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[mikekchar]

I discovered something I thought was a little strange with the manager and thought that it might be useful to start a thread to collect as many unexpected behaviours as possible.

Anyway, if you have an empty barrel sitting in  a booze stockpile, the manager considers it to be non-empty, but available.  I've never really understood the "reserve barrel" function because even though I always set it to 0, the dwarfs love to stick 1 empty (I assume "reserve") barrel in the stock pile.  If I'm stupid enough to make a bunch of single tile booze stockpiles, then all my empty barrels will end up in the booze stockpiles instead of the barrel stockpile.  And when that happens, the manager thinks there are no empty barrels -- they *are* available, though (if you remove the "empty" trait from the condition, then it notices them).

I guess, but haven't verified, that the same will be true for bins.

[mightymushroom]

I'll bet those barrels have a <##> on them. What you describe sounds like dwarfs automatically adding a storage barrel to a food/drink stockpile. I believe this is the default setting for food piles, even if you then remove non-drink items. I've adopted the habit of always designating "custom" stockpiles that take nothing at first, that way barrels or bins are only turned on if I want them on. The extra keystrokes to define pile contents are worth the hassle, in my opinion. That behavior's controlled on the individual pile setting: [q] > Max Barrels.

"Reserve barrel" does almost the opposite: it tells dwarves to fort-wide reserve X many empty barrels for non-pile uses and only once that number is exceed use them for stockpiling. So by setting it to zero, you've told them any available barrel is fair game for random storage.

The manager shouldn't be counting stockpile accessories as available, though, because they can't be put to any other use unless detached from the stockpile first.
Nevermind that last bit, I didn't understand what you said. Yeah, if you remove the "empty" trait on manager orders it will count all barrels in the fortress instead of just those that can be used immediately. In this case, even though they seem to have no contents to your inspection they are actually "full" of stockpile space.

[tussock]

Yeah, just learning that myself.

Reserve barrels/bins means those things not to be used for stockpiling, so you can ever build a dyers workshop or make booze. Should probably be more than 1, but eh, that's what manager orders are for.

--

In general, I've found making sure the job lots are small, the reagents are more than plentiful, and the checks are regular, almost eliminates cancel spam, or at least cuts it back to the point I can check on it and do something to fix it. Note that things like bones come in very large stacks, so more than a single bone crafter workshop needs a lot of spare bone to automate jobs with it.

Just generally be aware all stacks of objects when counting reagents for orders, a lot of farm/harvest product orders can use large and irregular numbers of reagents for instance. Bigger stockpiles help.

[anewaname]

The Reserved Barrels setting is very useful to ensure you have empties for drink production. I set Reserved Barrels to about 4, and queue "Make barrel (10) when empty barrels < 3". No cancel spam related to barrel shortage for a long time.

1-tile liquid-only stockpiles currently do not work, because the behavior for any stockpile with a barrel setting > 0 is to claim an empty barrel as soon as possible, and it only seems to look for non-empty containers after it check for empty containers (so if there is an empty barrel shortage but you do have drinks, a drinks barrel will be carried over, but after it is empty, the stockpile will again look for an empty barrel to put in place before looking for a non-empty drinks barrel and then the stockpile is jammed up). 1-tile solid-item stockpiles work because dwarfs can carry the items to put them into the empty barrel... I suppose the bottom line is that the dwarfs are not smart enough to kick the empty barrel out of the way when there is a non-empty barrel available.