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[ogreye77]

This game is going to make me crazy, when i finally find a solution of a problem, ten more inexplicable things happens in my game...

If someone can help me with that things would be very appreciated  or i will have soon a lot of FUN....

1) all the tamed animals in my fortress are dying of starvation and i can't undestand why. 2 white stork, 1 stray ram and 1 stray ewe at the moment. they can go outside (they arn't locked in a room o something like that), but it seems to me that those animals always are in the dining room and this is strange because i think they ned grass or some plant to eat. How can i avoid the starvation?

2) i always run out of seeds and i don't know why. Pumple helmets and dimple cups plots are always empty. I would like to have the plots always full, but maybe i choosed a plot too large. 10x10 of both the plots

3) my food stockpile is full of pumple helmets, various berries and plants but i can't brew or extract alcool from any of them. It seems that all the food is rotten (with k ==> enter  in the description i  always see colour:brown). Can i prevent the food to rotten so fast?

[MobRules]

1. Grazing animals aren't smart enough to know to go somewhere where they can graze when they are hungry. You have to pasture them on grazable ground (using the [ i ] zone, with [n] pasture designation) so that they'll have the grass available when they are hungry. If they aren't pastured, they will tend to migrate towards meeting areas.

2. Do you have a lot of Plump Helmets or Dimple Cups sitting around? If so, the seeds are probably locked up in them. Brewing the plump helmets and milling the dimple cups should produce seeds.

3. Food in a food stockpile shouldn't rot, afaik. Can you provide any more info about the stock pile, it's contents, and what's happening? (thought -- It doesn't also allow refuse, does it?) Also, being unable to brew the brewables is strange. Are your stills cluttered up?

[Urist McVoyager]

And do you have empty barrels or pots? No barrels or pots means nowhere to put the alcohol, so it never gets made.

[greycat]

In your brewery, is the "Brew drink from plant" job red so that you can't request it in the first place, or are you requesting it and then gets cancelled when a dwarf starts doing it?  In the latter case, the message you get will tell you what's wrong.

If the job is red, then the Still can't see the ingredients it needs.  This can be because you're out of barrels/pots, or because you're out of brewable plants.  Also check z -> Kitchen and make sure the plants you want to brew are marked with blue Brew and not red Brew.  Blue is the default, but it's possible you toggled it off.

Another cause for red jobs can be that the plants are busy.  If they're all in a single barrel, there will be moments when the barrel is "locked up" by another dwarf, usually hauling-related.  In that case, wait for the plants to become un-busy.

Another cause can be stockpile misconfigurations.  It's easy to accidentally hit the wrong key in a stockpile and not notice that you've done it.  If your barrels, or your plants, or both, are in a stockpile, make sure that stockpile either gives to the Still, or doesn't give to any workshops at all.

[ogreye77]

1) The designation of a pasture zone for the graving animals worked, no more starving cows or ewes. 

2) I gave 2 dwarfs without farming skill the labour Farmer. Yesterday i discovered in a guide that non-skilled farmers lose many seeds, i'm not sure but i think the odds that their lack of skill caused the poverty of seeds are high.

3) I checked the stockpile: no refuse allowed, in z => kitchen brewable plants are typed in blue. i don't know how to control if the stockpile gives to the still (and i'm interested in discovering how to do that) but actually i can brew from or extract plants but i changed nothing. The problem is apparently solved without my intervention, probably I'll never know what happened (or what was my mystake).

One last question, what's the difference between "brew from plant" and "extract from plant"?

Thank you all for your help! 

[Bakaridjan]

I'm almost certain that your brewing problem comes from lack of pots/barrels. You can brew now because one got freed up, but your problem will be back as soon as that one is full. Your seed problem is probably related to the same thing. Once you start brewing your available plants you will get more seeds.

Brewing makes drinkable alcohol. I've honestly never used extracting, but won't give you anything worth your time, unless you have certain plants native to your embark.

[PatrikLundell]

The extract option produces a few odd things that have no use except for trading (which means it's basically useless, since you're going to have more than enough to trade anyway). Gnomeblight is supposed to have some special usage in a convoluted process if you're having problems with gnomes (I've never seen one...). Basically, extract is currently a useless dead end to be made use of in some (far) distant upgrade.

