Good condition clothes strewn about

[fel-fi]

Hello all, I'm new to DF. I've been able to muddle my way through the various issues I've encountered so far, but this is driving me bonkers. I have a bunch of decent quality clothing strewn about the place that no one is picking up and putting into stockpiles.

I have stockpiles with the various clothing items enabled. The clothing does not seem to be worn (no Xs around the names). The items are not forbidden. Many of them are from an ill-fated battle that took out about a quarter of my colony (I am... not so good at the defense part of this game). The items have been there for quite a while and I have had many dwarves with no jobs over that time so it's not like no one has been available to grab them. I've installed DFhack, but to be honest I have no idea how to use it to fix them. I've discovered that a number of them (but far from all) have the "foreign" tag, but that's about all that I have been able to figure out.

I know that I could just dump them all, but it feels like such a waste since many of them are silk (which I don't have much of yet). Am I missing something obvious or do I just need to dump these things so my orderly mind is no longer bothered by the mess?

Thank you in advance!

[Fel]

Usually, clothing that doesn't go to stockpiles are owned items.
Normally, the owner would try to store it into the cabinet in their bedroom if they have one, when they have some free time.

[Haethei]

put cabinets in their bedrooms, offices, throne room, maybe even barracks

[DopaTrain]

To be fair I'd probably walk past a pair of random socks in the street too. I guess a dwarf fortress is a bit like our own world, there's discarded rubbish everywhere. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

[Slippy]

Originally posted by DopaTrain:

To be fair I'd probably walk past a pair of random socks in the street too. I guess a dwarf fortress is a bit like our own world, there's discarded rubbish everywhere. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

I have never thought of it like that before! I like that way of thinking

[fel-fi]

The clothing appears unowned, so I dunno. Everyone has cabinets in their bedrooms, but I will try placing cabinets in random places and see what happens. Fingers crossed!

[sonix2003]

You probably refer to the steam version. I can only talk about the non-steam version, but I assume much of the code base is still the same, as the steam version has mainly different UI and controls.

There could be various causes for these items cluttering the ground:
- you talked about a quarter of your dwarfs being killed. Maybe some of the items are (still) owned by now dead dwards. I remember issues that the game does not untie the ownership of items, if the owner dies. There have been multiple attempts to resolve this issue => https://dwarffortressbugtracker.com/view.php?id=4403
- did you assign dwarfs to squads and assign uniforms? Most items made of cloth are considered a "civil uniform" (shirt,dress, skirt, trousers, socks). If a dwarf is assigned a military job, he will drop it's "civil uniform" and starts wearing his "military uniform" (items made from leather, bone, metals,...) also see: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Squad#Wearing_equipment_over_clothing. Dwarfs don't seem to care too much keeping their fortress tidy.
- items with a "foreign" tag are items from a non-dwarfen civilization. Usually you get them from trading with other races (elves, human, ...). Without any further information I can only make wild guesses. In one of my games enemies entered my fortress, while a trading caravan was at the trading depot. A werebeast destroyed the wagons of the caravan, which blocked the caravan NPCs from leaving and all the items started to rot and were causing miasma. This also resulted in a lot of foreign items being scattered on the ground, belonging to the NPCs of the trading caravan.
To fix this mess, I wrote a LUA script for df-hack erasing the ownership of all the foreign items and dumping all items into a dwarfen atomic smasher.