Suggestion: Improved Organising of Work Orders.

[TheSinKing]

Work orders are probably one of the most powerful features of the game. Even the game emphasise how players can automate tasks this way. But as you progress the list of orders will become a problem to review due to sheer volume of orders. Without a way to organise orders, for example into collapsible sections, it feels overwhelming to dive back into work orders to make even the smallest of changes.

It's an awful experience when it feels like I am being punished. Because I spent so much effort building a complex list of orders only to then be forced to comb through my long list or work orders. Just to find and fix a broken work order due to a change of events. It's become a reason I've abandoned fortresses and even stopped playing the game back when this was not yet on Steam. Once my orders become too difficult to navigate I either give up or discard the list and try and do it all solo with as few orders as possible. For accessible reasons being able to better organise work orders would also help people with visibility and comprehension difficulties like dyslexia.

[AlP]

Originally posted by TheSinKing:

Because I spent so much effort building a complex list of orders

You completely wasted your time, because you didn't need to do any of that.

So now you want features that make it less cumbersome for you to waste your time on useless work orders that you don't need in the first place.

[AirToob]

Well, I have a long list of work orders which seem to me to be quite necessary and in themselves relieve me of having to go round workstations placing individual orders whenever I realise they are necessary - they provide automation, in fact.

I often want to check on a particular order to see how its conditions are going, or make some changes, and I relate very strongly to the views in the OP.

For me, it would be nice (e.g.) to add a new work order which wants to quite high priority. Bumping it to the front of the list is a tedious process, unless I am missing something (quite likely, being a newbie).

Another example: what orders have I currently got set up at a forge? Yes, I can always go to the forge and see the orders as they come up, but that's not the same thing. Again, I could be missing something.

I realise that there are many styles of play.

[amade]

These days I use work orders for specific workshops, rarely use general work orders. In fact, the only general work order I have are DFhack generated ones for automated milking/shearing. So if I need to review something, I go to the workshop and look through a (usually) short list of work orders.

[AlP]

Originally posted by AirToob:

relieve me of having to go round workstations placing individual orders whenever I realise they are necessary

So instead of going to a workshop and ordering something, you go... to the workshop and order something. Only with a work order, making the whole thing ten times more complicated.

Oh, and then you go back to the workshop and do this:

Originally posted by AirToob:

I often want to check on a particular order to see how its conditions are going, or make some changes

All of that instead of simply going to the workshop and ordering what you actually need, when you need it. That's why everything OP did was an epic waste of time.

[Saver Sigonith]

I think having organization options for work orders would be nice!

I don't tend to set up that many repeating work orders. I'll use one-time general orders for furniture and blocks and things, repeat orders for food and drink, maaybe automate clothes making, maybe a shop-specific order for sand gathering.

But some folks like having a ton of repeating work orders and hey that can be fun too. I wouldn't mind being able to dump all my clothing orders in a folder or have an easier time moving things up and down the list. Helps the OCD y'know? :P

[ʙᴀɴɢʙᴜᴄᴋs]

Collapsible work orders, or sectioning, would be amazing!

[AirToob]

Originally posted by AlP:

Originally posted by AirToob:

relieve me of having to go round workstations placing individual orders whenever I realise they are necessary

So instead of going to a workshop and ordering something, you go... to the workshop and order something. Only with a work order, making the whole thing ten times more complicated.

Oh, and then you go back to the workshop and do this:

Originally posted by AirToob:

I often want to check on a particular order to see how its conditions are going, or make some changes

All of that instead of simply going to the workshop and ordering what you actually need, when you need it. That's why everything OP did was an epic waste of time.

Sorry, you are fundamentally misunderstanding something, or I am. I *don't* go back to the workshop to check on a particular order. The workshop wouldn't tell me that. I go to the order in the order list. Unless I am missing something, all you can tell from going to the workshop is what the orders being carried out, and the way I play those orders are coming from the order list.

Going to a workshop repeatedly whenever I want something seems much harder to me then putting an order with conditions into the order list and letting it run. The conditions decide when I need something, I don't have to do that all the time.

