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[darkpatriot]

It seems that every time one of my dwarves gets a give water command they go get a brand new bucket, full it up, give one unit of water to a dwarf, then drop the bucket with 9 units of water on the ground and leave it there forever never touching it again.

I have tried all sorts of combinations of ordering dumpings(I've tried garbage zones that are on the ground and on cliff) and forbidings/reclaimings of both the water in the buckets and the buckets.  I have been able to get them to dump the bucket but the water remains inside of them. I cannot get the dwarves to empty the buckets.  Is this a bug or is there some special way to get dwarves to do this.

[PatrikLundell]

It's sort of buggish. As far as I know, the only method is to loo'k' at the bucket, enter the water inside, and 'd'ump that. You can also order exactly the same thing by going to the Stock screen, select liquids/water, and dump all water (provided you don't have water you actually want to use in mine carts and other buckets). Eventually some dorf should empty the buckets, and probably haul them to a stockpile as well.
Since I have yet to get a hang of the new job priority system (none of the tasks I tried seem to be subject to priority), I don't know if that can be used to speed things up.

[darkpatriot]

Ordering the water dumped, both by looking at the water in the bucket and by ordering it dumped from the stockpile screen, was the first thing I tried.  That is how I assumed it should work.  The water never got dumped.  Since then I have tried every combination of ordering dumpings, forbidding, and reclaiming both the bucket and the water inside that I could think of; with both ground level garbage dumps as well as garbage dumps next to a cliff.

Nothing I have tried has gotten any dwarf to empty any bucket of water.  When searching on google for any bug reports or threads on the issue I had come across a possibly related bug (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=4230) which states one possible work around.  It stated that if you designate a bucket to be taken to a trade depot while the contents inside are forbidden, it will cause the dwarf who takes it to empty the forbidden item onto the ground before taking the bucket to the trade depot.  I haven't been able to try that though because I am currently playing a sealed in isolationist fortress which doesn't have a trade depot and I don't currently feel like building a useless trade depot just for the purpose of trying to empty 4 buckets of water.

I don't know if it is related but I have noticed that things being inside containers is pretty buggy in general.  Stuff being in bins or barrels seems to cause all sorts of problems with jobs getting canceled if they need that stuff in bins or barrels.  Especially if stuff is moved around since the job order was placed at the work shop.  Usually a combination of re-ordering the job, forbidding and reclaiming, re-designating an item as needing to be melted, or having it dumped and then reclaimed is eventually able to fix the issue but it is a pain in the butt.

[Eldin00]

Haven't tried this, but if you forbid the water then order the bucket dumped, it seems that could reasonably work like the depot trick you mention.

[darkpatriot]

Just gave it a try, sadly didn't work   They dumped the buckets with the water still inside them.

I also just tried designating a pond without access to any other water sources in hopes they would try and fill it with the buckets with water in them.  That also didn't work.  A dwarf tried to do the fill the pond job but he canceled shortly after due to no access to a water source.

Edit:  Did just try something else that did work though.  If you forbid every available bucket except for the almost full buckets, and then designate a pond somewhere they will use the partly filled bucket as normal to try and fill the pond.  They will go fill it at a water source and then dump it in a pond, emptying it of the water inside.  Forbid that bucket once it is empty and another dwarf will do the same with one of the other partly full buckets.

[PatrikLundell]

Thanks for sharing your useful research!

I can also mention that you can only order things taken to the trade depot while a caravan is present (from the time they enter the map until they start to pack up), so building a useless depot would be totally useless indeed.

Another way to deal with the bucket issue is to over produce buckets, but if you're sealed you may have a limited wood supply, especially before the caverns have been secured.

One warning concerning the pond trick, though: I had the problem that pond filling buckets got destroyed by fire snakes, and that resulted in pond filling cancellation spams about lost or destroyed buckets: it seemed a bucket was allocated for the filling of the pond square, and if was just descheduled rather than getting a new bucket allocated on failure. If you suffer the same after forbidding the bucket, you can remove the pond designation and then recreate it to clear the spamming by correctly allocating an available bucket.