In my fortresses brewing very often stalls because of lack of barrels/pots. A stone crafter and a wood crafter full time on making large pots can barely keep up early on (because I harvest everything I can from the surface, in order to find seeds to plant in overground plots, with maximum booze variety in mind).

I avoid linking stockpiles to workshops because it tends to create more trouble than it's worth. If you're going to mill or press thing you probably have to do that, because you're otherwise going to end up your perfectly boozable plants in those other workshops, together with what you intended to process.
Linking is done by 'q'uery the workshop and then  select give to and then select a workshop. Linking to and from workshops are absolute for workshops, i.e. they will only take from the stockpile(s) linked/give to the stockpile(s) linked. This means linking your still to a food stockpile with your plants in it is likely to fail, because you need a pot/barrel to put the booze into, and that pot/barrel has to come from a linked stockpile (you CAN be successful a few times if there happens to be any empty barrels/pots in that stockpile)... If you have links to take from a workshop those things that do not fit into the stockpile(s) linked will remain in the workshop and not hauled to a free stockpile. Also note that stockpiles are not absolute about links, so linking your stone stockpile for magma safe stone/stone of a nice color/... to e.g. the mason workshop will not block the mechanic and stone crafter from pilfering rock from that stockpile, unless their workshops are ALSO tied down with "take from" links.

[ogreye77]

it is happening again, it seems that i lack some basic understanding of this game...

Jeweler Workshop, want to cut some yellow jasper but the "C" is in gray (in my thought that means: gem is not available "rough") and not in white. So i searched in the gem stockpile and there is a dozen of "rough yellow jaspers" in a bin. I checked the stockpile and the bin, but it seems to me that there is nothing strange.

[greycat]

I avoid linking stockpiles to workshops because it tends to create more trouble than it's worth.

It's a matter of playing style.  I use stockpile links quite heavily, but it's not wrong to do it your way.  The only thing that matters is getting the dwarves to act the way you want them to.

If you're going to use stockpile links, make sure you understand what you're doing.  I'd recommend them most especially for jobs that take stones as input (mason's shop, smelter, etc.).  Create a stone stockpile with wheelbarrows, so dwarves use wheelbarrows to move the stones 95% of the way.  Have the stockpile give to a very close workshop, so the manual hauling for the other 5% of the journey is as short as possible.  This prevents the "stupid mason syndrome", where the mason is notified of a "Make table" job, grabs the stone nearest to wherever he's standing, and drags it to the mason's shop, paying absolutely no heed to the distance involved, nor to the dozen equally suitable stones that are sitting right by the workshop....

[PatrikLundell]

@ogreye77: You're probably suffering from bin blocking. If the item a workshop has decided to use is blocked from being used, e.g. because it is in a bin some other dorfs is trying to put stuff in or remove stuff from, the job is cancelled. Gems, in particular, are horrible to store in bins because the haulers filling the bins block the workshop. I use bins only for stuff that's to be hauled to the trade depot for disposal (which happens at most 3 times a year), and not for anything that's simultaneously produced and used.

@greycat: I agree link usage is a matter of play style. You can very easily screw it up, however, but if you know what you're doing and spend the effort to think things through and set up the system correctly you can make things rather efficient.
When it comes to stone hauling I usually definitely don't want to do linking, as I tend to be short on dwarfpower, so I don't want to lock up too many dorfs on stone hauling, and linking with too few dorfs leads to job cancellation as the stockpiles dry up. My experience of the stupid mason syndrome is, however, that they tend to go for the most recently dug stones (which typically are the ones the farthest away...).

[ogreye77]

@PatrikLundell: if the problem really is bin blocking, how can i solve it? How can i tell the dwarfs not to use bins to stock raw gems?

[Innocent Dave]

Bin usage happens on a stockpile-by-stockpile basis, so find your Gem stockpile, select it (q), and set Bins to 0.

[PatrikLundell]

Innocent Dave beat me to it.
The type of stockpile created dictates whether bins, barrels, wheelbarrows, or nothing is added to the stockpile when created. I usually create the default stockpile (for caged animals and empty cages) and then change the settings to the type I actually want, because this type doesn't set up "extra" stuff.