[Sander]

Work order list is a powerful automation tool. For example i have a dwarf who does many things. He is also my fortress's only Dyer. So i set a work order to dye 10 cloth, with a condition that 10 dyes be available and the refresh rate i set to 1 month. So every month my dyer has a work order to dye 10 cloth as long as dye is available, which is more than i currently need but enough that it doesnt swamp the dwarf with only Dyeing jobs. So he can do other crafts.

While remaking the complex checks and balances of your forts work orders can feel a daunting task, just delete the old ones and start off a fresh page as your needs and goals grow. While tedious, its not really a long task to set up a new list of work orders for the new Fort you've grown into. Letting go of the past and acknowledging the future you're striving towards is rather useful, too.

[ndjs]

I dont see it as a big problem really, works fine for me but whatever i tend to not craft to much useless ♥♥♥♥ to begin with.

[AlP]

Originally posted by AirToob:

Sorry, you are fundamentally misunderstanding something, or I am. I *don't* go back to the workshop to check on a particular order. The workshop wouldn't tell me that. I go to the order in the order list. Unless I am missing something, all you can tell from going to the workshop is what the orders being carried out, and the way I play those orders are coming from the order list.

That's the same exact thing.

Originally posted by AirToob:

Going to a workshop repeatedly whenever I want something seems much harder to me then putting an order with conditions into the order list and letting it run. The conditions decide when I need something, I don't have to do that all the time.

Maybe it seems harder to you, but it's actually much easier than setting up work orders to produce every single item in the game.

Of course there is no way to organize such nonsense.

[Sinclair]

Originally posted by AlP:

Originally posted by AirToob:

Sorry, you are fundamentally misunderstanding something, or I am. I *don't* go back to the workshop to check on a particular order. The workshop wouldn't tell me that. I go to the order in the order list. Unless I am missing something, all you can tell from going to the workshop is what the orders being carried out, and the way I play those orders are coming from the order list.

That's the same exact thing.

Originally posted by AirToob:

Going to a workshop repeatedly whenever I want something seems much harder to me then putting an order with conditions into the order list and letting it run. The conditions decide when I need something, I don't have to do that all the time.

Maybe it seems harder to you, but it's actually much easier than setting up work orders to produce every single item in the game.

Of course there is no way to organize such nonsense.

I actually find it a lot quicker to order 10 beds for the migrants through the order menu, than having to click 10x on the same two buttons.

Setting up repeating orders to have a stockpile of common things like furniture is also my prefered way, so I can definitely see the value in having multiple automatic conditioned orders running.

That being said, I also feel like you are going a little overboard if you have more orders than fit on your screen. Most of these should probably be one-time or repeat-indefinitely ones.

[TheSinKing]

Originally posted by AlP:

Originally posted by TheSinKing:

Because I spent so much effort building a complex list of orders

You completely wasted your time, because you didn't need to do any of that.

So now you want features that make it less cumbersome for you to waste your time on useless work orders that you don't need in the first place.

I disagree with your opinion entirely AIP. The game itself is massive, complex, and improving with every update thanks to the devs and their hard work. Being able to better organise is a step in the right direction as proven with their steam release version in relation to the old school version - Back when everything was more tedious. Thinking it is all pointless is a pointless point of view when it will improve the quality of the game. Regardless if you won't use it others will as shown with the replies of those in this thread.

[Dagmar]

I generally disagree with the claims that people are using repeating work orders for too much. Considering how many things one generally needs to pay attention to during the "mid game" I wind up producing most of my commodity goods via work orders, targeting JIT production.

By example, I know I'm going to be hosting 200+ dwarves. Not all of them will need their own rooms (children, spouses) but I'm going to have a significant number of visitors, and I'm going to be spending lots of time building, but digging out 200 rooms all at once and producing 200 chests, 200 cabinets, and 200 beds all at once is simply a recipe for burning out dwarves (not to mention Elves getting a bit snippy about it). So I'll throw in a work order for producing 3 beds if there's ever less than four available and leave it on repeat. I'll do the same with cabinets and chests, and then doors, grates, pedestals, statues, tables and chairs, and then mainly not have to mess with them again because I can populate a "pod" of about six rooms on the spot just using what's on hand--with a few deviations from plan to enhance noble's quarters when the occasional masterwork happens. I will absolutely also have work orders for bins and barrels set up.

