Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[PhilD]

I have a problem keeping a steady supply of drinks for my dwarves. I have plenty of brewable stuff stored, thanks to more farming space and capacity than I can really use, but the problem is, my barrels fill up faster than I can make them.

Is there a way of giving the still "priority" for the barrels over other uses? Overproducing barrels doesn't seem to be a solution either, because wood isn't plentiful enough, and there are other things that I have real need of wood for.

Basically, what I'd need (and this would help in other situations) is the ability to designate flows of goods, like "stuff from this workshop goes to that stockpile" and "only use stuff from this stockpile for this kind of usage"...

[Zaratustra]

To ameliorate the effect, make some bags, that can be used to store the seeds and free some barrels. Prepared food usually stands outside barrels too, but dwarves won't eat it, so there you have it.

[AlStar]

Also, if you're up to the lava, make barrels out of metal. Sure, those silver and gold barrels may be showy, but they do a great job of holding booze and whatnot.

[bbb]

prepared food is odd..
i've seen prepared food barrels.. and at the same time i've seen prepared food just sitting there on the floor for no reason.

[PhilD]

I'm up to lava, but you need steel for magma furnaces, right? I've yet to find iron ore...  

[GrimmSweeper]

120 dwarves drink entirely too much beer. I had  the Bookkeeper noble knock heads with the human trade rep a previous year in asking--of the highest priority, of course--for all the beer that can be brought. The next year the humans ONLY brought barrels of beer and wine and generally alcoholic spirits. I had to scramble a bit to get enough goods to buy all their stock.

I ended up with maybe 434 units. By the beginning of winter, that was all drunk. Seeing as how alcohol was very scarce before this point, I think my dwarves descended on the stockpile with a collective YUM. At least two or three people were poppin' out for a cuppa beer every minute.

I was surprised they were still able to walk properly by the end.

[MikeWulf]

These are dwarves you are talking about. Totally different chemcial and biological makeup.

[Slartibartfast]

Just make some more, the still is there for a reason, so are plump helmets.

[Nakar]

Part of the issue, I think, is that dwarf drinking routines are pretty simple. If there's beer, they drink it. If there isn't, they go to the nearest well. If the well is inaccessible or in use, they stew for a bit and then go to a body of water.

The problem is that dwarves need a lot of drink, but they only need alcohol periodically. If their behavior reflected this (one alcoholic beverage every 2-3 drinks of water), stores of booze wouldn't disappear as fast as they do. However, the LIQUOR ABOVE ALL! priority system means dwarves will deplete your stocks far faster than you can possibly maintain them unless (and until) you have an enormous farming complex and one or more permanent distillers.

This isn't Suggestions, but I really wish dwarves would at least go get water if it's just a thirst issue and not a "losing my buzz" issue. This is especially true after I rescued a stranded miner from the banks of the lava river (he installed a floodgate... from the wrong side) at great risk and effort and steel costs, only to have the moron bypass the well RIGHT NEXT TO THE LAVA FORGE AREA and die of thirst en route to the food stockpile, because he wouldn't drink water if booze existed anywhere on the map.

It's silly, and running out of alcohol every year is pretty much an inevitability until dwarves learn some degree of moderation or common thirst-quench sense.

[GrimmSweeper]

Well, if I have an over-abundance of Plump Helmets (and other forms of brewable farmed plants), wouldn't you agree I would have a LACK of barrels to put beer in?  

At one point I stopped farming for two or three seasons just so I had barrels to use. They eat a lot slower than they drink, so an appreciable stockpile didn't occur until halfway through not farming.

To keep up with the demand of beer, I would have to have 3 or 4 stills running non-stop; 6 or 7 if they take breaks in between (as they're want to do, considering the alcohol). It really isn't something I consider viable at the moment, so I tend to build a still or two, flip it's job on Repeat and let it run until all barrels are full with whatever.

[bbb]

drinking... makes more sense for the hunters/soldiers/anyone outdoors/next to river to drink out of the river rather than going to the well.. or even worse.. food pile for the booze. it's rather silly to have hunters sleep in the open air but have to leg it all the way back just for a drink or a bite.

.. btw.. can they fill waterbags with booze? would be useful if it doesn't take a decade to do so.

[Slartibartfast]

I wonder of the amount of booze available affects the chances of quenching thirst in a well instead of the booze barrel (), because I've found that 20 units of drink last longer than 20 units of drink out of 40 available (just example numbers), even with the same amount of dwarves.
It may just be me not really paying attention to the passing of time (you expect me to notice time pass while playing DF? P , but it might be true (especially as I often keep my booze levels just slightly above the 0)

[RPB]

My long-term method of booze production: put up several lava smelters ASAP and set them on repeat orders to make metal bars out of everything, then set up several lava forges and set one of them on repeat orders for brass/copper/bronze/tin barrels. Then I set up several stills around the fortress and set them all on repeat orders to brew (I have both a farming area next to the river and an aqueduct to make a farming area across the chasm, so there's brewable food growing at both ends of the fortress to cut down on haul time when brewing). That way I get booze available all throughout the fortress. And more importantly it's mostly automated, although every now and then I run out of things to brew during winter (I use a lot of cooked food so this isn't a starvation situation).

As for drinking from wells instead of booze... I think each barrel can only be used by 1 dwarf at a time, so if you have 2 barrels with a bit of booze in each one and you have 3 thirsty dwarves, one of them will go drink from a well. This might not be such a bad plan for stretching out alcohol since dwarves only need alcohol occassionally, but I don't know how easy it would be to keep your booze production at the right level without having to micromanage it a lot.

[Captain_Action]

I've noticed the dwarves preferring the brew instead of the well.

I have discovered a nice trick to getting the most out your barrels. Get an experinced brewer! He can fill barrels to a higher amount. (Or is it that he brews a more powerful drink?)

With a proficient Brewer, I've gotten 15 and 25 drink barrels. He does haul plump helmets by the arm load (3 to 5). So having your brewer run 24 hours, 7 days a week brewing a single helmet, pod, wheat, or tail is not time effective. Wait until you got 5 or so then brew!

[Garthor]

Barrels with more brew in them aren't a result of a better brewer, they're a result of better farmers.  Brewers will only take one stack of plants to brew, and turn it into 5 brew per plant.  With better farmers, you get bigger stacks of plants, so more brew into the barrels.

Prepared meals follow the same vein: your cook will grab two, three, or four stacks of food to cook.  Thus, you can get some insanely large meals.  A lavish meal composed entirely of syrup might have up to 80 units of prepared food.  The thing to keep in mind is that the prepared food won't be put into a barrel if there are more than 10 units of it, because that's the capacity of food in a barrel.

So, my suggestion: prepare large meals to save barrels, fertilize your fields, get better farmers, and dedicate Pig Tails to brewing, which seem to have higher yields than Plump Helmets.