Without seeing the setup in front of me (and assuming you can get anyone to do anything, might be worth mass-assigning the needed skills to them), I'd suggest setting up a kitchen or three to be built (if you haven't already) and setting a full set (or mayb a repeated job, or if you can possibly wait for the manager, a Job Manager set of (30) or so) to "Make meal" (of whatever kind, lowest quality might be quicker to set up/test).
Make sure the kitchen setting (Z-Menu) dissallows seeds and drinks from cooking (while you're there, you can check that you
do have other things that you can cook).
That's for food. If you're running out of raw ingredients you'll get cancellation spam (recurring, if it's via Job Manager, cancelled and moved onto the next (possibly-to-be-cancelled) instance if you're doing it directly at the workshop), which should alert you to the lack of cookable items, then investigate your stocks. (Unless you have crops growing, don't re-enable
all seeds for cooking (and, if you do, disable it as soon as the free-seeds are cooked, before the next crops are gathered for processing). Or {forbid} a small selection that you know you can use to replant once the current emergency is over.
For drink, you've now stopped alcoholic drinks from being cooked, so that'll not absorb those, but you obviously don't have
any water-source. But build breweries (or use your existing one(s), or
add to your existing one(s)...) and assign dwarves to Brewing, then by one or other method spam "brew" jobs, which again will reveal if you're lacking relevant source materials.
When you hit that limit (assuming you've not died for some other silly reason, before then, of a kind I could not immediately guess, although military dwarves taking bites out of every single meal and then dropping them, unusable by anyone else, is one thing to look out for) you should then have more than enough food for everyone to gorge themselves and you can retask the brewers and/or cookers to whatever jobs are needed to replenish supplies. If you had immediately hit the "task unfulfilled" status without creating anything new then start looking at why your supposed cookable stuff either isn't there or isn't available, and
that will probably be the reason for your problem.
But it's easier to solve an issue of starvation prior to anyone starving. I (try to) check the Health screen of the Z-Menu for starvation/thirst (also with grazing animals, and sometimes set
them to slaughter if I don't think I can pull them back from the brink, but that doesn't work for hungry/thirsty dwarves...
) and usually find a slight hunger/thirst indicates something (often bad burrow-restriction, although they tend to 'break out' and deal with the problem themselves when they're more desperate, so that's probably not your problem) which I can then investigate. Usually it's just that it's time that I re-do a brewing job that I'd stopped (or had stopped) due to using up every single barrel/pot available, leaving me with a healthy amount of drink at the time, but it's now depleted down to the point that there's a queue to sip from the remaining barrels.
(FYI, my forum name reflects the fact that I always used to be terrible at food production. The number of times I used to see "Urist McHunter cancels hunting: Hunting vermin", or similar, it's not funny. I'm not saying I'm perfect at it now, but I've had a
lot more practice. And I now don't even use hunters/fishermen, if I can help it!)
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Topic: Thirsty/Hungry? (Read 437 times)