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[Five chickens]

I recently discovered to my horror that assigning wheelbarrows to a stockpile limits the number of jobs it can assign.  When should I use wheelbarrows?  For what types of stockpiles?  And when and how many bins and/or barrels should I assign?  How big should I make my stockpiles?  How should I handle feeder stockpiles?

Please tell me all about how you handle your stockpiles!  Thanks in advance.

[Mobbstar]

I have linked to the relevant wiki pages for further reading.  I have marked the TLDR keywords bold.

Wheelbarrows generally slow hauling down.  Only 1-3 dwarves can haul, and they have to go get the wheelbarrow before they can walk towards the actual item.  However, wheelbarrows negate item weight, which means very heavy items can be hauled faster.  Thus, I recommend to only use wheelbarrows for hauling heavy stones and (filled) animal cages.

Barrels can contain several foodstuffs (including bags of seeds).  Similarly, bins can contain several small items (including raw materials and finished goods).  Both are useful because they fit a lot of items into small stockpiles and make gathering faster (because a single dwarf will pick up several items).  However, the bin/barrel will be "locked" while a dwarf tries to insert or take items (even if they are still miles away).  Thus, I recommend them whenever you want to save space and have few dwarves using them.  For example, leather comes in small stacks, and it usually gets produced by only one tannery and consumed by only one leatherworks.  Therefore leather stockpiles are ideal candidates for bins.  An example for when not to use bins, cups/mugs/goblets are frequently used by every dwarf to drink, so bins would be a bottleneck, lead to cancellation spam, and generally frustration.

Special caution must be taken when using the Quantum Stockpile exploit.  Read the wiki for a full list of potential problems.  If you want to exploit technical details, you must pay attention to technical details.

[A_Curious_Cat]

DFHack allows you to increase the total number of wheelbarrows a stockpile can have beyond the normal maximum.

[Five chickens]

Is there a way to quickly cycle through stockpiles?  Thank you for your answers so far.

[anewaname]

As you develop a fort, you find reasons set things up differently. So, maybe the elfs have arrived riding giant slugs and now there are 50 giant slug corpses (very heavy). You set up a refuse stockpile that only takes giant slug corpses and uses wheelbarrows, and remove giant slugs from the no-wheelbarrow refuse stockpiles.

You can also use bins to effectively collect ammo and thread. When there are metal bolts everywhere, set up about 4 binned 1-tile ammo stockpiles and use a macro to set each to only take metal bolts. After a month or two, it should be done so you "deactivate" the stockpiles by setting them to accept only from links (deactivating the stockpile avoids job cancellations). This works well for collecting large quantities of thread also.

[Salmeuk]

Is there a way to quickly cycle through stockpiles?  Thank you for your answers so far.

Yes, though with all UI techniques in DF it is not quite what you want. If you go into the 'R'ooms list, you will find all created stockpiles listed, under the extremely confusing "xxx stockpile #3" format, where the number is assigned in order of creation.

While it is true that wheelbarrows aren't useful for most items, they are a MUST for proper mason efficiency. By creating a feeder stone stockpile and assigning 3+ wheelbarrows, you can have a mason carving statues unimpeded by the need to haul those stones across half the fortress. This is actually a huge thing for early game efficiency - never haul wood or especially stone until you really, really have to. When you do, wheelbarrows can help with the stone, while there are a few tricks for making wood hauling less painful.

One rather subtle interaction in the hauling system is that when your dwarves finish tasks, they often take a few frames to 'think' about what to do next. Mostly, they return to their hauling, but during that thinking time they tend to wander around, and further away from the hauled material. This wastes time, and the conclusion is that limiting the number of hauling trips is waaay more important than hauling distances, assuming weight is not a factor... essentially, try to have your dwarves always carrying the materials as far as possible in that first collection trip. And if the item is heavy, be careful how you ask your dwarves to move it around - I have seen community fortresses ground to a halt after refactoring furniture stockpiles containing a large number of anvils or metal furniture, as the dwarves break their beards trying to move the ridiculously heavy objects.

Um, tl;dr: Less is More when it comes to stockpiles, since you are essentially giving your dwarves unavoidable homework that will almost certainly get in the way of your other projects.