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[Ragnarock]

Is there any benefit from spending so much time on this? My fort seems to live just fine on Mussell Burritos

[Slogo]

What about Quantum Stockpiles? That should do the trick I'd think since you'd have all ingredients in the same tile (except booze and dwarven syrup) so everything is exactly the same distance from the kitchen.

[Absentia]

Is there any benefit from spending so much time on this? My fort seems to live just fine on Mussell Burritos

No benefit, just something that bugs certain players.

McCautious, try disallowing barrels in the larger stockpile as well. I don't know that much about the barrel/bag/bin logic, but I know that if they're causing a problem you can do without them.

[McCautious]

Is there any benefit from spending so much time on this? My fort seems to live just fine on Mussell Burritos

No benefit, just something that bugs certain players.

McCautious, try disallowing barrels in the larger stockpile as well. I don't know that much about the barrel/bag/bin logic, but I know that if they're causing a problem you can do without them.

Well ... the alleged benefit is that higher variety has a much better chance to generate a happy thought in dwarves. This in turn translates to more .. erm ... frustration tolerance.
But yes ... it also bugs me. I am currently trying to run a "perfect" model fortress, where everything is nice and working the way it should (lol). I have countless stockpiles for "perfect" workflow, armor and weaponry neatly seperated into different types and qualities, living quarters according to occupation, the friggin best hospital in the the history of dwarvenkind ... and of course: A kitchen complex that is supposed to generate "perfect" booze and meals according to my command. The idea is: If I think its time for Quarry-Plump-Mussel-Wheatflour-Roast ... then Quarry-Plump-Mussel-Wheatflour-Roast it Armok be damned better be.

Disallowing barrels alltogether ... I was hoping to somehow get around it. *sigh The "perfect" fortress of course stocks about 1000 tons of everything, "just in case". So using barrels to compile the stuff sure is nice and keeps the vermin out. I guess I could quantum stockpile it but this does not adress the vermin-problem. Also, quantum-stockpiling feels kind of cheap. I kind of like those big old halls where the eye meets an ozean of barrels filled to the brim with edibles. And dwarves actually need to walk and work to haul stuff around.

What about Quantum Stockpiles? That should do the trick I'd think since you'd have all ingredients in the same tile (except booze and dwarven syrup) so everything is exactly the same distance from the kitchen.

Here, you couldn't order specific meals. The Chéf would constantly just grab the quarry leaves from this stockpile and produce and endless stream of Quarry-quarry-quarry-quarry-roasts. Even if you had, say, 4 quantum stockpiles with specific contents next to each other he would mostly just take all the stuff from one or two piles. That's why people try to establish single-tile-single-item piles to feed the kitchen. This way, there is always exactly 4 different items closest to the kitchen.

[GavJ]

This is a way better solution than all the stockpile micromanaging permissions, etc. All just one tool (traffic designator) and a few moments!

[SMASH!]

My farm level: kitchen, still, farm plots and breeding room.

[Pink Photon]

I also wish there was more variety in meals. The fix I would like is to make it so that a meal cannot contain more than one item per category (fish, plant, etc.)

I never had much success using stockpiles, so I just use dfhack to make sure the meal names are appropriate. Eg. I'll start a lavish meal, use dfhack to make the fourth item have to be a meat, suspend that job and then duplicate it when I need to make some. This results in "dog meat roasts" with three other random ingredients. Soups have a liquid ingredient, and biscuits use plant/fruit/seeds. If you wanted to go to the effort you can assign specific items for the other ingredients.

[Aslandus]

No more (fish + whiskey) = (biscuits), now it's (flour + flour + egg + milk) = (biscuits)

I think that's the wrong kind of "biscuits", "easy meals" are more like dog biscuits, just ingredients dried and crushed together into little blocks which help with storage but don't taste great...

I also wish there was more variety in meals. The fix I would like is to make it so that a meal cannot contain more than one item per category (fish, plant, etc.)

I never had much success using stockpiles, so I just use dfhack to make sure the meal names are appropriate. Eg. I'll start a lavish meal, use dfhack to make the fourth item have to be a meat, suspend that job and then duplicate it when I need to make some. This results in "dog meat roasts" with three other random ingredients. Soups have a liquid ingredient, and biscuits use plant/fruit/seeds. If you wanted to go to the effort you can assign specific items for the other ingredients.

What, you've never wanted a roasted plump helmet with crushed plump helmet on top, soaked in plump helmet juice and stuffed with plump helmet? Or maybe a ray roasted with salmon and trout? Maybe not, but your dwarves do

[smeeprocket]

it's so weird to me that kitchenbots were a thing this board struggled with. I mean, it seems like an odd thing to promote. Herbal sex stimulants, sure, prescription drugs sold under the counter, of course, fad diets, absolutely, porn, why not. But kitchen remodeling...

[Thisfox]

Interesting.

I leave the stockpiles alone, with barrels enabled, but with a seperate stockpile for seeds with barrels not enabled, so that the bags of seeds don't all end up in a single barrel.

Then I go into the z-kitchen list regularly (it gets longer and shorter depending on what foods are available) and disable cooking on all tallows that I can find, disable cooking on all the fruit I can find, and usually all the more fancy beverages: Blackberry wine, sewer brew, etc, whilst leaving cooking on for the standard dwarven beer, dwarven wine, etc. The tallows because tallow roasts are a problem. The fruit and fancier beverages because alcohol variety is a good thing, and roasts can be made out of everything else just fine.

