Is Lye (and customer support) a lie?

[Irritant]

It seems the game still can't count the amount of lye you have in buckets (and there's no reliable way to prevent dwarves from leaving it in buckets). The result of this is that if you create a work order to make lye "if the amount of lye is less than 10", it will keep making lye forever (as long as there are empty buckets). If you happen to have another job to make new buckets if there are no empty buckets (as most sane players will)... you can see where this is going. Quite soon, your entire fortress is full of buckets of lye.

According to this post in the Bay12 forums, this bug (or a very similar one) was acknowledged in... 2006, and "should be solved today".

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=7066.msg82206#msg82206

But according to both my own experience and this other post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/zratdi/conditional_make_lye_order_wont_stop/

... it clearly wasn't.

Steam support just gives me two options: refund (which they refuse because it took me over 2 hours just to go through world generation and the tutorial) and "publisher support", that sends me to the Kitfox website, where there's no support page and clicking on "Dwarf Fortress" just sends me to the store page so I can buy Dwarf Fortress again.

The only vaguely promising link I found was here in the "Discussions" section, that sent me to a fourth website called "Notion", where they tell me to send an e-mail to a fifth website called "Mantishub", where they say I might, after three extra steps, get some feedback on a sixth website (Discord).

Basically, it feels like a series of hurdles to make sure people give up.

It's great that the game made 7 million in the first month, but maybe the publisher could invest some of that money (say, 0.5%?) on an actual support website and staff. Or, if they really don't want to have to deal with those pesky paying customers, maybe don't reject refund requests because the game was running for more than 2 hours before I even managed to actually start playing.

[AlP]

Why are you creating work orders to make lye? That's completely pointless.

[Festivity]

Originally posted by AlP:

Why are you creating work orders to make lye? That's completely pointless.

can u explain why?

[Irritant]

It's certainly pointless considering the fact that it's bugged. If it wasn't, it would be the logical way to make sure you always have a small amount of lye available in case you need it. Which is what conditional work orders are for (when they work).

[AlP]

Originally posted by FuwaFuwaWaifu:

Originally posted by AlP:

Why are you creating work orders to make lye? That's completely pointless.

can u explain why?

Because you can just go to the ashery and queue like 10 tasks to make some lye when you need it. Or just set it on repeat and make like 50 buckets of it.

Lye is only used to make one item that is very rarely used, there's zero point in automating it.

[AlP]

Originally posted by Irritant:

It's certainly pointless considering the fact that it's bugged. If it wasn't, it would be the logical way to make sure you always have a small amount of lye available in case you need it. Which is what conditional work orders are for (when they work).

You don't need to always have a small amount of lye available. That's why it has a low priority to fix, there are literally tons of high-priority features and bugs to work on.

[DoubleG]

Not sure I can see why its hard to keep lye in buckets. Used to be a bug where dwarfs would put the whole bucket of lye in the barrel, so I made a system that used stockpiles without barrels for lye for soap making.

Make sure its the only place to store lye and shouldn't be a problem.

[Irritant]

Originally posted by DoubleG:

Not sure I can see why its hard to keep lye in buckets.

Huh? It isn't. It's exactly the opposite: there is no way to prevent them from keeping it in buckets. And the game doesn't count lye kept in buckets. So it thinks you have no lye (despite there actually being 200 buckets full of lye), and just keeps making more.

[AlP]

Originally posted by DoubleG:

Not sure I can see why its hard to keep lye in buckets. Used to be a bug where dwarfs would put the whole bucket of lye in the barrel, so I made a system that used stockpiles without barrels for lye for soap making.

Make sure its the only place to store lye and shouldn't be a problem.

You don't need a stockpile for lye, just let it sit in the ashery where it was made.

[DoubleG]

Originally posted by Irritant:

Originally posted by DoubleG:

Not sure I can see why its hard to keep lye in buckets.

Huh? It isn't. It's exactly the opposite: there is no way to prevent them from keeping it in buckets. And the game doesn't count lye kept in buckets. So it thinks you have no lye (despite there actually being 200 buckets full of lye), and just keeps making more.

That's why you need to set it up properly. Link the stockpiles, limit the number of buckets they can access and where they can store the Lye. Automating soap making is an interesting circle of stockpile linking and limiting.

