I haven’t seen a Dwarf Fortress thread in ages, and wasn’t sure if anyone around here was still playing it. I started up again a few weeks ago. The version I had was a few years old, so I downloaded the latest Lazy Newb Pack, which I see now has DFHack included. I’ve never played DF with DFHack and it’s taking some getting used to.
One thing I can’t figure out is the “autolabor” function. The way I understand it, this sort of replaces “Dwarf Therapist”, in that you don’t have to specifically assign a skill to a dwarf before they can do a task. Autolabor will just assign any available dwarf to do a task that needs to be done.
The problem I’m having with autolabor is, there doesn’t seem to be any particular logic in how it assigns tasks. Here’s a situation I have run into for example. On embark I have among my dwarves two miners, a woodcutter, and an herbalist. I designate an area for my miners to start digging, I designate some trees for my woodcutter to start cutting, and I designate an area for my herbalist to start gathering plants. When I unpause, all my dwarves will start gathering plants. When the plant gathering is done, one of my miners may start cutting trees instead of mining, while my mason or farmer starts mining.
I like the idea of not having to assign skills to specific dwarves to get work done, but I’d also like to have my skilled dwarves doing the jobs they have the skills for, rather than just some random dwarf. I suppose when I embark I could have seven dwarves with no skills and just let them all do whatever, but then it takes forever for unskilled dwarves to do the tasks they’re assigned to (especially mining). There’s got to be a way to make this work, but I haven’t figured it out.
Of course this thread doesn’t have to be just about autolabor. All DF related discussion is welcome.