I'm just getting started on another fort, and I've got about 70 dwarves. I'm just getting my bedrooms and dining hall furnished, as well as irrigating a new farm area (8 7x7 plots just to be safe). But up next I want to put together some workshops and stockpiles. What kind of layouts do you guys like to use?
A related question is regarding my plump helmet industry. I always seem to have plump helmets filling every barrel I create before I can use any of the barrels for booze. Is the solution to simply strip the entire forest into barrels, or is there some fancy stockpile magic I can use to reserve barrels for booze?
8 7x7 plots? 392 tiles of farmland?
That's your problem. With that much land under cultivation, you're going to be swimming in produce. On average, you can support one dwarf per tile of agricultural land...and that's without taking into account
other sources of food.
As for getting enough barrels...if you have magma and a metal ore, you can make barrels for cheap. But that requires magma, and aestheticly speaking most metals make ugly barrels, only the white and yellow metals look nice as barrels.
My main suggestion is to continue to buy-out the wood brought in by every caravan, buy all of their barrels, and then request extra wood and barrels from your liason. Also if you've breached a cavern, consider starting up some forestry projects by digging out huge rooms in your soil layers. It'll be a year before you get any fungiwood from your tree-farms, and even longer than that before you get any significant amount of wood, but it's a relatively easy way of increasing your available wood with minimal additional effort on your part. The only labor-intensive part is the digging, and that's just an excuse to train up your miners. In my fortresses, everybody whose name begins with the letter 'D' becomes a miner.