Mineral hauling

[Dufflebags]

Fortress has almost 180 strong, military of 30. And maybe half the population actually has a job, and a quarter of them a consistent job. And for some reason there's still minerals and material from mining laying around everywhere.

Why aren't the idle dwarfs hauling? Do only miners move materials?

[McFuzz]

Hauling is a low priority job, set to everyone by default.

Assign those stockpiles some wheelbarrows to get it done faster. Ensure you set up custom stockpiles for each mineral you consider important so that they all get moved.

You didn't mention stockpiles in the OP post but I assume you know you need them, for them to be moved.

It takes a while, but soon you'll be like, oh no I'm out of rocks and minerals in convenient spots lol.

[=M$= Oroberus]

Hauling as a job needs to be enabled, either by default for all or, if you changed the settings around in the meantime, on each job (if you didn'T change anything, every dwarf will haul).

Some reasons hauling isn'T done:
- No appropriate stockpile has space (keep in mind, there are several types of stone and not every mineral counts towards metal ore etc)
- Dwarfs are too busy with other hauling/activities like praying, eating, drinking partying etc
- The way to your stockpile is somehow blocked
- The way to your stockpile is too long so while checking for what to do, the game finds other stuff with higher or same priority but shorter distance
- If the stuff is laying around outside or in the cavern layer, something is spooking your warfs

There should be a stop sign icon on the upper left of your screen showing all the cancelled stuff, right click it so it goes away and wait a bit until it pops up again, check if any of the recently cancelled tasks is a hauling job, it usually will tell you why it was cancelled.
Also, with a fortress this big, it would be a good idea to specifiy a custom job for haulers which are only hauling and has all other jobs disabled. You can do so in your labor screen be adding a custom job.