Yeah for sure, my page is pretty unwieldy now - that intro is my scrolling through the page in the fort I'm doing on stream and I got nowhere near the end!
@@roboform100 DFHack DOES have an import/ export option. I don't use the actual hacks of DFHack a lot, and I haven't used this feature, myself, but I do like the UI/ QOL stuff it adds in here and there.
Or at least search bar, which is really easy to do I believe, even if work orders are not stored as strings: just compile them to the strings and search in them with strcmp or something like that.
Some tips for anyone; shift scroll moves the window bar faster, the remove construction mining designation can be used to mass remove construction outliness (use the erasure after if you accidently designate built areas for deconstruction)
I have a few order related questions: - is there such a thing as too many work orders? (can the manager be overwhelmed by them?) If yes, can you name multiple managers? - if I want to always have X of an item in stock, would it be better (more efficient) to put a recurring work order that states "If there are less that X of that item in stock then craft 1 more" or think of a minimal threshold and then make the order "If there are [minimal threshold value] or less items of that type in stock, then make X of them"?
1. Managers skill up pretty fast and can mow down approvals. As long as they aren't busy doing something else they should have no issues running through the approvals. 2. I prefer the second option mainly because having lots of "workflow success" messages can be pretty spammy.
Thank You very much! Those tips were really useful. I'm looking for a guide about managing my kitchen in a way when you don't need to check your seeds stockpiles every minute when cooking plants (with seeds). Since your guides are the best, could you make one about cooking/brewing flow?
Aww thanks so much for the kind words! Tbh I find I don't really need to manage seeds to that degree - I'll only grow some specific plants for cloth/drinks and anything else I just buy in from traders.
I have a question about barrels, bins and other containers. There are two types of condition exists - 1. if barrels aviable less than.., 2 if empty barrels aviable less than... What's the best condition to use for the containers?
Does the game look at equipped items? For example, if I have 10 dwarves already wearing cloth hoods, do I need to increase the number in the work order so they keep making 10 "extra" hoods?
If you follow this guide they keep making them. If you do a "amount of ITEM available" criteria then it looks at unclaimed clothes and stop if you have built up a pile of unused clothes.
@@FurtherReadingTV When creating a "amount of items is [operator]" condition, are you supposed to change "ITEM" to be the relevant item being referred to in the work order? Better said- is "ITEM" just a placeholder? Or will the game know that "ITEM" means the item in question (i.e. cloth hoods) in the work order? Hope that makes sense!
I tried to set up a "milk animal --> make cheese" order on repeat with monthly checks but it won't work, it checks for milk everyday spamming the error no matter how I set it. Any clue on how to do that since milk production depends on a (random?) animal actually capable of being milked regularly? Thanks!
Ah so this is something I'm planning on doing in a follow up farming video. This is hard to automate with the current set up and the best thing is to make a manual repeating milk order once a month - it takes 17 days for animals to get their milk back and you'll only get one cancel message when all the animals have been milked. There's a similar issue for shearing - gotta do it once a year in that case.
Thx for the tips, do you what does the game consider as available? Equiped, built, part of a building or just those in a stockpile? I wanted to always have spare material to make bedrooms, but no orders got activated.
If its built or has been extracted from a wall or whatever. However when something is being actively hauled or even flagged to be hauled its considered owned by the hauler and will be temporarily restricted.
I only assign them for legendary Dwarves or Dwarves I'm hoping to train up. Even then legendary crafter a mainly matter for military equipment (or doors once building destroyers are fixed) - for anything else its either a bit faster or adds a bit extra value but not enough to usually justify the extra micro.
Great video! Can you elaborate further on some realistic uses of work orders? I've nailed down a few basic ones like keeping drink and food stocks up, automating fuel and smelting, but not much else... Would also love to see a video around raising the value of your fortress to bring in more migrants!
The cloth one in the circular order example is a common one for me, only I'm making a full outfit. Similar one for making armour. Another example would be for making steel. I have an order to make 16 pig iron if I have more than 32 iron - steel requires both iron and pig iron so this ensures that I'll have 16 of both to make into steel right away. I also have an emergency order to make charcoal if my fuel runs out - with limonite/bituminous coal smelting triggering at like less than 20 coal from a dedicated smelter so I shouldn't ever be using wood for fuel if I have better options.
One of the most common ones is to make large projects. Workshops can only queue up to 10 or infinite orders, anything between that and you're better off making work orders. Making gear, equiping an army, keeping ammo stocked, the list goes on.
