open discussion toward a "smarter manager"

[ab9rf]

I'm opening this because of persistent dissatisfaction with the work order system in the game.

Here are a number of limitations of the in-game system that I constantly rub against irritatingly:

• The manager allows the same raw resources to be allocated to more than one job.
• The conditions available often fail to reflect what jobs actually use. For example, each "brew plant" jobs consumes a stack of plants, but the only available controlling condition is the number of brewable plants without regard to how they are stacked. Similarly, a "cook meal" job will create a stack of meals of highly variable size.
• There is no way to filter based on quality levels, wear levels, or "size" of items
• Some jobs are very difficult to come up with reasonable conditions for the automation of

The general idea that I have in mind is to extend the basic concept of tailor to be a broader general "smart manager": when certain conditions are met, the "smart manager" will issue work orders, based on the player's specification, that will do the things that I'm currently doing repetitively by hand in my current forts.

For example: I have a stockpile that holds 121 stacks of prepared meals intended for trade. I would like this stockpile to be kept full of prepared meals, and so I periodically count how many spaces are free and issue a "prepare lavish meal" order with as many repetitions as there are spaces free. (This used to be automatable with stockflow but this tool hasn't been ported yet.)

Another example: for every two flux, two iron bars, and two charcoal I have, I would like to spawn one "make pig iron bar" and one "make steel bar" order, provided that I don't already have "too much" steel. There are ways to do this with the vanilla work order system, but all of those approaches have limitations (such as only producing a maximum of two bars of steel per day, or having to have more than two of each input to start the process, or having to have a complex set of nested orders to scale up production with supply).

There are any number of other things that I do in maintaining a fort that are a purely mechanical business of "count up how many of some thing there are and then issue a job order based on how many things I counted" that I would like to automate. This discussion is intended to be a repository for such activities that I, and others, observe in their game play, with goal of creating a tool that can perform such mechanical tasks on behalf of the player.

[ab9rf]

Brewing drinks:

I would like to be able to fill shortfalls of drink using specified materials according to a preference order, either statically determined or based on aggregated resident unit preferences, based on available stock. Thus, when there is less drink than "desired", the manager should count the number of drinks needed, the stock available to make drinks, and issue orders as appropriate.

Note that while the current game interface does not provide a means to limit a "brew drink" order to a specific plant (or fruit), the game itself does support specifying a specific material in the work order's job item filter that will be copied to the job item filter in the job created, which means it is possible to say "brew three batches of dwarven wine" and get exactly that. But even if we don't want to expose this hidden functionality, there is also the option to choose among "brew drink from fruit" and "brew drink from plant" (and possibly even "make mead") to satisfy drink demand.

[ab9rf]

Prepared meals:

Like many players, I generally make prepared meals for export, which maens I generally want to make as many prepared meals as I have room to store, in order to sell the excess to trade caravans. The way I currently do this is to set aside a storeroom for prepared meals, periodically count how many squares in that storeroom are free, and then order as many lavish meals as there is room for in that storeroom. (Historically, I have explicitly forbidden barrels in this storeroom because having storing food in barrels makes them potentially unsellable to elves, but more importantly prevents stack splitting on sale, which was possible in v47 but not in v50.)

It is probably possible to set up work orders to make meals with specific ingredients, but I haven't tested whether this actually works. If it does, being able to plan meals to maximize meal value or to provide meals that have ingredients preferred by the fortress population would also be ideas worth exploring here.

[ab9rf]

Bags:

Most applications that use bags are agnostic as to the type of bag. It would make sense for a demand for bags to generically request a bag of whatever type can be made based on what materials are available.