...and there's nothing more embarrassing than overproducing/underproducing booze. If you just leave those work orders for food and booze on endless repeat, you're looking at dwarves burning out and becoming grumpy about it (and then they start slacking!), and very possibly some rather extreme infestation issues (this actually used to happen, and I'm not relying on it not coming back), but if you have ample chefs and ample kitchens/stills ready to produce approximately what your dorfs will consume in a day if they fall below three or four days of supplies, this ceases to be a problem with just two or three carefully maintained work orders that you might tweak every year or two.

That's a dozen work orders right out of the gate and adding a few more for steel production and/or glass? Remember, you've got a couple of different sources of iron, you have to make pig iron first, and someone needs to keep the charcoal flowing (...and if there's some lignite it needs to take priority over pissing off the pointy-eared neighbors or running out of materials for making beds) I can blow right past twenty work orders without even trying. ...and that's before the various supply chains for textiles (DFHack's Tailor mod only handles making clothes, not making sure the materials are being produced), soap (which should be more important than it is for a bunch of subterranean alcoholics), and the various sets of armor and weapons I'm going to need to keep resupplying my 3-4 military squad geared up because 200 dwarves present will invariably begin making it rain pure goblinium.

For me, the manager is the first official position I assign and that's generally going to happen before the first caravan has a chance to arrive. ...and all this careful setting of limits means that when I have a noble whose demands for a better room become absurd or I have to hastily dig out and decorate the Guild of Flabbergasters or a Grand Temple for the worshippers of Squishy Thimbleton, I don't have to stress. I can and will just decorate them how I like and then slap in a few artifacts into cubbyholes protected by iron bars so they can't be stolen because there's always a little bit of everything left over for moody dwarves (and a shockingly long list of legendary craftsdwarves as a result) who just start cranking the darn things out (which leads to more goblinium whether you like it or not).

This isn't "going overboard". It's a combination of eliminating tedium and not trying to pretend all those dwarves don't have enough brain cells to rub together that they can't handle the simplest matter of keeping the larder stocked without starving to death. So yes I would absolutely and wholeheartedly love to have some collapsible sections in the work orders screen and would have already probably written it myself if the Lua were capable of touching it.

[AirToob]

What Dagmar said.

As a newbie I have yet to encounter the later stuff, but I have just received a sharp lesson in what happens if your hospital isn't properly staffed and equipped.

Making sure that the vital hospital supplies are always there is something I would hate to do manually - work orders take care of the chain that produces those supplies.

[TheSinKing]

Originally posted by Dagmar:

This isn't "going overboard". It's a combination of eliminating tedium and not trying to pretend all those dwarves don't have enough brain cells to rub together that they can't handle the simplest matter of keeping the larder stocked without starving to death. So yes I would absolutely and wholeheartedly love to have some collapsible sections in the work orders screen and would have already probably written it myself if the Lua were capable of touching it.

Could not agree more with you. Thanks for typing all that out by the way. You were able to explain, with clarity, an issue which I thought would have confused readers if I had attempted to do the same. It helps convey what I was trying to say as an example to players who have yet to utilise the massive range of work orders and the importance of the sequence of work orders as well. Something you cannot do neatly or quickly as is from the Manager work order panel or at all from the work order list in a workshop.

If organising was implemented everything could be done from a single window faster and more efficiently instead. Not to mention when you add a new order, In the Managers work order list, it will automatically send it to the bottom of the work order list. Requiring you to manually hand click the priority position every step of the way until you get it to the position in the work orders that will compliment the other orders ahead and behind it. Only until you let the game run a while you then realise a mistake was made in the order list. Now you have to not only sift through the orders to find the culprit but then modify or delete the order and do the whole thing again to get it in the right position. Hoping you don't miss-click and effect the order of something else in the process.

I genuinely feel sorry for anyone with troubles, such as dyslexia, trying to troubleshoot a list of work orders to make their fortress more accessible for their condition. Trying to manually manage resources is troublesome as is but for them this quality of life feature could decide if they were able to play and enjoy the game. And lets not forget if this was implemented it would reduce the number of clicks needed to do a given task as well. Something everyone would benefit from, not just players who might have a physical disability and find it taxing to playing a game requiring so much input to play.