ปีที่แล้ว +1
I also use work orders for commonly used items, like bins, beds, doors etc. Anything I need regularly gets an order as soon as I have a manager and I need said item for the first time
For some reason some orders are simply ignore one or two conditions entirely. Made an order to encrust finished goods with gems (1/1) if cut gems more than 10 and goods available at least 1. but then my jewelers waste all cut gems without stopping.
When I use work orders the work eventually comes to a full halt. I try to keep the orders low so not to overwhelm them but eventually everything stops and I have to delete all the work orders and restart them all. Its quite annoying.
God so many! A few basics: - Make 10 if less than 10 for doors, coffins, slabs, cabinets and other furniture you might need to make in batches. - Make 12 if less than 12 mechanisms (you trend to need these in groups of three) - Make 8 if less than 8 for hatches (I like using 2x2 stairwells into dangerous areas) - For armour, I like making 5 suits of armour at a time, which requires ~60 metal IIRC. Something like "make 5 ITEM if ITEMs less than 10 and metal > 60 and (if not using magma) refuned coal > 60). If your smelting industry can't keep up then maybe reduce accordingly. I have a clothing video that suggests a work order set for one complete outfit, a soap video for making opil soap and my steel video goes into more on steel smithing.
Behind the scenes info: I called my weaponsmith "this dwarf" after about 6 failed attempts to pronounce his name.
Dwarf names are surprisingly VERY hard to pronounce. Despite being constructed from very simplistic phonetic units...
I wish the work orders page allowed the player to create custom tabs to organize orders better.
Yeah for sure, my page is pretty unwieldy now - that intro is my scrolling through the page in the fort I'm doing on stream and I got nowhere near the end!
This, and a search/filter field.
@@noodlesup and an export/import
@@roboform100 DFHack DOES have an import/ export option. I don't use the actual hacks of DFHack a lot, and I haven't used this feature, myself, but I do like the UI/ QOL stuff it adds in here and there.
Or at least search bar, which is really easy to do I believe, even if work orders are not stored as strings: just compile them to the strings and search in them with strcmp or something like that.
Love these little tips of yours. Just what is required, no crazed hyperactive waffle. You're making quality content. :)
Always nice to find more Irish people on TH-cam. Thanks for the tutorials!
Some tips for anyone; shift scroll moves the window bar faster, the remove construction mining designation can be used to mass remove construction outliness (use the erasure after if you accidently designate built areas for deconstruction)
I like to use often "not 0" for available materials for some crafts
How does that work?
@@ShawnTinez you can switch the "less/greater than" clause to several others with one of the buttons in that row
@@ShawnTinez It means they wont try to craft if there's nothing to craft with so you get less alerts.
I have a few order related questions:
- is there such a thing as too many work orders? (can the manager be overwhelmed by them?) If yes, can you name multiple managers?
- if I want to always have X of an item in stock, would it be better (more efficient) to put a recurring work order that states "If there are less that X of that item in stock then craft 1 more" or think of a minimal threshold and then make the order "If there are [minimal threshold value] or less items of that type in stock, then make X of them"?
1. Managers skill up pretty fast and can mow down approvals. As long as they aren't busy doing something else they should have no issues running through the approvals.
2. I prefer the second option mainly because having lots of "workflow success" messages can be pretty spammy.
Thank you for this helpful and informative video
Thank You very much! Those tips were really useful. I'm looking for a guide about managing my kitchen in a way when you don't need to check your seeds stockpiles every minute when cooking plants (with seeds). Since your guides are the best, could you make one about cooking/brewing flow?
Aww thanks so much for the kind words! Tbh I find I don't really need to manage seeds to that degree - I'll only grow some specific plants for cloth/drinks and anything else I just buy in from traders.
I have a question about barrels, bins and other containers. There are two types of condition exists - 1. if barrels aviable less than.., 2 if empty barrels aviable less than... What's the best condition to use for the containers?
Empty barrels available is the better one. The first one will count full or partially full barrels.
Does the game look at equipped items? For example, if I have 10 dwarves already wearing cloth hoods, do I need to increase the number in the work order so they keep making 10 "extra" hoods?
If you follow this guide they keep making them. If you do a "amount of ITEM available" criteria then it looks at unclaimed clothes and stop if you have built up a pile of unused clothes.
@@FurtherReadingTV When creating a "amount of items is [operator]" condition, are you supposed to change "ITEM" to be the relevant item being referred to in the work order? Better said- is "ITEM" just a placeholder? Or will the game know that "ITEM" means the item in question (i.e. cloth hoods) in the work order?
