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Author Topic: Trying to assign barrels for alcohol?  (Read 1485 times)

mrbane

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Trying to assign barrels for alcohol?
« on: September 14, 2010, 06:07:56 am »

Hihi,

For some reason, no matter how many barrels I pump out, none ever seem to get filled with booze. As it's now winter and all other water sources have frozen over, people are starting to die of thirst. I just can't figure out how to get a barrel set to be filled only with booze, and the Wiki isn't the clearest or easiest source of info to understand.

Any ideas?

Thanks!
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Proteus

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Re: Trying to assign barrels for alcohol?
« Reply #1 on: September 14, 2010, 06:11:23 am »

Did you build a still and order alcohol to be made?
Do you have enough resources (plump helmets or the like) to make alcohol?
Are the resources enabled for brewing (via z -> Kitchen)
Do you have a dwarf with the brewing labor enabled?

And if these answers are all positive,
coiuld it be that you have other stockpiles that maybe have barrels enabled (and block them for their own needs)
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mrbane

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Re: Trying to assign barrels for alcohol?
« Reply #2 on: September 14, 2010, 06:28:18 am »

Thanks for replying!

Yes to all of the above, I just get the message that there are no empty barrels.
I've got 3 carpenters at 3 workshops pumping them out. What the hell are they doing with them!?

Ach. Doesn't matter, forty of them have just died of thirst as I figured it out. Fucking idiots.

My big gripe with this game is the level of micro-management involved in some seriously obvious areas. If they need alcohol, as in, it has such a serious effect if they don't drink it, the game should be programmed so that they will make space in barrels for it, instead of waiting for me to assign a number of reserved barrels.

40 dwarves and counting have just died because not a single one of them said: "Lets take all this stuff from this barrel and put it in this one so we can use it for alcohol."

That's just stupid and wrong.
« Last Edit: September 14, 2010, 06:37:21 am by mrbane »
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Proteus

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Re: Trying to assign barrels for alcohol?
« Reply #3 on: September 14, 2010, 06:36:15 am »

Could it be that the barrels are inaccessible for your brewer?
(for example because he is assigned to a burrow, that doesn´t encompass the workshops where your barrels are built)
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mrbane

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Re: Trying to assign barrels for alcohol?
« Reply #4 on: September 14, 2010, 06:39:33 am »

See my above edit. :)

I don't use burrows anyway.

Abandoned that one, will start again. FFS. :)
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Ganthan

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Re: Trying to assign barrels for alcohol?
« Reply #5 on: September 14, 2010, 07:12:41 am »

I've never been too bothered about dwarves not naturally saving empty barrels for alcohol.  Stuff like that is part of the appeal of the game for me.  It's possible that your farmers/cooks/butchers kept snatching up the new barrels for foodstuffs.

There are bigger micromanagement annoyances to me than that, most of them likely due to bugs.  Planters, for example, will no longer stop planting seeds if it's too late in the season to grow that crop.  You now have to watch the date yourself and go in and change the fields to fallow at around halfway through the season because if there are still seeds left to plant your dwarves will happily keep planting even though it'll all die at the season change.  I discovered this when all but two of my rock nuts disappeared on me when Autumn changed to Winter once.

Another example is military equipment.  At the moment dwarves have a hard time picking up the right stuff or simply dropping their stuff on the spot to pick up different stuff.  The only solid solution I've found is to assign each individual soldier specific items so that there's no ambiguity.  Only problem is that once an item has been assigned it doesn't disappear from the list of available items and if you assign the same item twice, the first soldier drops it off his list.  Forbidding removes it, though, so I have to fiddle around with pausing the game, forbidding all pieces of that gear, going into the stockpile, unforbidding that one item, assigning that item to a soldier, reforbidding the item then unforbidding another, assign THAT item to another soldier, etc.

I like micromanagement sims just fine, else I'd not be playing Dwarf Fortress.  However I do agree that some stuff, especially the workarounds for bugs, really need to be fixed.
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cerapa

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Re: Trying to assign barrels for alcohol?
« Reply #6 on: September 14, 2010, 07:17:52 am »

All barrels are used for food storage.

You have to seperate your food and booze stockpiles so that when the food stockpile is covered in barrels, the new ones will be available for booze storage.
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sebs

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Re: Trying to assign barrels for alcohol?
« Reply #7 on: September 14, 2010, 07:22:15 am »

Maybe your barrels were assigned to a stockpile, i.e. they were used to store stuff instead of ale. Check if you have a giant stockpile (usually it's food) with a high max barrel value - in this case, all new barrels are immediately transported there and cannot be used for ale.
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Quietust

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Re: Trying to assign barrels for alcohol?
« Reply #8 on: September 14, 2010, 08:23:49 am »

Maybe your barrels were assigned to a stockpile, i.e. they were used to store stuff instead of ale. Check if you have a giant stockpile (usually it's food) with a high max barrel value - in this case, all new barrels are immediately transported there and cannot be used for ale.

It doesn't work that way - a single stockpile will only ever have one empty barrel assigned to it (but once at least 1 item is placed inside it, then another will be allocated).

If you want to reserve barrels for brewing, just hit (p) and adjust the "reserved barrels" setting to however many barrels you want to not be allocated to stockpiles.
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