v0.31:Stonegears/Crafts

Three times a year (starting the autumn of the first year) caravans will come to your fortress for trade, and you'll have to have something to sell to them if you want to get anything in return. For this game we're going to turn all of the rock you mined out into rock mugs. It kind of strange that merchant are willing to travel through miles and miles of wilderness, braving attacks by bandits, just to get a bunch of rock mugs, but that's the way the game works.

Go to the same z-level that has the carpenter's and mason's workshops, and place a craftsdwarf's workshop‡ (b-w-r) next to the large storage area:

SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER

Then create a finished goods stockpile‡ (p-g) in the storage area, and change its settings (q-s) to only accept mugs (forbid Type then enable goblets).

Each "make rock mug" job uses one chunk of rock produces three mugs, and we want to make a lot of mugs, so use the manager‡ utility to line up 120 such jobs, for a total of 360 mugs (typing "rock mug" when adding a new work order narrow it down to Make rock mug). Since the job manager can only handle up to 30 jobs per work order you'll have to make four separate work orders of 30 jobs each.

360 mugs isn't going to fit into the mugs stockpile next to the workshop, so we'll have to consolidate the mugs into bins. Each bin can hold 30 mugs, so we need 12 bins to hold them all. Use the manager as this for well, typing "wood bin" when adding a new work order (make sure to then use ↓ before Enter to so as to not make an order for wooden cabinets).

Next tutorial article

Cooking.

Notes

• The way in which trading is done with caravans is going to change over the next few versions of the game, so any advice on this page might not apply past the current version (0.31.25).
• Making stone mugs was chosen for this tutorial because it's easy to set up, easy to get more raw material, and also uses up excess hunks of rock left lying around by your miners. A few other ways to make things to trade with the caravans:
  • Cooking. Start out the game with a skilled chef and have your farmer grow lots of quarry bushes to make lots of large, high value meals.
  • Set up a textile industry. Weaving, dying and clothes making each create something will quality, so the combination of high quality cloth with a high quality dye made into high quality clothing can make for a very valuable set of clothes.
  • Metal crafting. A single bar of gold can be turned into three goblets with a combined value of at least 900☼ (and probably more than that if you start with a skilled metal crafter), letting you quickly created enough trade good to buy a lot of stuff.