v0.34 Talk:Hauling

This bit:

"If you have the "All dwarves harvest" option turned on, all dwarves will help bring in the harvest, even if they don't have Food Hauling enabled."

What I've noticed is that dwarves will harvest the item and let it rot on top of the farm, but not actually haul it to a stockpile if the Food Hauling job isn't enabled. Sergius 13:59, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Bin/Barrel hauling changes

This page is in strong need of some updating to reflect the changes to how storage in bins & barrels is done. I'd have a go, but I haven't been fortressing in a while and am still sorting out how to best manage the new behavior with the latest version. From what I've seen so far, bins are now great when you have lots of small, light things to bin, but terrible for binning small numbers of large heavy things. Mainly this translates to

• bins are great for lots of finished goods (e.g. post-invasion cleanup) but
• generally pretty awful for bars, blocks, weapons, armor, and anything that tends to get binned in quantities of 1.
• barrels are kind of a wash - generally, even rock pots, while much heavier than wood, aren't heavy enough to slow dwarves down much, and the job combination feature pretty much offsets the having-to-walk-twice-as-far "feature".

Instead of the old behavior of the hauler walking at normal speed to the item and hauling it to the bin, he now walks to the (very heavy, if nearly full) weapon bin and slowly (at 1/3 or 1/4 or worse speed) drags it across the map to the 1Γ (large copper dagger), puts it in, then slowly and painfully drags the bin back to the weapons pile. For bonus points, he takes so long that next month's ambush catches him in the open and he drops a whole bin full of artifact weapons and ☼steel battle axes☼ in the middle of that gray langur herd..

Even with light/empty containers, there's still at least 2x walking involved for binning a single item (stockpile to item, then back to stockpile). Wheelbarrows help with the weight, but limit the pile to at most 3 jobs at once. The behavior may be fine for a newly-created invasion cleanup pile (since most bins will probably go from empty to full in one job), but terrible for an existing one, or for collecting armor that's being created one piece at a time in multiple workshops. Bins and barrels also now have a big downside in that when one gets picked up (or worse, I think it's as soon as the task to pick it up gets created, even if nobody's assigned the job yet), its existing contents become unavailable for use, potentially causing job cancellations (which has always been true, but now it happens a lot more than before). Don't get me wrong, the combining of jobs is a huge boon for certain situations, especially invasion cleanups, but in my experience so far, most typical fortress production cycles suffer greatly from the changes without significant adjustments to storage policies.

This can all be managed somewhat by creative use of wheelbarrows (& multiple stockpiles, if necessary), and/or bin-using "take from links only" stockpiles pulling from no-bin "take from anywhere" stockpiles, and/or giving up and using strictly no-bin stockpiles for certain materials, and/or, for intermediate materials (e.g. bars from a smelter feeding into a forge), using a no-bin stockpile to pull directly from the material-producing workshop and giving directly to the material-consuming one. In any case, it appears to me that hauling/stockpiling solutions are quite a bit more situation-dependent than they used to be. Urist McDorf 11:27, 4 September 2012 (UTC)