v0.34 Talk:Workshop

Tier System

I don't think the tier system is very useful. A better organization, if there needs to be an organization at all, would be by industry. HammerDave 00:32, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree that the current tier system is a confusing mess. However, given the complexity of DF's industry, pretty much any attempt at making a single graph or table that accurately encompasses it all will be a confusing mess; succeeding at also making it easy to read would immediately elevate your Wikicrafting skill to Legendary+5 level. And some workshops are used in several different industries, inter alia, the butcher's shop produces bones for crafts and ammo, meat for feeding your dwarves, and leather for armor and crafts. Also, furnace could be merged with this page so every "dwarf-operated building that produces things" would be in one page. Personally, I'd just remove the tiers entirely and leave the items used and produced by each workshop, sorted alphabetically. --Seikatsukan 01:21, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

What about instead of a 4 tier system, use a 2 tier system? Tier 1 has all the workshops for producing materials, like smelters, tanners, and butchershops. Tier 2 has all the workshops that produce finished goods, weapons, armor, and furnature out of those materials, like the forge, glass furnace, and the craftdwarf's workshop. This models the split between Primary and Secondary economic sectors, and represents a clear conceptual difference. --King Mir 23:20, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

The problem with a 2 tier system is that it is little different than the current situation, but makes it worse in that it lumps too many things together in a somewhat arbitrary way. For example, a loom produces both a material that can be crafted with and which counts as a finished good: cloth. Is that tier 1 or 2? Is a tannery, which takes hides from a butcher's shop and produces leather for use at a leather works, tier 1 or 2? (Even the current article doesn't mention the fact that the butcher's shop produces a "tier 0 item", as described by the tanner's workshop section.)

Organizing by industry is just as bad due to the overlap between many of the industries. Even between the food and non-food industries, wine needs barrels, gauntlets can be crafted from shells, pig tails make both thread and ale, and butcher shops make meat, fat, skulls, bones, and hides.

So, what's my solution? I don't have one, other than to suggest leaving the article as it is with the 4+ tier system because it breaks the workshops into reasonably sized groups, it explains the relationships between the workshops, and it keeps the terminology consistent with what it has been for a while. There is no simple way to untangle this mess that I can think of, so unless someone comes up with one, the current one is probably the most reasonable system for grouping such a complicated set of objects. -- HiEv 03:31, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

The tier system isn't even in the game. I think all mentions of 'tiers' should be removed, it's more confusing than what's actually in the game. --Richards 14:10, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree that the tier system creates more confusion than it resolves. Just removing all mention of tiers and leaving the page otherwise intact without adding any other organization would be an improvement. --Gchristopher 18:41, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

I agree that the tier system is confusing, but it's just an attempt at organizing various workshops. I don't think the best way to solve this is to remove over half of the article. Also, the whole point of the tier system is that it isn't referenced in the game, which is what makes many workshops confusing. For example, it's difficult to tell that a metalsmith's forge requires materials made by 2 other workshops when building it, but the tier system explains this better. (There are some workshops that use items from multiple tiers, which makes them hard to rank in the current system.) I do agree that the present format is confusing, but it's still useful information. A flowchart would probably work best, but the current one is somewhat outdated. I can try to make a new one, if you think that would help, or we could come up with a better way to organize workshops. --Lethosor (talk) 20:13, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

I'll just add my 2 cents, while acknowledging this is a great effor to impose any organizational structure on this complex set of information, the tier system does not mesh at all with how I think about stuff in the game. If I were making such a page from scratch I probably would have tried to organize by industry, and then stepped through from basic to complex within that industry. Alternatively, leave the "tier" structure as a coarse layout for the purpose of the article but remove the really specific tier analysis like "steel is tier 5!" which, I don't even know what that means. Smakemupagus (talk) 19:11, 6 May 2013 (UTC)