good basic work orders?

[Sikri]

hi all, i'm new to dwarf fortress, and i'm trying to work out what would be good basic work orders to have going? like you want to make sure you have empty barrels and bins, but what else is good?

[Oni]

1 ) brew drinks 2) brew drinks 3) brew drinks =)

[Oni]

make 10 of most usual furnitures, it could save time too : beds doors coffer etcs..

[The Former]

I like to make about double my population count in meals every day. Drinks, too, are a good one. I aim to keep around three times my population in stock, making more when the count reaches about a third of the population.

Ammo is also a good one if you're relying heavily on hunting.

[Other]

processing orders are useful - one of the first orders I tend to make in a new fortress is "make 1 totem if there is 1 skull available, repeat daily", so anytime I butcher an animal, the next day the skull is turned into a totem. You can easily make similar orders for anything you want to process all of into the same product (anytime you have milk, make cheese; anytime you have lye, make soap: and so on)

containers you've already mentioned, but raw materials can be good as well: "if I have less than 50 sand bags, queue up an order to gather 50 more" helps a lot in a glass-heavy fort.

[McFuzz]

Good newbie tip; figure out how the Manager works. Assign one in the nobles panel (bottom left), give him an office, then use the work orders menu to queue up jobs instead of using workshops.

[chronosphaenon]

Basically, anytime I install a new workshop or anytime I get access to a new material, I make orders to automate everything related.

These are some of the orders I'm using on my current embark, which is cassiterite poor and iron/flux/coke rich. Unless otherwise specified, all orders are daily, x1.

- at least 10 of the most used furniture
- at least 10 empty barrels, bins, buckets and wheelbarrows
- at least 20 mechanisms
- totem/large gem/craft/fat/cut gem/whatever if there are mats available
- milk animal, seasonally, (times the number of milkable animals)
- shear animal, seasonally, (times the number of shearable animals/4)
- charcoalx10 if ref. coal < 10, cokex10 if ref. coal < 30 (any reaction which needs ref. coal only runs if ref.coal>10)
- brew (both varieties) x5 if booze is under some threshold
- cook, if any solid mat is available.
- smelt iron ore (3 different orders) if iron ore <30
- pig ironx10 if pig iron <10 and iron >20
- steelx10 if pig iron >=10, iron >=10,
- bronze from ore x10 if bronze <20. I use bronze for chains, picks and axes.
- a long etc (musical instruments sequences, sand/glass sequences, stone blocks, platinum blocks, etc, etc, etc)

[AlP]

You can watch the new tutorial playthroughs by Quill18, he uses a lot of automated work orders.