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[shmelse]

My food stockpile is no longer working and I'm not sure what I've done wrong. 

The basic problem: dwarves will store food on the pile but they will not store them in barrels, even though there are plenty available, so there are tons of flies and the pile has to be *huge* and still can't hold all my individual stacks of 2 plump helmets.  Please help!

Symptoms:
What dwarves will do -

• harvest food and bring it to the stockpile
• prepare meals/fish/butcher and store it in the pile
• store food that I've bought on the stockpile
• use a few rows (from 2 to 6) of barrels, then they stop and just leave food

My barrel stockpile is right outside the door of the food stockpile and full of barrels.
I don't generally run idlers, but a lack of haulers is not the problem. 
They seem to be putting a lot of items on top of the barrels that are there.     
Looking at the job list, I've got tons of Store Item in Stockpile jobs but no Store Item in Barrel.  Very occasionally one will pop up, but usually I have none at all. 
I've got about 70 dwarves and this occurred in year 3 of my fortress.

Fixes attempted:
Deleted the stockpile and recreated it.
Shut down all other food stockpiles in the base and turned off all customization on the food stockpile, so I'm just using generic "food".  I've also checked my Max Barrels setting; it's the same as the number of squares in the stockpile. 
Checked orders:  "All dwarves harvest" and "Dwarves gather food" are selected. 
Create significant number of additional barrels, so a shortage is not an issue.
Unforbid all the barrels in my fortress. 
Dumped the entire pile into a Garbage dump zone, deleted the stockpile, recreated the pile and reclaimed all the food.  (This last one was a HUGE job; I've basically stopped all production in my fortress to make this happen, but it still hasn't solved the problem.  The dwarves have gone back and filled the first couple of rows with barrels and the rest of the spaces with individual food piles...)

Any ideas?  I'm sure it's some setting that I've changed and not realized it's having this effect, but my friend and I are both completely out of ideas as to what it might be.  I've got prepared meals rotting and miasma everywhere and the barrels are *right there*, why aren't they taking them?!  I'd really appreciate anyone else's thoughts on what I might have done to mess this up...

[twilightdusk]

At any given moment, a stockpile that is designated to receive barrels or bins will only have one empty barrel or bin on it at a time. If that barrel gets filled, and a dwarf is hauling something to that pile, they will just place the item on the pile, as the next barrel hasn't been placed yet. Once it's on the stockpile, the dwarves figure "hey, it's there on the pile, who needs the barrel?"

One fix that I've been advised to use in cases like this is to have a large number of small stockpiles as opposed to one giant stockpile. This way each individual stockpile will have an empty barrel ready, so a dwarf hauling food to the piles will have extra options if their original target barrel gets filled up before they arrive.

[Ubiq]

Check your stockpile listings; do you have any barrels reserved? That seems the most likely answer.

[shmelse]

At any given moment, a stockpile that is designated to receive barrels or bins will only have one empty barrel or bin on it at a time. If that barrel gets filled, and a dwarf is hauling something to that pile, they will just place the item on the pile, as the next barrel hasn't been placed yet. Once it's on the stockpile, the dwarves figure "hey, it's there on the pile, who needs the barrel?"

One fix that I've been advised to use in cases like this is to have a large number of small stockpiles as opposed to one giant stockpile. This way each individual stockpile will have an empty barrel ready, so a dwarf hauling food to the piles will have extra options if their original target barrel gets filled up before they arrive.

This isn't always the case, though.  On all my other stock piles with bins, they're happily putting every bin in the fortress onto the pile. 

I tried this suggestion and it didn't fix whatever I've done.  I'm creating smaller stock piles for foods but they're not putting any barrels on them at all, still just individual pieces of food.  So it's not just this one pile, they're not putting barrels on ANY food pile. 

Check your stockpile listings; do you have any barrels reserved? That seems the most likely answer.

When I hit "p", it says I have 0 reserved barrels and 0 reserved bins.  Is that what you mean, or is there some other place that I'm not seeing where barrels/bins might be reserved?

Anyone else know what I might have done to break my food?  This is my favorite fortress; I'd hate to see it brought down by something so simple.

[Korva]

Hmm. I had a similar problems with my huge supply of gems in a fort from 31.16: plenty of bins to spare, high number of permitted bins for the pile, yet for a long while they refused to add more. Over time I do find them adding bins now. The "only one new container will be added at a time" thing would make sense in that regard. So the best I can recommend is patience. It's curious since I too swear I've seen other stockpiles added to faster.

I found that it is quite easy to "overproduce" food after the first few seasons. If your stockpile is so huge, are you sure you need all of that food? Are you keeping brewers and cooks busy making meals and booze from it?

[nomad_delta]

Anyone else know what I might have done to break my food?  This is my favorite fortress; I'd hate to see it brought down by something so simple.

I'm pretty sure I encountered what must be the same bug during the setup of my current fortress.  Same problem -- I had created various separate food stockpiles:

1. Prepared Food Only
2. Drinks Only
3. Raw Plants Only
4. Seeds only (near my farm plots)
5. Everything Else

The problem seemed to happen mainly with the "raw plants only" stockpile -- it had max barrels assigned and plenty unused barrels available, but my dwarves just kept dropping the plants in the pile and never putting them in barrels.  The other stockpiles were using barrels just fine.

I wish I could tell you exactly what I did to fix it, but I was trying all sorts of things -- here's what I *think* finally worked for me at least:

1. Disabled barrels entirely on my "Seeds" stockpile -- they're just fine in bags anyway
2. Deleted ALL of my "Food" stockpiles -- all of them, all kinds
3. Created several large new "Food" stockpiles containing *everything* except seeds and with max barrels assigned -- no separate categories.
4. Waited for my dwarves to run around re-arranging everything into the new combined stockpiles -- and the put everything *including* the raw plants into barrels this time
5. After everything was sorted, I recreated my original separated food stockpiles, each with max barrels assigned, waiting for the dwarves to move everything around, and it's been working normally ever since.

Not sure how it got like that or whether the same will work for you.  Good luck!

--nomad_delta