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[Gus Smedstad]

This probably falls under the category of Things You Don't Need To Do.

Early on, food and booze production are pretty important.  The very first thing I do after embark is set up a way to flood an underground cavern and drain it so I can plant plump helmets.  But fairly quickly, by the end of the second year at most, I'm absolutely overflowing in food.  So far as I can tell, that's all you really need to do.  No need to mess with other crops, surface crops, milling, or cooking.  Just mushrooms to eat and ferment.

Still, I try for a more sophisticated food system when I can afford it, and it probably contributes in some hard-to-measure way to dwarf happiness, since I've seen "ate a great / decadent meal recently" often enough.

The problem, to my mind, is that there's no good solution to producing "balanced" meals.  Your cook grabs whatever is closest.  If you put a stockpile that allows anything cookable nearby, pretty soon it's completely overrun with plump helmets and strawberries.  I feel that if I'm going to go through the effort of milling flour, grinding sugar, making syrup, and rendering tallow, all that stuff should be used in roughly equal proportions in my meals.  Nor do I want to give up on simple plants entirely - it seems there's always a surplus of those once things are rolling, and it annoys me to think that all of them are rotting in the fields, never to be eaten.  Brewed maybe, but not eaten.

Since in a economy with a significant surplus, mixed-type storage piles tend to fill with whatever you have the most of, to the exclusion of all else, I wanted to set up a system where my kitchen was precisely the same distance from several different ingredient piles.  I ended up with this.



That may seem excessive for a single kitchen, but the idea is that this is my entire raw food stock, excepting local stocks for the stills.  If I want multiple kitchens, I can stack them vertically above or below this one, but generally one is plenty even for a fort full of hungry dwarves.  Whenever possible, I try and set it up so the dwarves eat cooked food only, but some still insist on raiding the pantry for horse haunches and mushrooms.

 - Gus

[melomel]

Well, at least your fort doesn't seem to be awash in floods of blood and ichor?  (My entire map is covered with blood.  The dorfs don't seem to mind it; I don't see unhappy thoughts about being dirty, just happy thoughts about having bathed/cleaned.  Win?)

I stuck the seed/raw meat stockpiles behind the prepped meals stockpiles, and it seems to work.  Somewhat.   If nothing else, having a couple skilled cooks Prepare Lavish Meal/R is at least good for trading.

I'm still in apoplexy trying to get the dorfs to sleep in their own rooms.

[Hyperturtle]

well MY problem is that I had huge food stockpile areas, allowing any types.  With trading, I had over 10000 units of booze. 

So I had barrels all over.

I neglected to actually take note of how much FOOD I had... until i saw half the dwarfs looking for vermin.  In a fortress of 117.  The elven caravan showed up shortly thereafter and I traded for loads of plants and I never saw such a massive wave of dwarfs descend on an area to eat.  The dining room was totally packed after that.

So, afterwards, I made stockpiles for only plants, meat, fish, flour and dwarfen syrup and prepared meals. I have two kitchens now running non-stop.  I also sent out a number of gatherers topside and into the caverns. 

My last fort, I had built such a huge farm that I couldnt collect it all, all the dwarfs did was harvest and it was really digging into the productivity until I turned off all dwarfs harvest, then I got to see it all wilt.  I ended up abandoning that fortress--too much time had passed, too many sieges, and not enough traps set and warriors built up...

Anyway, moral of the story is I keep the actual food stockpiles near the kitchen, and booze wherever.  It seems to work and the cook makes various stews, roasts and biscuits.  Some of the stuff is worth over 5000 for the stack (forgotten beast roast is pretty valuable!)

[Limul Thak]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't dwarves choose the closest individual ingredients, and not the closest stockpiles? That would undo your system, provided that not every stockpile is full.

[Gus Smedstad]

I'm pretty sure it's closest ingredients, with diagonal distance counted as 1, same as orthogonal.  That's why the stockpiles all carefully have 3 tiles adjacent to the kitchen.  In the screenshot, 5 of 8 ingredient piles have barrels on those tiles, despite not being perfectly full.  The 3 top piles have a bit of a problem in that regard, though.

 - Gus

[MrFake]

For the surplus problem, I have two large dedicated plant stockpiles to hold all the plants that aren't set for cooking.  With economy activated, the dwarfs eat mostly plants anyway.  Booze is separate as well.  That just leaves the ingredients pile, where I also store cooked meals.

I would think that set up, Gus, would produce less balanced meals.  If each pile is dedicated to one ingredient, then the closest barrel will contain all of that ingredient, and the cook will empty that barrel before moving on to the next closest.  In a single, mixed stockpile, a barrel may contain a variety; maybe all a single type, but at least variations among that type.  At least, that's what I think.  I use a single pile and get a good variety just by virtue of having a variety of ingredients to cook with.

[UnrealJake]

You could use a set up like that to make high quality roasts, locking doors to the plants and only keeping the stockpiles for rare meats and the likes open.

[Hyndis]

Just limit the size of your farmed plants stockpiles and your booze stockpiles. Create a unique stockpile for each type of plant.

For plump helmets, make only a 5x5 stockpile that accepts plump helmets and nothing else. Disable plump helmets for every other stockpile. This means that you will only use up 25 barrels and any extra plants just rot in the fields.

Do the same with booze. That way if you are producing too much booze the extra barrels stay in the still, slowing production down. Its a natural balance. When a barrel is drunk dry a dwarf will haul a barrel from the still to the stockpile. I have numerous very tiny booze stockpiles scattered around the fortress.

This leaves the vast majority of your barrels free for storing meat, harvested (non-farmed) plants, and roasts.

I also queue up cooking in huge batches using the manager. I'll queue up a few hundred milling, plant processing, and cooking jobs and it'll all get done eventually.

[Collic]

That's a nice setup. What I try to do is just make sure I have some specific stockpiles for cookable plants, tallow, flour etc close to the kitchen. I keep an eye on my stocks and when I notice a certain ingredient is building up, I just fiddle with the permissions to get the cook to use either just that ingredient, or only a couple of others. It's not as elegant as what you're going for, but it's how I try and stop myself from drowning in items that can only be cooked, or specific types of plant.