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[PlatypusMD]

First post for me: 

My still is set up next to a small drink storage stockpile.  The stockpile is next to a minecart track that picks up the finished drinks and dumps them by the dining room in the kitchen.  The two sites are separated by ~25 z levels.  Dwarves seem to be drinking from the barrels in the still (likely because of pathing to the nearest unoccupied drink), but then walk off with the drink when they're done and place it in the far away storage site.  Why are they bypassing the nearby stockpile?  I've been pretty careful with the settings, and the nearby stockpile will occasionally have a barrel or two of drinks on it...

[AutomataKittay]

I wish I knew either, it's a problem for me too. I have some suspicion that stockpile selection ignores Z levels since I keep getting dwarves trying to path too far up and down.

And setting stockpiles to take from still don't seems to work for me ( or general taking from workshop in general ), so I can't help much there, other than advising to make enough to overflow the other stockpile.

I'm pretty sure it's the newest drink they're pathing to, since I get more dwarves chugging at the stills than in proper drink stockpile

[greycat]

I believe hauling jobs are generated from the stockpile's point of view, not the item's point of view.

By that, I mean: suppose you have two booze stockpiles, and neither one is completely full.  Every once in a while, the game looks at the stockpile and says, "Aha!  It wants more booze!"  So the game looks for some booze that isn't in a stockpile, and if it finds some, it generates a hauling job, to take that booze to that stockpile.  The job will sit in the jobs queue until assigned to a dwarf, and ultimately performed.

I don't know whether the game cares about the distance between the booze and the stockpile, but if it does, then it's finding the nearest booze to the stockpile which needs booze -- rather than finding the nearest stockpile to the homeless booze.  So, just because all your booze is distilled in one place, doesn't mean it's all going to be stored in the stockpile nearest to the still.  It'll be stored everywhere.

(This is my current understanding.  Feel free to correct me.)

[PlatypusMD]

That's a great explanation, however it made me recall some crucial information that I neglected to share...

In the course of troubleshooting the problem I told the far away stockpile to only take from links.  I then linked it to a very close by quantum stockpile which contained a food/drink mix.  The dorfs would walk to the still, grab a drink, and then walk it down to the undesirable stockpile.  This makes me think that automata's explanation may be closer to the mark in this instance. 

I run all of my products to a centralized warehouse in the middle of the fort connected via minecarts.  Furniture, crafts, weapons food etc... all make use of the minecarts.  The exception seems to be booze which just acts weird. 

[i2amroy]

I wish I knew either, it's a problem for me too. I have some suspicion that stockpile selection ignores Z levels since I keep getting dwarves trying to path too far up and down.

Just a note here, but a lot of tasks that select their own materials to use/store (such as picking stone for crafting tasks, etc.) use "direct distance" for determining which item to use, meaning a z-level only counts as "1" regardless of how far they have to walk to get the item. It's only after the item is chosen that the game actually determines the "pathfinding distance" to the item to figure out where the dwarf needs to go to get it. As such lots of times the best place to put stockpiles is right below/above the workshop that uses them with stairs next to the workshop to lead up/down to the stockpile.

[AutomataKittay]

I wish I knew either, it's a problem for me too. I have some suspicion that stockpile selection ignores Z levels since I keep getting dwarves trying to path too far up and down.

Just a note here, but a lot of tasks that select their own materials to use/store (such as picking stone for crafting tasks, etc.) use "direct distance" for determining which item to use, meaning a z-level only counts as "1" regardless of how far they have to walk to get the item. It's only after the item is chosen that the game actually determines the "pathfinding distance" to the item to figure out where the dwarf needs to go to get it. As such lots of times the best place to put stockpiles is right below/above the workshop that uses them with stairs next to the workshop to lead up/down to the stockpile.

That still don't explain a lot of cases where stockpiles would be more than 3z away, while the nearest stockpile would be right around the workshop, which's why I suspects that z isn't accounted for in stockpile or fetching analysis.

Or really just dwarves ignoring stockpile to pick up stones that's within the workshop area but many z's away. I've gotten into habit of linking stockpile to workshop to cut down on travel time and it's helped a lot, it's the taking from workshops that don't seems to be working properly for stills, and indirectly related to op's problem of dwarves going around too far.