Mass moving of goods to trade depot
How do I move a massive amount of goods from my stockpiles to the trade depot? I've set it up so that my craftsdwarf does absolutely nothing but produce stone crafts, and now I have an obscene amount of the stuff I need to get rid of.
I pull up the "move goods to/from depot" screen, but I still have to manually tag each one to be moved. Is there any faster way to do this?
If you have bins, your craftsdwarves will put their products in storage, rather than storing them one by one.
If you mark the bin as available for trade, all of its contents will then come along for the ride. This should reduce the number of items you have to tag by 90% or so.
If you use DFHack, there's a plugin I've written that lets you marke selected stockpiles such that whenever traders are around, every item in those stockpiles get marked for moving to the depot: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=124523.0
I also have plugins to make bulk trading easier.
To speed up moving goods to the Trading Depot, I often build a second storage area near the Trade Depot that the dwarves move crafts to from a first storage area near the workshop. Then your craft dwarf doesn't have to walk far to store his creations and your labor dwarves are busy "giving goods" to the trading storage area. Don't forget to deselect certain goods (like crutches, splints, ropes, and chains) from the storage area that you don't want to trade.
Bins are an amazing help too, and a good use of your tin and lead once you get metallurgy up and running. But that does't help with selecting goods to trade. I don't like to sell my bins so I still have to select each good individually.