quote:
Originally posted by Amir Alawi:
<STRONG>My dwarves are very rarely drinking alcohol. Instead they are preferring to drink water from the rivers.</STRONG>
I have not seen this problem, but there is an unfortunate issue with alcohol in that you need essentially a barrel per every two dwarves to be fairly certain they'll drink. When a dwarf wants to drink, he checks for a barrel of alcohol he can reach. If he finds one, he flags it for his drinking, and no one else can do anything with that barrel until he finishes drinking it. Similarly, if that barrel is tasked for being dragged to a stockpile, it can't be flagged for drinking at the time.
This isn't a question of how much alcohol you have, because if you're unlucky, a dwarf might grab a stack of 5 helmet spawn and brew them all at once, making a whole bunch of alcohol, but in a single barrel that will take forever to empty. There is no way to request drink be evenly distributed between barrels nor to have a brewer add new drink to an existing barrel.
What's worse is that sometimes I've found dwarves randomly hauling around barrels of ale when they are doing other things like hunting. I'm guessing this was because he didn't have a waterskin available to keep water in or some such. Perhaps it was a bug... Dwarves do weird things sometimes, and I don't think anything of it.
Of course, it'd be neat if dwarves would actually fill their waterskins with dwarven vodka... But perhaps that has to wait for dwarven juniper berries. As it is, hunters just plain get surly after a while from sleeping in the dirt, drinking plain water (yech!) from the river or waterskin, and never admiring the local statue garden.