Why is mining so low-priority?

[Traslo]

Seriously, no matter what we do mining seems to be the lowest priority job in all of Dwarf Fortress. I don't remember it being this bad years ago. Miners basically have to banned from every single job but mining or they'll prioritise it over that. They'd rather haul for 6 months than mine a single tile.

[Miclee]

Are you setting the priority of your mining tasks? (click the -> on the toolbar when you have mining selected, priorities exist. 1 = most important)

[Sophtopus]

The default priority is 4 out of 8. To move the priority up, you need to click the yellow right facing arrow after you selected the mining option. Put it to priority 1 and it should work no problem. You may want to lock your miners to the mining job.

[AlP]

Mining and farming are full-time jobs, you should not assign other labors to them most of the time.

[Dain_Ironfoot]

I haven't really had any issues with it if I set the priority to 1 when selecting where to mine.

[Fel]

I just set my miners to not do other jobs (except if/when they need to craft something or get a new ring)

[DoubleG]

I usually have one miner who only does mining, and if I want some mining done by everyone really fast ~I up the priority to 1.

[Fel]

I prefer to have about 3 but it's also because the mining skill can be very helpful later on in the military.

So once they reach legendary +5, I usually switch to new miners.
Plus those older legendary miners are there if I need a lot of mining done quickly at some point.

A military squad with pickaxes and legendary skills with it is quite deadly even with barely any skill in other military stuff, as long as they get good quality steel armor.
Since mining trains both strength, toughness, endurance, willpower, spacial sense and kinetic sense, miners usually have pretty high stats that are useful in the military.
And a pickaxe is a pretty decent weapon to begin with.

[AlP]

Originally posted by Fel:

I prefer to have about 3 but it's also because the mining skill can be very helpful later on in the military.

So once they reach legendary +5, I usually switch to new miners.
Plus those older legendary miners are there if I need a lot of mining done quickly at some point.

A military squad with pickaxes and legendary skills with it is quite deadly even with barely any skill in other military stuff, as long as they get good quality steel armor.
Since mining trains both strength, toughness, endurance, willpower, spacial sense and kinetic sense, miners usually have pretty high stats that are useful in the military.
And a pickaxe is a pretty decent weapon to begin with.

Your miners are actually inferior to your other soldiers, who continue training their combat skill, while your miners are stuck at Legendary +5 for the rest of the game.

[Fel]

Legendary +5 is the cap for skills anyways and once they become military they train their other skills as well.
The first batch usually reaches legendary +5 by the time a military is set up at all in most of my forts anyway so they are not even lagging behind for the other military skills.

[corisai]

Originally posted by AlP:

Your miners are actually inferior to your other soldiers, who continue training their combat skill, while your miners are stuck at Legendary +5 for the rest of the game.

Now with introduction of Teaching skill it's very efficient to train your soldiers in Mining & Pump Operator - just keep some dwarfs with high Teaching skill (ideally to get them at start) training all the time & switch rest of your military between combat and mining&pumping trainings. Teachers will help them to remove the difference in combat skills pretty fast.

[AlP]

Originally posted by Fel:

Legendary +5 is the cap for skills anyways and once they become military they train their other skills as well.
The first batch usually reaches legendary +5 by the time a military is set up at all in most of my forts anyway so they are not even lagging behind for the other military skills.

It's not the cap, the skills go way beyond L+5.

[Thermal Lance]

I always have at least 1 dwarf constantly mining and when I need more I just tell a few more to mine and mine only by simply not issueing them any other job at all.

[Miclee]

Originally posted by AlP:

Originally posted by Fel:

Legendary +5 is the cap for skills anyways and once they become military they train their other skills as well.
The first batch usually reaches legendary +5 by the time a military is set up at all in most of my forts anyway so they are not even lagging behind for the other military skills.

It's not the cap, the skills go way beyond L+5.

No, they are capped at Legendary+5(level 20).

From the wiki:
"Many skills can gain practical levels beyond level 15, or "Legendary". Farming, plant gathering, and fishing use an older formula for calculating yields which effectively caps the skill level at "Legendary+5", but most other crafting skills use the following formula to determine the quality of the resulting item:"

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Skill

[AlP]

Originally posted by Miclee:

Originally posted by AlP:

It's not the cap, the skills go way beyond L+5.

No, they are capped at Legendary+5(level 20).

No, they are not.

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Skill

[Miclee]

Originally posted by AlP:

Originally posted by Miclee:

No, they are capped at Legendary+5(level 20).

No, they are not.

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Skill

Literally says they are, just uses a different formula for some(the cap is still technically 20).

"Many skills can gain practical levels beyond level 15, or "Legendary". Farming, plant gathering, and fishing use an older formula for calculating yields which effectively caps the skill level at "Legendary+5", but most other crafting skills use the following formula to determine the quality of the resulting item:""

Things "beyond" 20 have penalties applied, therefore you aren't really improving anything.