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[Paul]

I know the seed bag horror has been brought up many times, and I'm quite amazed Toady hasn't corrected the issue yet. If the problem is it takes too much time to write a better bag handling code for seeds, heres a simple solution: turn it off. Make seeds just like any other food item, storeable in barrels. Simply take bags out of the equation.

If this was done seeds would act just like other food items. Namely they would ONLY be moved if there was a stockpile with room for them. Currently this can be accomplished by forbidding every single bag in the fortress, but this is really a pain - especially in processing plants to bags which requires the bags to be available.

Just make it an init option, just in case some people want to keep seed bags for some reason.

I'm not sure about other's opinions, but this tiny little tweak would be the #1 change for me - even over the big things like army arc. It would remove a nightmare that has plagued DF players since the beginning.

[Othob Rithol]

Yeah, I really don't want Toady to waste his time fixing this minor bug, but I do want the bug to go away. This sounds like a quick, dirty little fix that could just do it.

I mentioned this in another thread a week or so ago, where someone also suggested a reserve bag option similar to barrels/bins.

[Hyndis]

It seems bags aren't even needed at all for seed storage, they just get used up seemingly at random for no actual purpose. Hundreds of seeds can be stored directly in a barrel without any ill effects. Or these seeds can each be packed into a single bag, which is then stored in the barrel. Same number of seeds in the barrel, both accessible for planting just fine, the only difference is that in one scenario all of the bags get used up for some reason, and in the other scenario all of the bags are free for things like sand hauling.

[Paul]

Yep, bags aren't needed, they just get wasted.

They only store seeds directly in barrels when bags aren't available. I recently stored every one of my seeds from my fort in a single barrel as a test, accomplished by dumping all the seeds out of the bags and forbidding all the bags in the fortress, and then reclaiming them and letting them all be stored in the stockpile.

All I want is an option to make this behavior default, and get rid of the bag waste. It's just so annoying when I have to forbid all my bags and unforbid them one at a time while I slowly mill my plants one stack at a time and wait for the seeds to be hauled before unforbidding the next bag, and heaven forbid if dwarves eat some plump helmets while I'm trying to make glass. I've actually seen 5 different dwarves grab 5 different seeds from the dining hall and run them all across my fort to my glass furnace while I'm trying to refill bags with sand, and each seed got a bag. Then they grabbed those 5 bags and ran them back across the fortress to stuff them in my barrel. I had to forbid all my other seeds and cook the ones in the bags to reclaim the bags.

[Draco18s]

I can see it making a difference if:

A barrel can hold 100 seeds
A bag can hold 100 seeds
A barrel can hold 10 bags (with seeds in them).

[Impaler[WrG]]

How about bags hold 100 seeds and barrels don't hold bags at all, dwarfs will put seeds in the nearest stockpile that will hold seeds, if that stockpile can hold bags and is full (of seeds on the floor) then they appropriate bags to hold the seeds the same way they will use Bins to store other items more densely.  Once bags are present they always store things in a partially filled bag before bringing another bag to the stockpile.  Basically make it work just like the rest of the games storage.

And whats this silliness about "I really don't want Toady to waste his time fixing this minor bug", its minor in the sense its not causing the game to crash but it dose seriously compromise ones ability to play and that definitely should be fixed before new features are added.  Even if DF was only being tested internally then that might be acceptable  but a public release (I don't care he calls it Alpha, the game is released and carries a fan base that makes donations) needs to address bugs of this magnitude first.

[Paul]

Actually, 100 seeds IS the limit on both bags and barrels.

I counted up my seeds that I didn't cook and I had 99 when I assumed they could store all the seeds, but 100 is the limit.

And if you bag them you CAN have multiple bags of 100 in one barrel. I'm not sure the limit here but I just churned out a ton of seeds and stuffed 5 bags with about 100 seeds in each including a couple with a smaller amount into one barrel. Dumping the seeds and trying to store them separately fills 5 barrels with extra in a 6th. Presumably if you could actually get enough seeds you could fill a barrel with 100 bags of 100. I remember once having 100 bags with 1 seed each stuffed into a barrel after a long period of not micro managing the bag storage.

Personally I'd prefer to have 1 barrel per 100 seeds and make it so bags aren't used for seeds at all than the current seed bag nightmare. You don't really need such large numbers of seeds anyway, and even if for some reason you wanted 100 of each type of seed you could just have a one tile stockpile and barrel for each plant.

[Boatmurderer]

I don't mind the seeds being in bags ( i usually have a metric ton of leather, cloth, and silk to make more bags). What I want to see is a farmer picking up an entire BAG of seeds for planting, and planting all the seeds in the bag. It doesn't make sens for him to run to the bag, pull out ONE SEED, plant it, then run back to the bag for the next seed. The bag ain't that heavy, even when it's choc-a-bloc full.

