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Wheelbarrow

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This article is about the current version of DF.
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Wheelbarrow sprite preview.png

A wheelbarrow is a tool used to increase the speed of hauling heavy items. Wheelbarrows can be made of metal or wood at a metalsmith's forge or carpenter's workshop, and can carry a single item (or stack of items, e.g. prepared meals). This is equivalent to one fifth of a minecart's capacity.

Construction[edit]

Wheelbarrows are constructed of either wood or metal:

Material Worker Workshop
Wood (1 log) Carpenter Carpenter's workshop
Metal (2 bars) Blacksmithing Metalsmith's forge or Magma forge

Utility[edit]

Dwarven wheelbarrows are sturdy and practical.

Stone stockpiles have 1 wheelbarrow automatically assigned upon designation, though any stockpile can have wheelbarrows assigned in the stockpile (p) settings menu in the "Storage and tools" submenu (barrel icon). Wheelbarrows will be stored in their assigned stockpile when not in use; when used to haul an item to that stockpile, the item and the wheelbarrow will both be dropped onto the same tile. A stockpile's wheelbarrows are only used to carry items to that stockpile; they will not be used to carry items away from it.

Dwarves carrying items in wheelbarrows will ignore both the weight of the wheelbarrow's contents and the weight of the wheelbarrow itself, moving always at their top speed. This makes them particularly useful for hauling heavy items like stone, which slow haulers a lot.

Dwarves will haul any items weighing exactly 75Γ or more via wheelbarrow if their destination stockpile has wheelbarrows enabled and available. All stone boulders (with the exception of raw adamantine) weigh significantly more than 75Γ - these are the most common heavy items most players will find themselves needing to haul during normal gameplay. Any items weighing less than 75Γ will not be hauled via wheelbarrow, even if there are empty wheelbarrows available. Once again, the weight of wheelbarrows is ignored for this condition, meaning that a dwarf will not haul a 50Γ object with a 50Γ wheelbarrow, despite how the combined weight would be greater than the 75Γ threshold.

Wheelbarrows carry less stuff than minecarts, but do not require a track to be preconstructed, and can go up and down stairs.

Forging and Melting[edit]

  • Metal wheelbarrows cost two metal bars or six adamantine wafers to forge.
  • When a metal wheelbarrow is melted down, it will return 1.8 metal bars for an efficiency of 90%, or 1.8 wafers for an efficiency of 30%.

Bugs[edit]

  • If all of a stockpile's tiles are occupied by wheelbarrows, it will stop requesting new items even though the tiles under the wheelbarrows have no stockpiled item. Consequently, stockpiles need to have more tiles than wheelbarrows to work correctly.Bug:8861
  • Items can occasionally be left inside a wheelbarrow, causing the wheelbarrow to become unusable. This can cause a stockpile to stop collecting stone if all of its wheelbarrows end up in this stateBug:6074 You can work around this by marking the contents of the wheelbarrow for dumping.
  • Dwarves carry wheelbarrows instead of pushing them when the wheelbarrows themselves are being hauled.Bug:6008
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When they push an empty wheelbarrow, any dwarf walking by will jump in and demand a ride. To avoid this, the decision was made long ago that empty wheelbarrows must be carried to avoid elvish-type laziness.