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I've been trying to build fortresses that produce sheep and bees. It's not too bad, but I have to manually micromanage milking, shearing, cheese- and mead-making.

I can assign these tasks to individual workshops, but the moment the dwarves are unable to do a task, it gets cancelled, so I have to reassign it manually some time later. Or I can assign tasks via the manager, but then orders to the same workshop seem to stack up, so until n orders of shearing are completed, dwarves won't try to milk my sheep or make cheese. Both require significant micromanagement, which I can imagine only gets worse as the fortress grows.

What can I do to make these production chains (also: butchering by-products) handle themselves, so I can direct my attention elsewhere?

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2 Answers 2

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Unfortunately, the user interface for these industries is rather poor.

The only real fix for it I've uncovered is the use of dfhack's workflow tools.

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  • Works for me. So remove all relevant orders from the manager, add as repeated tasks in the workshop(s), enable workflow (alt+w in default LNP)? Am I missing anything?
    – Pvt. Grichmann
    Commented Aug 23, 2013 at 11:02
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    I'd like some extra info on the dfhack workflow tools.
    – Madmenyo
    Commented Aug 23, 2013 at 12:45
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    The workflow expansion is bundled with the Lazy Newb pack. To make use of it, add a repeated task to a workshop, select the task, and hit alt+w. If this is the first time you use the expansion, a dialog box will offer you to enable it. Agree. After that, hit shift+a, and choose the type of product you need to keep track of. This does not seem to be workshop-specific. If there is no product specific enough for the task, press shift+enter and try to find it in the interface. Then assign how many of that item you want to maintain. Dwarves will try to do that, if they can.
    – Pvt. Grichmann
    Commented Aug 26, 2013 at 13:33
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What i normally do is put the milking first in the order cue on repeat the next order is the cheese making and put that on repeat as well. Depending on how much animals you have and how fast your dwarf does the job you can cue this up multiple times. So not really automate but it's a relative low amount of clicks and you end up with big stacks of products. If your dwarfs finish the end tasks (cheese making) before there first tasks (milking) then the jobs will be cancelled.

Perhaps you need to count the amount of creatures to be milked, put that amount in the job manager. Then add an equal amount of milking to the list with lower priority. Still not fully automated but very doable compared to some other tasks.

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