[Paul]

Carrying bags might sound nice, but imagine the insane efficiency! Legendary growers would pick up a bag and just walk across the field and it'd all be planted, instead of: run get seed in 2 seconds, run to field in .5 second and stand there for 0.2 seconds, run off randomly to a meeting area for 10 seconds, suddenly decide he should plant another seed, repeat.

Dwarves just aren't ready for logical efficiency. They have too much food already, with that kind of efficiency one farmer could plant a 50x50 area in as much time as it currently takes to plant a 5x5 - imagine how much food you'd produce THEN.

[Techhead]

If you made multiple 7x7 large farms with seed stockpiles of the used seed(s) you could speed it up somewhat.
I get annoyed with <100 seeds being stored in multiple bags. Store item in bag jobs should not generate for empty bags if seed bags with extra room exist.

[Boatmurderer]

OH NOES! ALL T3H FOOD! It's Thanksgiving: The Apocalypse!

That's what roasts are for. Make a roast out of syrup, plump helmet, and unicorn meat. Then hock it to humans for 3 bins of cloth.

[Paul]

OH NOES! ALL T3H FOOD! It's Thanksgiving: The Apocalypse!

That's what roasts are for. Make a roast out of syrup, plump helmet, and unicorn meat. Then hock it to humans for 3 bins of cloth.

How does that solve the issue of bags being wasted for seed storage? If you're suggesting to produce more bags, I had an old fort with 1,000 (yes, a THOUSAND) bags used for seed storage, almost every one of which had 1 seed in it. Granted I had a lot of seeds, and cooking seeds would free bags pretty quickly, but as soon as I produced more seeds by brewing/milling/etc it would happen again. With more careful micro management this doesn't happen as much, but the issue is that it happens at all.

[Othob Rithol]

And whats this silliness about "I really don't want Toady to waste his time fixing this minor bug", its minor in the sense its not causing the game to crash but it dose seriously compromise ones ability to play and that definitely should be fixed before new features are added.  Even if DF was only being tested internally then that might be acceptable  but a public release (I don't care he calls it Alpha, the game is released and carries a fan base that makes donations) needs to address bugs of this magnitude first.

That "silliness" is called an opinion, and what follows is your demand.

Yeah it's a bug. Yeah it's annoying. Yeah it needs to be fixed (eventually).

No, a donation does not require performance. No, Toady has no obligation what-so-ever to his fans. No, the sky is in fact, not falling.

Seriously, which is better:

A - Toady spends five hours digging through code, becomes annoyed, has to stop and take a break, and finally finds out why it happens. He then spends three hours writing an innovative, dynamic system to optimize bag handling.

B - Toady spends an hour making an init switch to disable the use of bags for seed storage, then spends 7 hours working on the the current arc, as well as the remainder of the 60 Requirements, 150 Power Goals, and 383 Bloats.

[Pickerel]

bags aren't required for seed storage, and if you do it right, you can get your seeds stored properly: I designate a single stockpile, of 4-6 squares, and set it to seeds only.  All other food piles have seeds off.  Since the dwarves are storing in this limited area, they will tend to put all seeds into the right place, rather then into the first bag at hand.

[Paul]

bags aren't required for seed storage, and if you do it right, you can get your seeds stored properly: I designate a single stockpile, of 4-6 squares, and set it to seeds only.  All other food piles have seeds off.  Since the dwarves are storing in this limited area, they will tend to put all seeds into the right place, rather then into the first bag at hand.

I have a workaround too: I keep one bag for every seed type that will be used in that workshop on top of the workshop. That way the seeds are stored right there. A bag for every brewable plant seed on top of the still, bags for plants processable in farmers workshop on top of it, etc. The problem comes when dwarves eat plants and produce seeds in other areas, like dining rooms. Or when dwarves grab a seed to plant and then abandon, or start a task like processing to bag and then stop while other seeds are yet to be moved to the seed bag - they'll drop seeds in 10 different bags on one spot even though they are all on the same tile and thus equally accessible. I have to constantly dump seeds out of bags due to these issues.

The fact that painstaking workarounds exist to avoid an issue does not mean it's not a problem that should be fixed.

Another big issue is you have a massive backlog of moving seeds around even if you're storing them directly on top of the workshop in a bag, and your food haulers may let other things rot while they run and move a seed to a bag, dance around the meeting halls, run back and move another to the bag, etc.

If seeds were treated like other items you could simply turn off their storage and let them stay in the still for instance. This way you could just put a still beside a farm plot and use seeds from the still without a horde of haulers having to rush in and move the seed inside the bag that they're laying beside already every time your brewer makes a barrel of wine. The only way this is currently accomplished is by forbidding all the bags (I usually forbid all my bags while brewing, but eventually I have to store the seeds since I can't make glass or process plants while they're sitting there).

It's got so bad that I have a stockpile of 180 seeds of every type dumped in a corner and forbidden so that I only produce up to 20 extra seeds and don't get the ridiculous overflow. I can plant 20 seeds and then start brewing the 90 or so plants from them and as soon as the first few stacks make 20 seeds I can ignore the nightmare for the rest.