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[vertinox]

So I thought to get around to getting soap for the dorfs, but I can't seem to make it at the soap maker's work shop.

I made an ashery and made the lye and I've got plenty of tallow from butchery animals, but when I go make the soap the item name is in red and when I press t it goes to the reagents of soap (which are all in white btw).

What could I be missing?

[Sphalerite]

Is the lye in barrels, in a stockpile near the soap maker's workshop?  If the lye is still sitting in buckets in the ashery you might need to get it moved to barrels in a stockpile first.

[Grumbledwarfskin]

Chances are it's bug 1236. Check your buckets with k. Do they have both water and lye in them? If so, then you can't use that lye to make soap. You need dry buckets.

The work-around to fix your lye+water buckets is to wait for a trading caravan to arrive. Loo(k) at your buckets, and forbid the water that's in them. Then order the buckets taken to the depot for trading. You can cancel trading them as soon as they've been picked up and moved, the forbidden water will drop to the floor, leaving buckets filled with lye only. At that point, quickly make soap before your buckets get messed up again.

When you start up a soap industry, this is often a big problem. If you can keep your soap industry far enough from your well(s) and have enough buckets, you can usually get the frequency of lye+water buckets down enough to make it run moderately well, with regular inspections to fix the buckets that get messed up, whenever the traders arrive.

[TheBerg15]

I have a problem making soap to and now I have a bunch of lye sitting in my ashery in buckets that I can't use.  How do I move my lye out of the buckets and into barrels in the stockpile I put right next to the ashery?

[Poindexterity]

You can cancel trading them as soon as they've been picked up and moved, the forbidden water will drop to the floor, leaving buckets filled with lye only.

do you HAVE to cancel the trade while they're being carried or will it still work if said buckets are already at the depot?

[Nan]

If you're using 34.02 you shouldn't have the "wet buckets" problem. If you're playing with 31.25 you can use DFHack and the "drybuckets" command to eliminate water from buckets, and/or the unofficial patch which is floating around will eliminate the problem in the first place (the same as 34.02).

The totally different thing which can cause problems is frozen lye. This occurs when lye is stored outside when the temperature is freezing. It can be resolved simply by having all lye operations moved underground - existing frozen lye will thaw and become usable.

[joecacti]

If you're playing with 31.25 you can use DFHack and the "drybuckets" command to eliminate water from buckets

Thank you SO much!  This is the first command I've ever used in DFHack, it's not cheating if it fixes an unintentional bug

[i2amroy]

You can cancel trading them as soon as they've been picked up and moved, the forbidden water will drop to the floor, leaving buckets filled with lye only.

do you HAVE to cancel the trade while they're being carried or will it still work if said buckets are already at the depot?

No. If you set the contents of a bucket or barrel to be dumped/forbidden then dwarves should empty them out when they pick them up IIRC. Also if you are doing this you might also consider the spotclean command in DFHack as well because the dwarves will never clean up the water spills from this method on their own.

[Rominus]

On a related note, a bunch of my buckets have stagnant water in them, and I don't want them contaminating my new clean cistern.  Is there a danger of this happening if a dorf uses one of the stagnant buckets to get water from a clean well?  Or alternately, will all water that ever goes into those buckets become stagnant even if they're emptied out?

I'd just as soon get rid of the nasty water altogether; do I have to use the trade depot trick to do it, or can I just mark the water to Dump?

[i2amroy]

I'm fairly certain that the water will never "contaminate" your well. The stagnant thing is set for each time you fill up the bucket by the tile that it is removed from, but it can have no effect upon the water it is placed into IIRC.