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[Silentstar]

This is all for 40d.

I'm starting to get a very large stockpile of food items, to the point where it's difficult to keep my brewers and plant processors stocked with empty barrels, so i'm looking for a way to free some up.  To that end, i've decided i need to get rid of my rotten food.  The only problem is, and maybe i'm just stupid and not seeing it, how can you tell in the stocks menu what is rotten and what is not?  Also, once i get my dwarfs to discard all that crud, can i get them to consolidate stuff so that i don't have a bunch of not quite empty barrels sitting around?  Also also, is it possible for the dwarfs to properly sort what they put in barrels.  I have barrels that are just mish-mashes of different food items,  plants are all stored together and meats are all stored together, but i'll have a barrel with 2 or 3 plump helmets, some cave wheat, some pig tails or what have you, all jumbled together.  And since i'm starting to get a huge surplus of plump helmets (can't keep my brewer stocked with barrels, remember) I'd like to just trade some of them before they go bad, but i don't want to trade away other stuff i have a reasonable amount of (or an unreasonably small amount of)  (Just realized if i trade away a barrel of plump helmets that's not going to free up any barrels since the barrel gets traded with the food,  but the question still stands)

Sorry for what are probably extremely basic questions

[Rapidfirewombat]

I've rarely ever had any rotten food in my 40d fortresses, but it usually comes from food sitting around, not in a barrel.  Dwarves treat rotten food as refuse, so they should be automatically throwing it away.  Anything you see in your "kitchen" menu from the "z" fortress status screen should be unrotten.

The stockpiling A.I. is not the best and leads to a lot of barrels with only

[Rapidfirewombat]

(continued from last post, sorry)

only one item in each.  There is a setting in the .ini file to affect how aggressively they stockpile like items with other like items, you can take a look at it but I believe it's already set at pretty much the maximum.

You can try locking your brewer in with a stockpile of plump helmets by putting him in a room with a food stockpile set to only accept plump helmets, and then disabling plump helmets in your main stocks.  Dwarves should carry all your PH's to the new stockpile, but it may take awhile.

Consider cooking your food as well.  It frees up a lot of barrels, since most of the time dwarves don't even put the prepared meals into a barrel at all, and just set them lying on top of a barrel in your food stockpile.

[Psieye]

In fact, I insist that prepared food is placed in stockpiles where 0 barrels are used. This is my main way to free up barrels in 40d. I also insisted on heavy woodland forests as my default embark environment in 40d precisely because I wanted so many bins and barrels.

[Silentstar]

the wood supply isn't a problem, half my map is medium to heavy forest, i guess i need more carpenters and just have one or two carpenter's workshops dedicated to making barrels.  Or else maybe i just need to let my fields go fallow for a season and stop the massive influx of food.  I read in some tutorial that your carpenter is going to only be marginally busy,  that's BS,  my head carpenter is the expedition leader/bookkeeper/whathaveyou (still around from embark) and shortly after a trade caravan arrives (or he decides to go on break) things fall apart.  I've finally got back ups from migrants, but still.  Carpenters need to be dedicated workers.

Also, if everything in the kitchen screen is unrotten, why do i get so many abandoned kitchen tasks stating the need for unrotten food items of the appropriate sort, even though i appear to have plenty?

i think my farmers are just too damn productive, despite only having sand to work with, and i never even have them feritilize

[Rapidfirewombat]

Did you disable cooking for plump helmets in the kitchen screen (if the word "cook" next to plump helmet is red, that means it's disabled)?  The "unrotten food item" message that appears when a cook cancels a job doesn't necessarily mean anything is rotten, that's just the default message for "I couldn't find two/three/four stacks of food items to make into a meal."  Also keep in mind a lot of plants can't be cooked, or need to be processed first in order to create something edible.  Alternatively, is there a clear path from your kitchen to the food stockpile?  Are any of your food items forbidden in the stocks screen?

It is definitely possible to overproduce food.  With legendary growers, two 5x5 farm plots can feed a population of 160 easily.  You can also import too much food, that will eat up your spare barrels really quickly.  If you have a metalsmithing industry going, you can produce barrels out of some junky metal you have a lot of.  It's good blacksmithing practice, and dwarves don't mind drinking out of low-quality metal barrels.

[Dave Mongoose]

On the stock[p]ile designation screen, increase the number of 'reserved barrels'. These won't be used for stockpiles but will still be available for jobs that use a barrel (like brewing or building an ashery).
I only found out about this feature a few days ago, and I've been playing for years - lol.


Also, a few points on the other things you mention:
 + Rotten food will automatically be moved to a refuse stockpile
 + Having separate stockpiles for different plants could solve the 'mixed barrel' problem.
 + If you have the patience when trading, you can select the items in the barrel but not the barrel itself (except in the case of liquids). This lets you keep the barrels but lose some of the excess food. For the most profit, prepared meals are best because they have quality bonuses.

It does sound like you are producing too much food: how big are your fields? Consider setting some seasons to foods that need preparing, like cave wheat, pig tails or sweet pods. This has the bonus of giving you more varieties of alcohol, which helps stop dwarves getting tired of drinking the same thing all the time. Alternatively, you could set up a clothing industry with pig tails (for cloth) and dimple cups (for dye), with food production in the other two seasons.

[Silentstar]

ok, i went into the stockpile menu to reserve barrels, only, i can't for the life of me figure out what the keybinding is for it.  reserving bins says -+, that works, barrels it says / and then the symbol for ore sitting on the ground that's used in the tile set i'm using.  I assumed it would then be *, but that doesn't work.  I can't make heads or tails of the keybindings menu.  It says under stockpiles catergory that barrel up and down are 'e' and 'r' in Unicode and there's no scan key, i tried those keys and that didn't work, i tried adding a scan key and that didn't work either.  Oh, it's probably worth mentioning that / and * change the z level for me, and also, i'm using the mayday tileset version 19.  I suppose that is probably complicating things beyond just the fact that i can't see what the key is supposed to be.  I tried to find where / and * are set to change the z level and maybe try turning that off (since <> already changes the z level), but i couldn't even find that keybinding in any catergory

[AncientEnemy]

it's / and * on the numpad (adjacent to numlock). if for some reason you want to change them (or don't have a numpad on your keyboard), the bindings you're looking for are "page secondary selector up" and "page secondary selector down"

It says under stockpiles catergory that barrel up and down are 'e' and 'r'

those are a different binding, for increasing/decreasing the maximum number of barrels allowed in a particular stockpile (if you were to (q) over a stockpile). different setting from reserved barrels.