47 – Stocking some piles, part 3

I delayed the stone stockpiles video a little because it was not that interesting, especially after two posts about stockpiles. Post 43 gave the general final design and rules for stockpiles, using wood as example, while post 44 detailed food stockpiles and optimizations for small or light objects. Stone stockpiles are the same as wood stockpiles.

With one important caveat. Wood, food and other resources are what I call rare resources. For rare resources automatic hauling is desired. If a new resource is lying about and there is a free stockpile for it, a low priority hauling task will be added. But this would not work for stone. Stone is abundant. Virtually the entire map is made from stone cells. Every time you dig you get new stone resources. If stone hauling is automatic as in the case of rare resources, every time you dig you would add a hauling task if a stockpile is available. Dwarves would spend most of their time hauling stone and it would be impossible to maintain a free stone stockpile for some particular purpose.

To compensate the abundance of stone, stone hauling is not automatic. Digging through stone will leave stone boulders that are not scheduled for hauling. I have defined a new action that will allow you to manually designate stones for hauling. This option is called "Haul Boulders" and it is an option under floor/channel actions:

Stones are probably the only exception for automatic hauling. Ore may be the second exception, but I need to decide first the exact rarity of ore.

Another consequence of their special status is that boulders lying on the floor that do not have a manual hauling task enabled will not be considered for building operations that use stone. For such task only marked stones or stones that are already in stockpiles will be considered. This actually turns out to be a nice feature, since you will be able to easily choose specific stone. Maybe you want your building to use the same stone or form a pattern out of different colors. In the future, a menu based system will be introduced to fine tune your selection.