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[kurisukun]

Okay, so I set up my Fortress to have 3 food stockpiles.

1 for seeds
1 for processable plants
1 for Drinks and Prepared meals.


the problem is with the 2nd one.

I disable seeds, drinks, prepared meals, Lye, dyes, venoms, and bonemeal.  It works fine... for a time.  But at some point the dwarves stop storing the plants in barrells, resulting in 3-10 barrels lined up, and then a BUNCH of plants.

The barrels are all full of plants and meat, however a new barrel is never added to the stockpile, so the dwarves never put the items into a barrel, filling up the stockpile very quickly.

Removing the stockpile and re-adding the stockpile with the same settings does not fix the problem.

Removing the stockpile, adding a generic food stockpile, waiting for the dwarves to barrel all the plants, and then changing the settings back to the desired settings fixes the problem... temporarily.  It appears to be mainly a problem when dwarves take barrels out of order (like, the 2nd barrel in a row is emptied, and then taken away)  but that is just an observation of what could be the problem.



Yes, I did have barrels availble.  They where in a barrel stockpile (Which I removed, to see if that would fix the problem, and it did not)   And yes, it was set up to use all the barrels it  could (152 in this particular example, where there where only 5 barrels in the stockpile at time of problem)

I have caused this to happen twice in separate games in separate regions, so you should have no problem re-producing.

I can post a save as well, if you think it will help.

[Kagus]

Okay, so you had barrels on hand and the stockpile was set to accept the maximum amount of barrels.  The stockpile-screen option for reserved barrels was 0 or some other low number, correct?  Because that will save a number of barrels to only be used in workshops.

Check the other barrels.  If you find an empty barrel that says something like "Tower-cap barrel <#32>", it's dead and can't be used for anything.  You need barrels without the number after it.

But I doubt that's the case, as it's relatively rare...

Uhh...  I'm not sure what the job is for hauling empty barrels to stockpiles, but do you have enough idle haulers ready to do something like that?  Because if it's not handled by food hauling and you have a ton of dedicated food haulers, there's a chance that the food haulers will fill up the place before the furniture haulers (or whatever it is) can deposit a barrel.

But that's probably not it, since I've seen dwarves dump bins in occupied stockpile space, and barrels should work in roughly the same way...

Well, I don't know.

[eerr]

the barrels may already have jobs to go to the other food stockpiles, or be moved to another furniture stockpile
you can try cooking the plants to conserve space/reduce rotting

[kurisukun]

hrm...

funnily enough, after those 5 dwarves sat around for a season idling, and I got some more migrants, everyone figured out what they where supposed to be doing and started barrelling the plants again.

Guess I was just impatient..  ><

[yggiz]

hrm...

funnily enough, after those 5 dwarves sat around for a season idling, and I got some more migrants, everyone figured out what they where supposed to be doing and started barrelling the plants again.

Guess I was just impatient..  ><

This happens with other jobs too. A great example is dumping. You will flag one hundred or so items for dumping, and sometimes there will be a lag between the dwarves finishing a handful of them, before the new dump jobs are assigned and can be taken. You can remove the dump flag, and reapply it, it seems to jumpstart the little buggers grabbing the jobs.

Next time this happens, look for store item in barrel jobs, I have seen my guys fill a stockpile without barrels, then take each plant and go bring it to store in a barrel on the other side of the fortress, then lug the new plant barrel to the stockpile, as it should be.

[Forumsdwarf]

You've discovered a phenomenon I call "storage surge latency".

Some stockpiles shrink and grow in surges, raw food in particular.

A raw food surge happens when the farmers harvest and store plants faster than the haulers can bring in barrels, and as far as I'm concerned it's perfectly normal.  If you have enough food processors and cooks, the surge will be cashed out in fairly short order.  Left unmanaged storage surge will lead to some average number of barrels on the pile between 0 and maximum surge volume.  The barrel situation is less important than the overall storage situation.

It is critical to your operation to have enough stockpile space to handle a surge of harvesting.  You can reserve barrels in your raw plant stockpile or dig more stockpile space.  What you don't want is to lack surge capacity, as that will mean plants go unharvested and eventually wilt.

I go with a fixed stockpile size with a barrel reserve I adjust as needed.  I just eyeball the stockpiles every once in a while, and if it looks like harvest surges are pushing capacity over ~75% I reserve a couple more barrels.
Another advantage of not having "enough" barrels is that you can see the plants on the pile, which makes it way easier to know when to process quarry bushes.
I run a continuous series of 150-180 "Process Plant" orders in the Manager so reeds and tails are automatically processed into thread, but when I see quarry bushes on the pile I know to reset the farmer shops to process to bags.  (Putting bag orders in the Manager interferes with thread orders.)

Ballooning raw plant stockpiles can also be a symptom that your back-end isn't keeping up with your planters.  I actually wouldn't mind that situation at all were it not for seeds lost to wilting.  I've never actually suffered a seed shortage due to overgrowing, but then I've never operated in that condition longer than a year, either.

Anyway the takeaway from this is "manage the surge".  Barrels are tools; handling the peaks is the goal.  A barrel that only holds a plant for a few frames is a barrel wasted.