Hi again!
After the record-breaking heatwave in late June, it cooled off to more normal Summer temperatures, and this has allowed us to continue on smoothly! There's a healthy grab bag of menus left to complete, relating to the military, justice, labor and so forth, and we're just going through them one by one in whatever order seems to make the work go fastest. Most lately, we've been working on the ability to produce work orders. Much of the art here on these fresh new menus is still placeholders.
Work orders are used to automate tasks in your fortress. The most simple order is something like "make ten beds". The manager (one of the administrator dwarves you appoint) validates the order, and then the jobs are automatically assigned to any carpenter workshop you have available, which saves you the trouble of setting them all manually. Work orders can also be assigned to specific shops.
But there's a lot more you can do with work orders. They can be conditioned on the stocks of the fortress. For instance, you can set a work order to produce drinks at the still 25 times if your supply drops below 100 drinks, and the order will renew itself at the proper time. You can also set key furniture orders, like the beds above, to renew based on the number of beds you have, or seasonally, etc. Orders can also be conditioned on the completion of other orders, if you want to make sure you have the supplies available. For instance, you could create 10 cloth, then have a 10 cloak order ready to go immediately afterward. You can also leave all of this alone and get along just fine, but the system is pretty powerful and now it's less difficult to use!
The screen above is a basic work order being selected. In the old Dwarf Fortress, this was an opaque mess. Now it should be a little easier to find jobs, and also to see which jobs are available by shop. We're still finishing up the menu by which you select conditions to place on orders (like the aforementioned "when drink supply is less than 100.")
Another bit we finished up is the ability to link workshops to stockpiles from the workshop. We had already finished the ability to do this from stockpiles, but oftentimes it's more convenient to add links while you are in the shop thinking about production. In this screen, we've set up the metalsmith to take metal bars from a particular pile and to give finished goods to a different pile. Both of these piles are close to the shop, and so as long as the goldsmith is working and the piles are supplied by other dwarves, gold craft production will be happening as quickly as possible. If you use the ability to nickname piles, it's also easy to remember what your setup is (I've neglected to do this in the screenshot!)
As with work orders, it's also possible to ignore stockpile links completely if you like. But as you start to notice your dwarves wandering farther and farther to get job items, it becomes more natural to start optimizing storage and routes a bit, and you can begin to use these tools to fit your playstyle.
- Tarn