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I started a new fort today, and the little OCD voice in the back of my head started screaming -- "you know what would be great? To make all the doors in this fort out of microcline!"

Is there an easy way to limit your masons to building with a specific type of stone?

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    That sounds more like CDO to me: it's like OCD, but all the letters are in alphabetical order THE WAY IT SHOULD BE!!!!
    – Epaga
    Commented Aug 27, 2010 at 14:44

3 Answers 3

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To provide an easier way that might not have been available when the other answers here were made, you can now specify materials directly in work orders: for the OP's case, j, m, q a new order to construct the desired number of rock doors, highlight that new order in the Work Orders screen, hit d for Details, and you'll be presented with a screen of materials to pick from (along with their quantities at the right edge of the screen)!

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There are two way to do this.

  1. The Stockpile Way
    By designating a stockpile right next to your masons workshop, and only allowing the stone you want to use on that stockpile, and removing/forbidding all other stone around the workshop, the mason will grab the stone you want him to use, as that is the closest availble stone.
    Note that even if you forbid all stones around the workshop, the mason may still gather stones from a z-level below the workshop if they're closer directly. (This has to do with the way the game does pathfinding.) Therefore, it may be a good idea to define a burrow around only the workshop and the stockpile, and restricting your mason to it. Make sure to set the workshop to only be used by the mason you add to the burrow, so you can build another one to make unimportant stuff out of other stones and don't make important stuff out of them. To do this, you may need a manager noble.

  2. The Fortress Way
    (The name of this way is a reference to "Obsidian Fortress", where only obsidian is being used for the whole fortress.)
    You can simply disallow usage of all other type of stone trough the Z -> Stone Menu.

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Set up a stockpile with only the types of materials you want. Set up a stockpile link at that stockpile to give to the mason's workshop. This will cause the mason to only take materials from that stockpile.

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  • How is this different from alexanderpas' answer?
    – kotekzot
    Commented Apr 30, 2014 at 20:55
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    I'm pretty certain that alexanderpas's answer just passively tricks the mason's pathing algorithm to pick stone in the pile via proximity, this answer uses a (maybe newer than 2010?) feature that positively assigns a specific workshop to only take from a certain stockpile. From the wiki: "This can also be used to specify that a workshop or forge will only get its materials from a certain stockpile. This provides a way to make sure everything that workshop produces is of a specific material."
    – nexus_2006
    Commented Apr 30, 2014 at 21:56

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