancellations if the desired items haven't made their way to the pile yet.
The only thing I hate about this system is when work orders that are partially done get cancelled, the dwarfs will still try to do them and it turns into spam and causes the dwarfs to do nothing or slows them down. When that happens I have to delete the work order entirely.
Love the videos but you gotta turn that mic value up man dunno if you are just really soft spoken irl but I have to crank my volume just to here that pipsqueak voice!
I'll see what I can do! Hardware is new, actually it's right now on a auto-detection mode which supposedly adds gain to the input until it is saturated but ... Well, I'll see what I can do :D
Note when create multiple outputs orders like goblets, crafts or blocks, if you create 5 order of blocks the output it will be 20 blocks. Now if only we could import/export whole work order and storage stockpile settings, inverted burrow, show the lenght and hight when building, digging, etc🙁. Also i din't like the game tracking the item used in building, building outside you get thousands of blocks, i think it would be better is when you finished building the item is removed from memory and when you target the building to be remove the game check the tile and create a new item. (Build a iron floor, the bar is removed from memory then if you remove the floor the game will check the tile and create a new iron bar when the floor is removed.)
While I would love the game to have some of those I should note you may want to see dfhack as it already allows to import and export work orders on the steam version
You can do some of those things (like import/export work orders, copy stockpile settings etc) via DFHack. It's a really powerful tool and it's surprisingly easy to use these days.
In regard to 13:40 - seeing already used blocks, the same goes for wood logs lying inside water like rivers and ponds; you see them on the list but they're impossible to get to, so they won't get used. I learned about this just yesterday, when i tried to make charcoal out of willow logs and nothing was happening; the willow logs were lying in the river 🙄
Checking for Shearing and milking animals every day will lead to an annoying amount of canceled jobs notifications. This game needs so much QoL to not be a chore to play… this is just one of them.
The endless stream of canceled job notifications is a necessary evil currently. I would know of no other config avoiding these. And yes, it's a pain and annoying af. I agree.
I think he already has a video about soap production. You get tallow from butchering an animal. Make sure to forbid it from the kitchen so your cooks don't waste it on a meal lol Oil comes from pressing seeds, usually from rock nuts (underground) or cotton seeds (above ground). Grind seeds at a quern, then press them at a screw press. You'll need jugs for the oil. Tallow is /much/ easier, FYI - I think any animal you can butcher will give tallow, so just raise some kind of livestock and you will have plenty of soap in due time.
That's weird. I mean when I turn up my videos and keep the volume identical I can understand other people's videos perfectly fine. But I am using headphones exclusively, prolly that's the issue. Hardware is new, so I'm not surprised that there's some optimizing to do.
