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[GavJ]

Make a well for thirst. Dwarves won't like drinking water, but they like it better than dying of thirst, and they never run out if you fill them pretty much any way other than buckets. Even murky pools fill enough every year to water a whole fort, generally (you have to pass it through a screw pump or well to de-murkify it if you don't want them to be angry)

[Panando]

I personally recommend against building a well. Instead just place a grate over the water source.

When drinking water, dwarves always get an unhappy thought about drinking water, if they don't use a well, they get an additional unhappy thought about the lack of a well. (I don't think dwarves get unhappy thoughts if they drink water when incapacitated or if they drink from a waterskin - it's only when they drink at a well or water source)

When filling buckets dwarves never get unhappy thoughts, regardless of whether they use a well or scoop water from an open tile.

Using a well is slow, it's extremely slow if multiple z-levels above the water, dwarves run up/down stairs faster than buckets traverse z-levels. Only one dwarf can use a well at a time. If they use the well to drink water, they block the well for the duration of their drink.
If a well is built on water, it's still slower to get water than 'scooping' (scooping is instantaneous), and while the well is blocked (for example, by a drinker), other dwarves will happily 'scoop' water from around it, and get an unhappy thought about the lack of a well if drinking. A well built on water *does not* stop nasty things coming up from below nor stop things falling in. A grate (or floor bars) built on a water tile still allows water to be scooped, and offers total protection against creatures coming up from below, and stops creatures falling in. Technically the well can be built above a grate which is on a lower z-level, providing a barrier against creatures.

If you want to run an efficient hospital and use pond zones, then do not build a well, as it will simply slow things down. If for some bizarre and elfish reason you want to force dwarves to drink water and want to mitigate the unhappy thought about the lack of a well, then you need to have the wells at least 1-z above the water to stop 'direct drinking', and build quite a few wells to deal with the well-hogging by drinkers. But bear this in mind, if you always have booze on hand you will never see the unhappy thought about the lack of a well, and if you build a well it will just pointlessly slow down getting buckets of water, with how badly it pointlessly slows down getting water depending on whether it's build on water (allowing the well to be bypassed), or above water.

[indyofcomo]

Can a well be used to get water for cleaning/hospital work? Are good/bad thoughts generated by this(if possible.)

[greycat]

I always try to have a protected, internal well somewhere near the hospital (nearness in terms of the number of steps it takes to get from one to the other -- they could be on different Z-levels).

In a properly run fortress, dwarves won't use the well for drinking.  They'll only use it for cleaning themselves, cleaning patients, or giving drinking water to patients.

And yes, you can have multiple wells.  If you've got a reasonably sized cistern, there's no reason you can't drop half a dozen wells into it, so half a dozen dwarves can all fetch water simultaneously.  Just make sure there's plenty of standing room so dwarves and animals don't all get smashed together, start fighting, and dodge into the well.

[Larix]

Drinking from a well doesn't cause a (visible?) negative thought. If dwarfs have only water to drink, their movement and work speed will suffer, but i haven't seen a direct mood effect. They don't seem to prioritise drinking from a well over drinking directly from the river, which makes "lack of a well" complaints appear quite frequently, even if wells (multiple) are accessible. Seems you have to delete all "water" zones to enforce use of wells.

Wells are a good way to provide water for hospital use, and can generate good thoughts from admiring (they're architecture-requiring multi-part buildings, so their value and thus admirability can get pretty high).

[WanderingKid]

Some notes about food production, I'll try to avoid the good advice already delivered for some other information/alternatives.

You can't stop dwarves from eating raw plump helmets.  When they want one, they want one.  You can stop them from being cooked, however.  When a dwarf eats a raw, there's seeds.

Don't bother with Potash making.  No, really.  Just assign the two guys (Potash maker and Wood Burner) as farmers and let them help... and increase your farm size.  If you're looking for absolute gains this is generally better (unless you've already got a team of 10 farmers, at which point you shouldn't need Potash without a mod) than fertilizing.