[Diarmuhnd]

Originally posted by Irritant:

It seems the game still can't count the amount of lye you have in buckets (and there's no reliable way to prevent dwarves from leaving it in buckets).

What did you do in your fortress? Did you have a Lye supply chain that crossed hostiles forcing them to abandon buckets?
I'm asking because in my recent fortress I have not had 1 partially filled lye bucket left abandoned. And I've made 500+ bars of soap so far.

I did have recurring water buckets left partially empty again. Seems to happen from hauling it to wounded dorfs in the hospital but those are easy to empty. I just set up a pedestal, a golden mastercraft for a good mood buff, and display the water in those buckets. This empties the buckets easily, quickly, and I remove the pedestal once its got about 10+ water on it and make a temporary puddle.

Originally posted by Irritant:

...
It's great that the game made 7 million in the first month, but maybe the publisher could invest some of that money (say, 0.5%?) on an actual support website and staff. Or, if they really don't want to have to deal with those pesky paying customers, maybe don't reject refund requests because the game was running for more than 2 hours before I even managed to actually start playing.

Huh ... you know the publisher won't see this eh? And yarp, you should have spent some time seeing some gameplay vids on youTube first. You would have seen how janky this old game is and known what you were getting into.

I'd jokingly say "go dig a hole, diggy diggy hole." but I guess thats not going to happen.

Good luck trying to ahve some fun.

[Tanker]

Originally posted by AlP:

You don't need to always have a small amount of lye available. That's why it has a low priority to fix, there are literally tons of high-priority features and bugs to work on.

Fixing anything is low priority in DF.
Maybe except for crashes when they are easily reproducible.

[Diarmuhnd]

Originally posted by Irritant:

Originally posted by DoubleG:

Not sure I can see why its hard to keep lye in buckets.

Huh? It isn't. It's exactly the opposite: there is no way to prevent them from keeping it in buckets. And the game doesn't count lye kept in buckets. So it thinks you have no lye (despite there actually being 200 buckets full of lye), and just keeps making more.

Did you change any stockpile settings? Just wondering how your lye broke.

[Irritant]

Originally posted by AlP:

Because you can just go to the ashery and queue like 10 tasks

You can "just" go to any workshop and queue 10 of anything. Buat that's not really a smart of viable way to manage production chains, and that's why the game has conditional work orders.

Originally posted by AlP:

Originally posted by Irritant:

That's why it has a low priority to fix

How do you know what the "priority" is? According to Tarn's post it was scheduled to be fixed on the very same day, so he didn't seem to think it was so low-priority.

In fact, if it is a known bug, why does the game come with a preset conditional for lye production (that doesn't work)? Several work orders have no presets at all, and a couple of them (ex., soap) have bugged presets that need to be modified, but if this one is known to be bugged (and "unfixable" via other conditions), why leave it there?

[AlP]

Originally posted by Irritant:

Originally posted by AlP:

Because you can just go to the ashery and queue like 10 tasks

You can "just" go to any workshop and queue 10 of anything. Buat that's not really a smart of viable way to manage production chains, and that's why the game has conditional work orders.

That's the smartest and the most efficient way to handle tasks that don't need to be automated. The problem here is you overcomplicating the simplest tasks.

Originally posted by Irritant:

How do you know what the "priority" is?

Because it wasn't fixed, duh.

[Irritant]

Originally posted by Diarmuhnd:

What did you do in your fortress?

What I described above. I created a conditional work order to make lye if I ever had less than 10 lye. Same for buckets, same for ash.

Originally posted by Diarmuhnd:

Did you have a Lye supply chain that crossed hostiles forcing them to abandon buckets?

No hostiles at all. Dwarves just put the lye in buckets, leave it there, and then go make more lye and more buckets. It's the problem described in the second link in my original post. Apparently it's been a known bug long anough that people have come up with a convoluted (and not 100% reliable) workaround (also described in that post).

Huh ... you know the publisher won't see this eh?

They certainly seem to try very hard not to. The new customer support meta seems to be to pretend customers don't exist after they become customers.

And yarp, you should have spent some time seeing some gameplay vids on youTube first. You would have seen how janky this old game is and known what you were getting into.

I watched over 20 hours of gameplay videos. None of them showed any of the dozens of gameplay bugs I've encountered, and only one of them showed one crash (I've had several).

And blaming the victim is very 2016. If you buy a car and it has a new problem every day, it's not your fault for "not watching enough videos".