Just started playing, having a lot of fun. A number of (hopefully straightforward) questions, in approximate order of how much they're annoying me:
* There doesn't seem to be much consistency in whether the game does or does not allow you to select the material you want to make items from. When building workshops, stairs, or doors I get a list of materials sorted by distance to choose from. When building beds, brewing alcohol or cooking food, no choice is presented. I particularly want to be able to choose what food is cooked. How does one do this? Most confusingly, I could have sworn that the first few beds I built *did* give me much a choice (pine logs, cedar logs... etc), but this is no longer the case. What am I missing?
* Irrigation seems to take forever. I'm using the "hole-in-the-floor designated as a pond" method (it seemed the simplest), pouring buckets down it to muddy the floor in the room beneath. It works, but I only ever seem to get one dwarf at a time on bucket duty, however I set tasks. Any ways to speed it up? Multiple holes?
* Do doors actually serve any purpose, other than keeping pets out of rooms? Do they affect noise, for example?
* Whenever I choose to embark, I get a "area contains an aquifier" message- this has happened around 6 times now. Am I just unlucky, or are they very common? It doesn't seem to have created any problems so far: I've dug down four levels of rock and no sign of any water. I have plenty of stone- mostly chert.
* What use are stone coffers? I built a bunch hoping to store food in them, but no one ever seems to put anything in them.
Many thanks in advance.