How does the decorate with shell command work? How to prevent decorating bolts? How to specify markdwarves ammo types?

[Lin Chung]

Like the title said, I thought the decorate with shell command will simply cause craft dwarves to find random items in my stock pile to decorate. Or does it work where they only decorate on items queued up at the same time (such as making a bunch of bone bolts for example). I have the decorate with shell order up because I'm drowning in pond turtle and mussel shells. I was hoping that a 50/50 order of decorate with shell would be a good way of removing the shells without having them take up a refuse pile. But that order never goes down so they always keep decorating bone bolts. I have an ongoing daily order of create 100/100 bone bolts when bone bolts gets less than 75. I'm creating bone bolts for practice ammunition for my marksdwarves (also cause I have a ton of bones from a corpse pile). The craftdwarves keep decorating the bone bolts only to get those bolts shot at an undead and break. How do I specify them to not decorate bolts?

Also is there a way to designate dwarves to use only a specific ammo type? My dwarves sometimes use a mixture of metal, wooden, or bone bolts. I want them to exclusively use bone bolts for now as practice against these undead I captured. I made a chamber where I release the undead (stripped of armor so they are naked) so that my markdwarves are stationed safely behind ramparts and can fire upon the undead.

Sorry if these questions sound dumb but I can only get so far with the dwarf fortress wiki.

I undoubtedly will have more random questions so thanks in advance.

[Mobbstar]

As far as I am informed, it is NOT possible to select specific kind of ammunition in the current game version (0.50.04), but one of the upcoming patches should restore this.

For specifying what to decorate, a complicated but powerful trick is to "link" the stockpiles to the workshops. Create a stockpile that only accepts the things you want to decorate, and tell that stockpile to "take" from your main stockpile, and "give" to the workshop. Then tell the shell/refuse stockpile to also "give" to the workshop. I believe the wiki explains this in greater detail.

[malthenielsen]

Originally posted by Mobbstar:

As far as I am informed, it is NOT possible to select specific kind of ammunition in the current game version (0.50.04), but one of the upcoming patches should restore this.

For specifying what to decorate, a complicated but powerful trick is to "link" the stockpiles to the workshops. Create a stockpile that only accepts the things you want to decorate, and tell that stockpile to "take" from your main stockpile, and "give" to the workshop. Then tell the shell/refuse stockpile to also "give" to the workshop. I believe the wiki explains this in greater detail.

Wow I will try that.

I've just lived with the dwarves decorating really random items like buckets.