A single 3x3 farm won't get enough booze for a fort that size.  I usually have 6 5x5 farms running by the time winter rolls in.  Yes, they're slow, yes some food rots in the fields, but as more get assigned to farming (full forts for me usually have 5-6 full time farmers) they're quite effective and can usually handle another 6 5x5s on the surface for alternatives.

You need a single boozesmith, and until your stocks are at least 10-20x your dwarf population, he shouldn't have any other duties.  Aim for 40x.  Booze is quite possibly the most important resource in a fort.  Dedicate a dwarf to it.  The other restriction you can run into is barrels.  Stone Pots, Glass Pots, and/or wooden barrels (shiver) are your best bets in that order.  Stonecrafting is necessary, and make a large empty barrel stockpile so you can at a glance make sure you have enough on hand.

As mentioned, use the kitchen menu.  It's under [z], same area you go to stocks.  The difficulty of this menu is that unless something is available in your fort, you can't see it listed here (mostly because of the 32 billion meat pieces).  Shut off seeds and booze for cooking, unless you're nearing 200+ seeds of something, then allow them to use it for a bit for meals (there's a DFHack option to help you manage that if you want to look into it, I just run manually).  If you're using the herbalists as recommended, make sure you allow dimple dye seeds to be cooked.  They're a great way to get some good use out of the dyes you'll grind up now and then (provided you have bags).

For food, the one crop you want is Quarry Bushes.  Find a way to get bags in bulk, or just make them from plant fibers to level up a clothmaker.  Those quarry bushes are an industry to themselves and are a huge food producing plant, between pressing the rock nuts and getting oil/paste from them and the leaves themselves.  They're useless for booze, but it takes the pressure off your booze plants if you're not hunting.

Speaking of, and isn't mentioned enough here... hunt.  Breed dogs/pigs/something.  Butcher is your friend.  The problem with booze is you need to convert your primary edible, Plump Helmets,  into your most common booze, Dwarven Wine.  Typically anyone with booze concerns isn't bringing in enough food to override the need of the dwarves, or they're just not building enough infrastructure.

[greycat]

You need a single boozesmith, and until your stocks are at least 10-20x your dwarf population, he shouldn't have any other duties.  Aim for 40x.

I aim for 10x and consider it a Threat if it drops below 5x.  You, sir, are a veritable avatar of Dionysus.

The other restriction you can run into is barrels.  Stone Pots, Glass Pots, and/or wooden barrels (shiver) are your best bets in that order.

Wooden pots (they use Woodcrafting, and come from the Craftdwarf shop) are superior to wooden barrels, being lighter and having a higher capacity for food.  Capacity is irrelevant for booze -- they hold however much booze you brew in a single job, which is 5x plant stack size -- but using fewer barrels/pots in your edible food stockpiles helps.

Stonecrafting is necessary, and make a large empty barrel stockpile so you can at a glance make sure you have enough on hand.

"Necessary" is relative to how treeful your embark is.

[krenshala]

A single 3x3 farm won't get enough booze for a fort that size.  I usually have 6 5x5 farms running by the time winter rolls in.  Yes, they're slow, yes some food rots in the fields, but as more get assigned to farming (full forts for me usually have 5-6 full time farmers) they're quite effective and can usually handle another 6 5x5s on the surface for alternatives.

Personally, I make about a dozen, sometimes as many as fifteen, 1x5 farm plots for both above and below ground farm areas (so 20 to 30 plots total).  This gives me much finer control over how much of any one plant type I'm growing, though I normally just set one plot per plant type, then double or quadruple up on stuff like pig tails, rope reed and longland grass.  From past experience, it looks like I need about one noob farmer for every three or four of these plots, but my farmers do all of the farmer labors except for woodburning (my smiths) and brewing (the doctors).

Personally, I like trying to use stoneware pots (fireclay) since you just need a source of fireclay and either magma or (char)coal to crank out as many as you want.