iron age setup question :)

[soulphreak]

here i go again, with another setup question, sorry guys :P

before the iron age my crafters worked just fine. i had one doing 1 tool each and 1 doing 1 armor piece each, so over time, every one of my guys got kitted out in armor and is getting replacement tools.

along comes the iron age and i am again at a loss how to set up the workers.

first problem: nails.

no mater if i set the nails task to 1 or 10 or whatever, my guy crafts 5 nails, the warehouse worker picks them up, my guy crafts another set of nails. and another. which means i have to delete the task and craft nails myself or lose all my iron. how do you prevent that?

second problem: tools/weapons.

since iron tools/weapons are reusable, i can set my crafter with tasks to only use refurbished(?) parts, which is fine, or not and lose a ton of iron. which again means, i have to craft all initial tools myself.

[Jebbalon]

You can exclude the nails from the warehouse storage task list (Q on the bin itself)

I also set it to 5 and forget it.

You only need to set task for the tool/weapon not tasks for the metal piece. Unless you want to do like an initial run of so many then switch to tasks for the tools later.

Initially I'll let the crafters make several items without the refurbished only check. After a few days though, I'll set that for everything and then check often for when they say they need an axe head of knife blade - then I'll make a couple.

You can micromanage the number of items for each type but I tend to not do that.
Like- why do you need more bars? ... Oh yeah the new farmers need those rakes! Okay, here ya go!

Sometimes it's never ending - You recruit new builders, they work hard and break that wood hammer they came with so they grab an iron one. Then you get around to assigning them somewhere and now you can't find where that hammer went to.

This all assumes you have the iron and coal to make all these items. If you are struggling with supply then more managing of the tools it needed of course.

[Aurelius]

Agreeing with Jebbalon on this one:
1) Set the crafter to make 5 nails and set this to top priority (recommended dependent on how many tasks you have set.)
2) For storage, exclude nails from warehouse gathering OR, if you want to put them in a warehouse, set a gather limit on the small materials container so the warehouse worker won't fill the container with nails. (This is the numeric indicator on the tasks list, per item, on the container)
3) Per Jebbalon's post, you can either build the whole initial slate of stuff yourself or tell them to make 1 of each you need, then wait for all the eligible workers to grab stuff. Once you hit capacity you'll want to shift this to "replacement parts only."
4) If you're iron constrained, and most are, it may be worth keeping up with how many eligible workers there are, per tool, and keep a tight fist on how many of each tool is in circulation so you can monitor part loss. This is effort intensive though, as Jeb implied. You also have to walk around and listen to the people complaining about tools because unless they have nothing else to do, they won't come up and pester you about it, and they'll default back to basic tools to keep gathering the base items presuming those are available. A tool deficiency also won't get listed on the village issues list, unless there's no task to create the tools at all. To be clear, it'll tell you if you're not producing axes at all, but it won't tell you if Sven can't find an iron axe.
5) Probably goes without saying, but make sure you have adequate broken parts receptacles, and that your warehouse \ worker supply chain is adequate to get everything collected back to the blacksmith.
Note: I can't confirm that patching has completely eliminated parts loss; Still seems to be an issue, although I think it's not the problem it was a few months ago, e.g., I think workers will try to carry parts back with them instead of dropping them in the middle of the forest.

[Aurelius]

Originally posted by Aurelius:

Agreeing with Jebbalon on this one:
1) Set the crafter to make 5 nails and set this to top priority (recommended dependent on how many tasks you have set.)
2) For storage, exclude nails from warehouse gathering OR, if you want to put them in a warehouse, set a gather limit on the small materials container so the warehouse worker won't fill the container with nails. (This is the numeric indicator on the tasks list, per item, on the container)
3) Per Jebbalon's post, you can either build the whole initial slate of stuff yourself or tell them to make 1 of each you need, then wait for all the eligible workers to grab stuff. Once you hit capacity you'll want to shift this to "replacement parts only."
4) If you're iron constrained, and most are, it may be worth keeping up with how many eligible workers there are, per tool, and keep a tight fist on how many of each tool is in circulation so you can monitor part loss. This is effort intensive though, as Jeb implied. You also have to walk around and listen to the people complaining about tools because unless they have nothing else to do, they won't come up and pester you about it, and they'll default back to basic tools to keep gathering the base items presuming those are available. A tool deficiency also won't get listed on the village issues list, unless there's no task to create the tools at all. To be clear, it'll tell you if you're not producing axes at all, but it won't tell you if Sven can't find an iron axe.
5) Probably goes without saying, but make sure you have adequate broken parts receptacles, and that your warehouse \ worker supply chain is adequate to get everything collected back to the blacksmith.
Note: I can't confirm that patching has completely eliminated parts loss; Still seems to be an issue, although I think it's not the problem it was a few months ago, e.g., I think workers will try to carry parts back with them instead of dropping them in the middle of the forest.

Regarding 4) - You WILL get a visual indicator (!) on a given worker if they have any kind of issue; Tool or material availability; What you WON'T get is a per-worker report on the issues list.