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[Ariosto]

For some reason in this particular game I'm playing now, my Dwarves are refusing to eat the prepared meals I have in the Dining Hall and instead are going right for the raw ingredients in the kitchen immediately above, and I'm not sure why as I've not experienced this in previous Fortresses. The only solutions I've seen proposed elsewhere on the 'Net are to move the Kitchen further away (which judging on responses to that achieved only mixed success), or to forbid each individual food item; however I'm worried about using forbid given, well, I'd expect it to forbid ALL interaction with those food items, that they won't even be cooked, milled, and so on.

There isn't any mention of this on the wiki, so I'm curious if this has happened to anyone else and if they've managed to develop any solutions, or if my game is just bugged.

[PatrikLundell]

There are two common reasons for dorfs to steal the raw ingredients rather than eat the prepared meals:
1. The raw stuff is closer (as the dorf digs) to where the dorf happens to be when deciding to grab a bite.
2. The raw stuff is something the dorf actually has a preference for, which can cause a dorf to go out of the way to fetch it. For some reason prepared meals containing favorite ingredients either don't attract dorfs, of have a very weak attraction.

Note that moving stockpiles out of the way has a limited effect, as the haulers get hungry too...

[Mort Stroodle]

In my experience, the best solution is to stockpile the raw ingredients so that you have to walk past the prepared meals to reach the raw ingredients. As long as the raw food is further from the dwarves than the prepared food, they should go for the prepared food. The dwarves in your kitchen area might get hungry while they're cooking, causing them to grab raw food, but everyone else should always be closer to your prepared food. It should look like this:


R: Raw food stockpile, Kitchens, etc
P: Prepared food stockpile
D: Dining Hall
S: Stairwell
. : Walls

Top-down view

Code: [Select]

...................
.RRRR.PPPP.DDDD.SS.
.RRRRRPPPPDDDDDDSS.
.RRRR.PPPP.DDDD.SS.
...................

A couple of caveats: You'll have to include ALL raw food in your fort behind a prepared food stockpile like this if you don't want dwarves to eat it raw. This includes butchered animal meat as well as edible plants. If you want to keep dwarves from having to haul a bunch of crap around, that means putting your raw food, your farms, your plant stockpiles, your brewers, your animal corpse stockpiles, your butchery, maybe a bone carving workshop, and your fishery all behind that prepared food stockpile. This also increases the number of dwarves who are going to be near raw food at any given time, increasing the chance that THOSE dwarves will eat raw food. Ultimately some jobs are just going to be near raw food any way you do things. If you plan around this pathing though, you can makes sure that all the dwarves who don't have to be near raw food avoid it.

Even if you don't go all-in, putting your raw food stockpiles behind the prepared food stockpiles should drastically reduce the number of dwarves eating raw food.

[PatrikLundell]

Pathing has nothing to do with it, as item selection is based on geometric proximity (i.e. as the dorf digs). This means that apart from keeping raw stuff further away from prepared stuff on the same level, you also have to do the same for all other levels, effectively removing a large part of the map from use.

[anewaname]

I apply what Mort Stroodle posted by putting the kitchen and raw foods off to the side, but also use a distribution network. The main cooked food stockpile gives to small cooked food stockpiles located throughout the fortress. Booze distribution is set up the same.

[Saiko Kila]

Moving the raw ingredients off-centre is a good solution. If the main activity (like taverns and workshops) are close to the central axis of the fortress, putting the prepared foods closer to the axis, and the raw ingredients further, helps tremendously with that problem. It's impossible to prevent eating raw ingredients totally (there is always someone who will grab that kidney to eat instead of hauling from butcher's to the stockpile), but I observe like 9 to 1 ratio of roast-to-raw eaters.

I also move the farms slightly off, so they don't eat plump helmets. Just put it somewhere where you don't want to expand too much (including below), like close to the corner or something. I also utilise stockpiles of roasts near centres of activity (tavern, dining room,) and close to the "outposts", if I expect a significant number of dwarves to hang around there for long. It's not worth doing for a couple of miners, though.

[Ariosto]

Alright, thanks everyone, that explains quite a bit. If that is the case then I'm going to have to restore an older save for the Fort where I was in the midst of digging the Dining Hall and Kitchens. That also would allow me to rectify a number of other structural mistakes I made.

As anewaname suggested I did have a distribution network of sorts set up where I had food stockpiles set up in Apartment blocks, but that was specifically for Alcohol; it'd be easy enough for me to place a couple more and put meals there, which would in turn be closer then the raw food in every respect, unless they went to the Temples.

[Bumber]

What if you surrounded the raw stockpiles with prepared meal stockpiles, including on the z-level above and below?

[Fedor]

What if you surrounded the raw stockpiles with prepared meal stockpiles, including on the z-level above and below?

That would work. You'd need to keep a lot of prepared meals on hand to make sure that all stockpiles had enough to share.

It would almost always be sufficient to surround it on the same z-level, as the areal extent of the raw food stockpile is usually very small compared to the extent of a z-level.