Leather Woes

[erandomone]

Mid to late game, I've run entirely out of pelts to make leather. This makes making new sets of clothing, armor, or bags pretty impossible.

I've increased my trade rep with everybody, I've purchased the scant beaver pelts available, but the mine's stopped spawning rats and the overworld's stopped offering to sell me pelts.

Is there some way to prompt the traders to generate pelts? To spawn rats that I can fight?

[Cheet4h]

Yeah, I have the exact same issue. I can buy pretty much anything else, but beaver leather is extremely rare. Sometimes there are rat hides in settlements, but also not very often.

[Da' Vane]

Same here. I am literally buying up every hide I can get, because there's so few. My only suggestion is to maybe NOT kill all the rat lairs, so that you can farm rats.

The use for leather has increased significantly with this update, but the supply of leather hasn't been increased.

[elliam]

I'm having a problem where I can't even get the dwarves to pick up rat hides from rats I kill. I wish there was a "pick this up" task, similar to the attack or loot tasks.

[AI Sin || SinNoAria]

Yeah, the closest you get is make a new storage, set it to only hide, then set priority to max.

[Cheet4h]

Originally posted by elliam:

I'm having a problem where I can't even get the dwarves to pick up rat hides from rats I kill. I wish there was a "pick this up" task, similar to the attack or loot tasks.

To clarify, they don't pick them up despite the hides being needed as parts in a workshop? Or do they not carry them to a storage while idling around?
Can they walk to the hides? Does the workshop list hides normally in the list of items needed to be brought there or with the exclamation mark for unobtainable items?

[Da' Vane]

Make sure you have "pick up from ground" checked on your storage/chest.

You can set hauling priority separate from crafting priority, otherwise they are generally the same. So setting Hauling to high priority wherever you need hides should work too...

[Cheet4h]

Originally posted by Da' Vane:

You can set hauling priority separate from crafting priority, otherwise they are generally the same. So setting Hauling to high priority wherever you need hides should work too...

Uh, usually chests and the storage room start out on low priority, while workshops are on medium priority.
There isn't really a reason to set storages to high priority, as your dwarfs should deliver items directly to workshops - although I'm not sure if crafting is of a higher priority then hauling to workshops. In that case your dwarves would not haul as long as they can craft stuff. But if you have storage buildings set to high priority, your crafters will spend their time filling those up instead of crafting, provided you allow your crafters to haul.

In the end, a relatively straightforward to most hauling issues is to simply have one or more dwarves who are dedicated haulers, and just not care about whether items are lying around in the mountain somewhere - build chests or storage rooms, check those items and your dwarves will carry them there when the workshops are not busy.

[Da' Vane]

Just by the priority of the workshop, there's an arrow that lists "Crafting" and "Hauling" so you can set each individually. You can also see this under the Job Broker as well. Generally, these are the same, unless you designate them seperately. By this, I mean if you set a workshop to high priority, then both crafting and hauling for that workshop are set to high.

So, if you need hides in your Tailor, you can set Tailor hauling to high priority, and you should see those hides being shifted...

[AI Sin || SinNoAria]

Should happen and actually happens are different, unfortunately. I had this issue in my game where unless I made hauling a high priority for storage, my dwarves would ignore the ground hides for crafting and would only count hides in storage.

[Da' Vane]

Originally posted by SinNoAria/Arkia/AI Sin:

Should happen and actually happens are different, unfortunately. I had this issue in my game where unless I made hauling a high priority for storage, my dwarves would ignore the ground hides for crafting and would only count hides in storage.

That's probably because of the way the jobs work - items get "reserved" for jobs, including Hauling, so if your Hauling priority was higher than your crafting priority, it is likely that your ground hides would be "reserved" for hauling to storage, and therefore unavailable for hauling to crafting sites.

If Hauling is medium of lower, you will often see the reverse - that Hides get reserved for crafting, and therefore don't get put into storage...