The result, with my huge (ten by ten) food stockpiles a few tiles from my three kitchens and three stills, is roasts which always have at least three ingredients, and usually have four ingredients. No problem.

I would really really like for food to have more than just "mince everything and cook it", because I was hoping for either food porn, or food word salad, or some combination of the two, and all I get is mince. Booo-rrrring. But I never have a problem with "variety roasts", unless I forget to disable a tallow, so I'm finding it interesting that you do.

[McCautious]

Alright guys ... I am back and off are my Chéfs to create the "perfectest" meals ever created by Dwarvenkind:

Thanks to ...

I just use dfhack to make sure the meal names are appropriate. [...] If you wanted to go to the effort you can assign specific items for the other ingredients.

... I have found a workable solution here! Yaaaay! Presscake-Wheatflour-Quarryleaf-Pandatripe-Roasts ... here we come! 

I am assuming, Pink Photon, that you mean the gui/workshop-job functionality of Dfhack?

INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Select your kitchen
2. Start new job: Lavish meal ... and keep it highlighted (if you have several jobs listed)
3. Hit Alt+A (default Dfhack command, you may need to enter "gui/workshop-job" in DFhack-Box once before)
4. use up- and down keys (secondary menu selector) to pick ingredient slot
5. per slot hit "i" to choose item type (meat, cheese, plant, plant growth etc.)
6. per slot hit "m" to specify material
7. hit "Esc" to quit menu
8. hit "r" to queue up infinite amounts of your recipe
9. unpause by exiting kitchen workshop menu

Annotations:
- the beauty of this technique is that using barrels isn't really a problem because the Chéf will get single stacks from respective barrels
- Meals will be named after the fourth ingredient, hence Pink Photon using the fourth ingredient slot I guess
- finding processed items/materials may be tricky and of course far from intuitive
- an item type has to be chosen, a material may be chosen ... material just specifies the item as known from e.g. military equipment
- Unused slots will be filled using the usual "whichever is closest"-routine for selection (for the most part)
-> hence a combination of the "close stockpile" and the Dfhack technique works very well
-> if you cannot get a certain item to be used, just set it in a stockpile next to the kitchen and leave an ingredient slot open

Some ingredients:

Horse Tripe
item=meat
material=creature->horse->stomach tissue
-> if you put just "meat" as item type and leave the material to the Chéf, he will happily clear out your whole meat stockpile roast by roast no matter how far it is away. Talk about Kobolds requiring a single meat-item in their food in Masterworks.

Quarry Bush Leaves
item=plant growth
material=plant->QuarryBush->leaves

PressCake
item=glob
material=plant->QuarryBush->rocknut

Potato Plant
item=plant
material=plant->potato plant plant

Peppers, Onions, Potatos ...
item=plant growth
material=plant->pepper plant fruit/onion .../potato plant

Flour
item=bag
material= ?? either this is bugged or I just can't find it
-> typical candidate for a nearby stockpile
-> you can still "reserve" an ingredient slot for this by setting "bag" as item type, hence creating opportunity for a second nearby stockpile

This is a way better solution than all the stockpile micromanaging permissions, etc. All just one tool (traffic designator) and a few moments!

Wow. This is also pretty awesome. You mean you can guide your Chéfs by setting low traffic zones and simply changing them around a bit to change recipes eh?
I guess if you combine this with the Dfhack-method it could get as simple as having a couple rooms with various plants in specific stockpiles. Ingredients could be simply set to "plant" or "plant growth" item type and you just save the material-selection hassle by setting the passage to certain rooms on restricted.

[Miuramir]

it's so weird to me that kitchenbots were a thing this board struggled with. I mean, it seems like an odd thing to promote. Herbal sex stimulants, sure, prescription drugs sold under the counter, of course, fad diets, absolutely, porn, why not. But kitchen remodeling...

I think it was SEO (Search Engine Optimization) gone awry more than actual advertising to the forum membership. 

Search engines have a lot of complex routines they use to score sites these days, many of them based on key words; the DF forums get a lot of points for legit discussion of "design", and some points for legit discussion of "kitchen"s.  So, from a simplistic Google point of view, if our site which is therefore believed to be knowledgeable about design in general and kitchens in particular, links to some other site about kitchen design, said other site must be at least somewhat interesting and/or legit; so it gets a few extra points on its score and moves up the page a bit when you search. 

The routines these days are generally more advanced than that, but that should give you the general idea.  People are willing to spend substantial amounts of real money on SEO, easily enough to pay teams of people in low-wage countries to post on places all over the net just so that their web site comes up closer to the top.  Consider how much money printing a color circular that goes in every copy of a Sunday newspaper costs; even a small fraction of that buys a whole lot of offshore flunkies clicking on things and posting in strange places to hopefully improve the odds that people click on your site first. 

[Magistrum]

it's so weird to me that kitchenbots were a thing this board struggled with. I mean, it seems like an odd thing to promote. Herbal sex stimulants, sure, prescription drugs sold under the counter, of course, fad diets, absolutely, porn, why not. But kitchen remodeling...

We also had to deal with the occasional  season skirt or something, we generally end up countering by responding and starting a thread with it.