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[Lagslayer]

I have a large food stockpile, 30X10, with the max barrels set to 300. I have a few dozen barrels made up and waiting in my furniture stockpile, yet, at some point, my dwarves decided to not use barrels to put new food in, and I got a few dozen piles of uncooked food in the stockpile.

Why aren't they using the barrels?


I built a 1X1 bridge and set it to open -->, then built a lever and connected them. However, when I pull the lever, the bridge does not move. What am I doing wrong? Can anyone provide pictures of a functioning one?

[twilightdusk]

You need a 2X1 bridge, a 1X1 bridge won't move, it just alternates between floor and wall. You need at least 2X1 to have it actually fall on something.

[Lagslayer]

Oh, I see. Ill try again and see if it works.

[Sphalerite]

Barrels only hold stacks of at most 10, so if you are making prepared food stacks of more than 10, which is quite easy to do, they won't be put in barrels.

[Lagslayer]

Most of it isn't prepared though. Raw meat, raw fish, raw plump helmets, raw prickle berries, raw sweet pods...

[GhostDwemer]

Do you have reserve barrels set? They won't use reserved barrels for storage, but will hold onto them for jobs that process directly to barrels.

[Lagslayer]

How would I check if they are reserved?

[Urist Imiknorris]

For the atomsmasher, you need either a larger drawbridge or a raise-to-crush note somewhere, in case you forget.

[Lagslayer]

Also, I'm sorry all the noobish questions I've been posting. I'm still new and trying to find where everything is .

[Urist Imiknorris]

No problem, everyone here went through that. Also, in Dwarven Fortress, lag slays you!

[Lagslayer]

You can say that again. My FPS has gotten pretty bad. I need to figure out how to install DFclean.

Also, gotta control my habit of strip mining.

[Roflcopter5000]

Traffic designations help enormously with strip-mine FPS issues... But something that helps far more is just making your smelters/masons go grab the ore/stone themselves, instead of having stockpiles for it. One pathfind every so often takes a lot less cycles than 5-10 pathfinds constantly. If this is just unworkable, make one small (4x4 or so if you can get away with it) ore/stone stockpile per high priority material, that is a great compromise. Seriously, you'll notice a HUGE fps increase on this one. (I'm strip mining on a fort right now, ignoring my own advice, and any time I turn on my magma smelters my FPS drops by about 30.)

A few less ideal but occasionally preferable options:
If you are done with a mining operation and ore is left over, quantum stockpile it by the entrance. This will cause your FPS to eat total shit for quite awhile while your haulers go to work, but if you wall off the mine/ set restricted traffic designations, you never have to worry about it again.
Limit your number of stone haulers. This can be a  pain sometimes, because there are situations in which you may end up wanting to juggle the labors on a large number of dwarves. But it works.
Wall off the mine.

And of course:
Magma.

[Lagslayer]

I'm not stockpiling any stone, but I have everyone working constantly. Idling dwarves bother me. I do have a lot of animals running around, so I could probably cage them up near my farmers workshops and butchers. How do I distinguish male and female animals on the mayday tileset? I think i know where they are, but they look like a bag and an amulet and I don't know which is which.

[Zaerosz]

Bags use the male symbol if you don't have a tileset, while amulets use the female symbol.

[Xenos]

Bags use the male symbol if you don't have a tileset, while amulets use the female symbol.

In the phoebus tileset the symbol for an amulet looks like the ovaries and uterus.  I'm just saying.