[Cheet4h]

Originally posted by Da' Vane:

Originally posted by SinNoAria/Arkia/AI Sin:

Should happen and actually happens are different, unfortunately. I had this issue in my game where unless I made hauling a high priority for storage, my dwarves would ignore the ground hides for crafting and would only count hides in storage.

That's probably because of the way the jobs work - items get "reserved" for jobs, including Hauling, so if your Hauling priority was higher than your crafting priority, it is likely that your ground hides would be "reserved" for hauling to storage, and therefore unavailable for hauling to crafting sites.

If Hauling is medium of lower, you will often see the reverse - that Hides get reserved for crafting, and therefore don't get put into storage...

I've seen items getting reserved for crafting jobs, but haven't noticed anything being reserved for hauling before a dwarf actually takes a hauling job for that item. Could you explain how to see that happening?

[Cheet4h]

Originally posted by SinNoAria/Arkia/AI Sin:

Should happen and actually happens are different, unfortunately. I had this issue in my game where unless I made hauling a high priority for storage, my dwarves would ignore the ground hides for crafting and would only count hides in storage.

Yeah, bugs can happen in development, although quite often this can also be a design bug, where a user expects something to happen which isn't accounted for by the devs. This happens more in Early Access games, by nature of playing an unfinished game.

The best thing to do in either case is usually submitting a detailed bug report, ideally with the savegame and log file attached.

[Da' Vane]

Originally posted by Cheet4h:

Originally posted by Da' Vane:

That's probably because of the way the jobs work - items get "reserved" for jobs, including Hauling, so if your Hauling priority was higher than your crafting priority, it is likely that your ground hides would be "reserved" for hauling to storage, and therefore unavailable for hauling to crafting sites.

If Hauling is medium of lower, you will often see the reverse - that Hides get reserved for crafting, and therefore don't get put into storage...

I've seen items getting reserved for crafting jobs, but haven't noticed anything being reserved for hauling before a dwarf actually takes a hauling job for that item. Could you explain how to see that happening?

I've not really seen it happening specifically for hauling ground items, because most items you can't do anything with directly, so there's now way to see them reserved. I have seen it with Mushrooms being reserved when first found, as you can interact and Harvest them, but sometimes the tooltip says "reserved for interaction by" a dwarf that can be a little distance back, especially if you have the game paused.

I think it's because all jobs include travel to the site of the job, so if you don't have an efficient logistics system in place, it can take a short while for the dwarves to get there. From what I have deduced, jobs are largely in the form of "Do X at Y" - and for Hauling that translates as "Haul X from Y to Z." The nearest free dwarf will will then take the job, reserving it.

I HAVE seen items reserved for Hauling in inventories, often things like Drills, and when things are hauled FROM storage, so I can only presume the same thing works for items on the ground - especially since everything in the game counts as an entity, be they on the ground, in an inventory, or wandering around outside their lair...

[Draken]

I got a way to mitigate the end-game lack of leather - I call it 'Rat-Farming'.

Do not destroy ratholes lairs that spawn close to your main settlement..
I tend to wall them up, put doors on both sides, and let them spawn the waves of rats, which drops rat leather in abundance.

[Enishiq]

Originally posted by erandomone:

Mid to late game, I've run entirely out of pelts to make leather. This makes making new sets of clothing, armor, or bags pretty impossible.

I've increased my trade rep with everybody, I've purchased the scant beaver pelts available, but the mine's stopped spawning rats and the overworld's stopped offering to sell me pelts.

Is there some way to prompt the traders to generate pelts? To spawn rats that I can fight?

tl;dr: No

Increasing rep with nations only increases what they will pay for your goods, maybe cheaper for what they sell but I haven't paid attention to that. It doesn't unlock more items.

Draken is correct, the best way to generate leather is not clear out ratholes. Sadly this is the inferior leather. My just completed play through had two places that sold a total of 7 beaver leather the entire game.