Hope that makes sense!
Sorry yeah it needs to be a specific item - I was using ITEM as a placeholder there.
I tried to set up a "milk animal --> make cheese" order on repeat with monthly checks but it won't work, it checks for milk everyday spamming the error no matter how I set it. Any clue on how to do that since milk production depends on a (random?) animal actually capable of being milked regularly? Thanks!
Ah so this is something I'm planning on doing in a follow up farming video. This is hard to automate with the current set up and the best thing is to make a manual repeating milk order once a month - it takes 17 days for animals to get their milk back and you'll only get one cancel message when all the animals have been milked.
There's a similar issue for shearing - gotta do it once a year in that case.
@@FurtherReadingTV I am looking forward to that one. I just tried to figure out how to do it myself earlier but failed.
Thx for the tips, do you what does the game consider as available? Equiped, built, part of a building or just those in a stockpile? I wanted to always have spare material to make bedrooms, but no orders got activated.
If its built or has been extracted from a wall or whatever. However when something is being actively hauled or even flagged to be hauled its considered owned by the hauler and will be temporarily restricted.
I had no idea that I could change "when order x is completed" will be a lifesaver, no more spawning errors (well less atleast)
Is it generally a good idea to assign dwarves to workshops or leave them open?
I only assign them for legendary Dwarves or Dwarves I'm hoping to train up. Even then legendary crafter a mainly matter for military equipment (or doors once building destroyers are fixed) - for anything else its either a bit faster or adds a bit extra value but not enough to usually justify the extra micro.
Great video! Can you elaborate further on some realistic uses of work orders? I've nailed down a few basic ones like keeping drink and food stocks up, automating fuel and smelting, but not much else...
Would also love to see a video around raising the value of your fortress to bring in more migrants!
The cloth one in the circular order example is a common one for me, only I'm making a full outfit. Similar one for making armour.
Another example would be for making steel. I have an order to make 16 pig iron if I have more than 32 iron - steel requires both iron and pig iron so this ensures that I'll have 16 of both to make into steel right away.
I also have an emergency order to make charcoal if my fuel runs out - with limonite/bituminous coal smelting triggering at like less than 20 coal from a dedicated smelter so I shouldn't ever be using wood for fuel if I have better options.
One of the most common ones is to make large projects. Workshops can only queue up to 10 or infinite orders, anything between that and you're better off making work orders. Making gear, equiping an army, keeping ammo stocked, the list goes on.
I also use work orders for commonly used items, like bins, beds, doors etc. Anything I need regularly gets an order as soon as I have a manager and I need said item for the first time
I almost exclusively use work orders. There aren't many one off in the game so why not automate it?
@@FurtherReadingTV What about shearing? Do dwarfs shear all the animals at once and it counts as a single action? Or every animal is a single action?
For some reason some orders are simply ignore one or two conditions entirely. Made an order to encrust finished goods with gems (1/1) if cut gems more than 10 and goods available at least 1. but then my jewelers waste all cut gems without stopping.
I always end up with double the goblets I order. Something might be wrong.
@@chaotickreg7024 Mugs, cups and goblets produced in quantity of 3 for each order. That's why you get more than order
I...had no idea there was a link task button. Somehow my brain didn't process that button was even there
When I use work orders the work eventually comes to a full halt. I try to keep the orders low so not to overwhelm them but eventually everything stops and I have to delete all the work orders and restart them all. Its quite annoying.
Hmm that is odd - is the manager maybe too busy to approve them?
can you give a list of good orders to have?
God so many! A few basics:
- Make 10 if less than 10 for doors, coffins, slabs, cabinets and other furniture you might need to make in batches.
- Make 12 if less than 12 mechanisms (you trend to need these in groups of three)
- Make 8 if less than 8 for hatches (I like using 2x2 stairwells into dangerous areas)
- For armour, I like making 5 suits of armour at a time, which requires ~60 metal IIRC. Something like "make 5 ITEM if ITEMs less than 10 and metal > 60 and (if not using magma) refuned coal > 60). If your smelting industry can't keep up then maybe reduce accordingly.
I have a clothing video that suggests a work order set for one complete outfit, a soap video for making opil soap and my steel video goes into more on steel smithing.
How do you even set the work order # to infinite?
Set the number of times to repeat to 0
@@FurtherReadingTV Thanks
Here's hoping some madman in the Steam Workshop will make these just a little less cumbersome. Especially when you have a gorillion work orders.
What, you mean you don't love clicking that up arrow 7 million times?