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[Thorfinn]

Been looking around for some science on this, but can't seem to find even any rules of thumb.

I'm trying to get an idea how important it is to put food in barrels. I have a 4x7 food stockpile with no containers, accepting meals from the kitchen as well as raw foodstuffs, all of which which get stuffed into QSPs, so there's a 4x8 zone for the cats to patrol, with most of the food in two tiles. Vermin remains are all over the place, one tile 18 deep in creepy crawler remains. But what I'm not getting is significant decreases in total food. Might have missed one or two, but every time I checked a decrease in food, it was because a dwarf was eating.

Is it just because I embarked with "too many" cats? I have 6 cats assigned to those 32 tiles, and there are 133 vermin remains, so they seem to be doing the job. So far, I have only a few hundred biscuits piled up in the QSP. Is it that is too low, vermin will get worse as that gets into the thousands, and the cats can't keep up?

Under what circumstances do you find it important to put food into barrels?

[EldritchVoid]

Barrels/pots are always important. Food outside of barrels/pots attracts vermin, including flies which will give every dwarf a bad thought. <50 food items outside of barrels has produced obnoxious amounts of vermin for me, and more food = more vermin.

I think 1.5 barrels/pots per tile covered by food stockpile is good. Can't use them effectively with quantum stockpiles. I could probably QSP food barrels, but unsure. I only QSP booze.

[Fleeting Frames]

I mostly just don't care, but barrelled food is useful for marriage burrows (even 25% full minecart has more stuff in, and though you could set up complicated distribution it is easier to give a barrel), and you need barrelled plants and spices to make megasalads worth millions.

I sometimes do set up minecarts standing on dining halls and such with taking from central food qsps to spread around the food options. (Mind that barrelled alcohol/syrup, while available for cooking, is unavailable for drinking inside minecart.) As minecarts prevent rot of things inside, this doesn't need to be on a food stockpile tile.

[Nagidal]

I also read somewhere that food which is not in a barrel (or pot) will rot faster, if I remember it correctly. Never did any science about this. Maybe the statement was that food outside of a food stockpile rots faster. The more I try the less I remember.

Another food related thing is, that rock pots can store more food than barrels. Therefore I prefer to have pots even I'd have enough surplus wood for barrels.

And another thing about rotting I read is that clothes (and presumably food as well) rot or tatter much faster if they lay in a refuse stockpile. Again didn't do the science, but it goes along my gut feeling and observation.

[Shonai_Dweller]

I also read somewhere that food which is not in a barrel (or pot) will rot faster, if I remember it correctly. Never did any science about this. Maybe the statement was that food outside of a food stockpile rots faster. The more I try the less I remember.

Another food related thing is, that rock pots can store more food than barrels. Therefore I prefer to have pots even I'd have enough surplus wood for barrels.

And another thing about rotting I read is that clothes (and presumably food as well) rot or tatter much faster if they lay in a refuse stockpile. Again didn't do the science, but it goes along my gut feeling and observation.

Don't think food in stockpiles rots at all right now.

[PatrikLundell]

Pots can store more than barrels, and this goes for wooden pots as well. Barrels are needed for a couple of workshops, but for most everything else pots are better.

Barrels (and pots) are unsuitable for mine cart QS' because they get appropriated by the feeder stockpile, resulting in an eternal hauling cycle. Thus, you can't use mine carts for actual hauling of pots/barrels either (e.g. to a food stockpile down by the magma sea workshops), as the containers will be hauled back (manually). It should be possible to QS storing them provided they're dumped into the QS by haulers while unassigned to any stockpile (i.e. taken directly from the still in the case of booze: for food I guess you'd have to remove the source stockpile to get rid of the assignment).

[Fleeting Frames]

Pots can store more than barrels, and this goes for wooden pots as well. Barrels are needed for a couple of workshops, but for most everything else pots are better.

Iirc that isn't the case anymore. Barrels used to hold 30, but now can hold 60, and they have exact same container capacity now.

[PatrikLundell]

Hm, that's news to me. Thanks for correcting me.

[FantasticDorf]

Using trappers is a less messy alternative to cats.

Personally you can turn vermin into profit by pitting a large mass of them into a sunk in room with a pet sealed trapdoor & a ramp for entry, allow them to breed (if there are enough it should be continuous) then burrow a trapper over the area to catch vermin as food, pets or a trade commodity to ram into pretty cages.

Vermin cave spider farms are already recognised on the DF wiki as being a alternative way of gathering string, and setting a burrow over where the vermin are being held also allows webbers to clear away webs without being bitten.

Decoration counts also of the vermin is not hatable, this can be done with fish too for much the same reasons.

[Quietust]

pitting a large mass of them into a sunk in room with a pet sealed trapdoor & a ramp for entry, allow them to breed (if there are enough it should be continuous)

Does that actually work, though? Vermin are not the same as creatures, and I wasn't aware that they were capable of breeding in that manner (the wiki even states outright that they don't breed, but instead "spawn" out of thin air in their natural environment)...

[FantasticDorf]

From my experiences, when compacted they retain a static population, its difficult to keep track of numbers but by taking periodically and amassing a amount of them it stablises. If anything its a convenient dumping place for them rather than releasing into the wild, i've bred a lot of hamsters before though.

The closest thing to a experiment would be amassing a set number of gendered vermin, then counting them with trapping a season later. The fish example is hypothetical, but if it can be substantiated it can save pond populations and create indoor fisheries with proper management.

[Luriant]

I have some luck using QSP, and Pasture a Cat in the QSP tile.
I don't see the food root or disapear.

In my future fortress I will use normal Stockpiles, and some Vermin have [PENETRATEPOWER:X], X a number between 1 and 2-3 i think.

When a Vermin whit penetrate power is in the same tile as a barrel with food, the game generate a number. If the number is same or lower than penetrate power, the vermin can eat some food.
Wood and cloth containers (barrels, bags) use a Dice of 10 faces, Metal-Rock-Glass use a Dice of 100 faces for generating the number.
So i want to build Large Rock Pots as container.
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/v0.31:Creature_token#P

[Thorfinn]

Using trappers is a less messy alternative to cats.... then burrow a trapper over the area to catch vermin as food, pets or a trade commodity to ram into pretty cages.

Ah. I thought for sure that creepy crawlers were butcherable, but couldnt' figure out how. Once they go to Remains, they are useless, so far as I could tell.

So to get food from 'em, you treat 'em as extracts? Animal Dissector instead of Butcher? Still need vials then? Not sure that's worth it, food being so plentiful. Maybe have a use in the first year if they had some tallow, but after month 15 and you have mature poultry to butcher, even that's pointless.

Curiously, even with creepy crawlers so thick that I needed more than a full-time refuse hauler, in the course of a year, I ended up with no rotten food. I thought that was their special ability...?

[FantasticDorf]

Dwarves just eat the entire creature as a delicacy from the cage they are in.

[Thorfinn]

As a delicacy? Good Lord! Dwarves are weird.

Isn't transferring them to a cage pretty intensive, though? If I could set the trapper to catch and cage, might be worth it. I don't know trapping cycle time, but crawlers must spawn in the thousands per year...