Yes, and they take fewer trips to the booze pile and spend less time there when they do.
They do need some sort of torso clothing to tuck the waterskin or flask into.
Excellent! Hopefully this can make some thing simpler (at the moment my doctor + nursedwarves' burrow includes not only the hospital, but every cloth, thread, barrel/pot, and drink stockpile in the fortress. They were all systematically added each time a new string of endless job cancellations came from a nurse and I had to track down which stockpile they were trying to return the beer barrel/thread they just picked up to )
Backpacks & waterskins only became effective with 34.11
(*) Made dwarves eat from backpacks/drink from waterskins earlier
Your best bet is to make a smaller stockpile that accepts empty barrels in your magma area, let your main barrel stockpile take from that stockpile. From time to time you'll still be bothered by some dwarf trying to access another stockpile outside of the burrow: just forbid the item he is currently hauling. That will make him drop it, reclaim it after that and everything should be dandy.
Same goes for a thread stockpile in your hospital burrow.
Also do not forget to include a place with fresh clothing, so your burrowed dwarves do not run around naked.
Hmmm, with the rate of job cancellation spam I've gotten in my experience with burrowed magma dwarves / hospital dwarves, the benefits of the burrow aren't worth the hassle of constantly forbidding, unforbidding items etc. I'd prefer a hands-free approach, even if it involves a bit more walking. For example, with the thread/cloth issues with my hospital, in any future forts, I plan to make sure the hospital is adjacent to the clothing industry, so that I can include all cloth/thread stockpiles in the "Nurse's Burrow" without sacrificing efficiency.
Good point for the clothing stockpile. That would probably be another thing I would put in the center and make part of both burrows, along with the 'worn clothing' discard pile, because if there are 2 options to put / take things from, and one is outside the burrow, the job cancellation just isn't worth it to me. Of course, aside from some promising modding in
Modest Mod to supposedly eliminate clothing wear, when I upgrade to 34.11 I hear that armor counts against nudity thoughts. With civilian squads, I plan to not have a single scrap of clothing in my fort, going full armor on everyone, to prevent the whole clothing issue (which supposedly is bad for FPS anyways).
Backpacks & waterskins only became effective with 34.11
(*) Made dwarves eat from backpacks/drink from waterskins earlier
Waterskins for civilians were effective in .31. Active military would hold off eating and drinking their supplies for ages, but I never saw thirsty civilians except when they were on a task that took a while. Even then, they'd take a swig as soon as they finished the task and go right back to what they were doing.
I never used backpacks for civilians because it stopped them using the dining room, and unlike with drinks they'd split their food supply into stacks. If they were set to carry three meals, they'd go and refill the backpack as soon as one of them was gone.
Yeah, I always avoided food carrying for civilians for that reason too (as well as frequent rotten meals in rooms in previous versions). I'm in the process of mass-produing waterskins, now I just have to deal with the issue of dwarves never fully equipping their uniform in one go... even with multiple {m}ove orders to station some soldiers over my armor stockpiles, about half of them still haven't put on their steel helms. And of the half that
do have helms already, about half of
those are bronze/copper etc., so I need to figure out how to get them to gear up properly...