I`m in the starting phase. the first dwarven caravan is at my fort now, and im trading away. I have 3 kinds of booze, and they seem to eat, drink and sleep more than 2 times per season. o.O or maybe not more, but they use significantly more time than usual.
The most common cause for this is not enough *barrels* of booze. When a dwarf drinks, they claim a barrel, path to it, grab it, upend it, and chug until finished. If anything is left they may put it back or drop it and generate a hauling task for someone else. No other dwarf can be using the same barrel from when it gets first claimed until it is properly re-filed in a stockpile, and that can add up to a lot of time. Note that you can have a fair amount of booze in a single barrel, which is efficient for storage but inefficient for actual drinking.
From the
wiki on Alcohol: "a dwarf will drink booze an average of four times per season". The
Starting Build article says "A single dwarf eats about 2x/season, and drinks about 4x/season." IIRC the old rule of thumb was at least 12 booze per starting dwarf, to get through to the caravan; with caravans sometimes arriving later and migrant waves earlier these days, that's a bit risky unless you're confident about getting your industries up fast. If you pick a nice variety of starting booze, that should give you roughly enough barrels for the initial 7 to drink freely, but if you're adding dwarves and/or taking up barrels with other things (food, etc.) then you can have available drinking quanta drop low enough that you have what amounts to a line. Additional inefficiencies like poorly placed or badly pathed meeting rooms and stockpiles can also slow up the drinking process, and ultimately everything else. Ultimately, one of the controlling aspects of efficient fortress design is that you need to plan for your dwarves to stop what they're doing, go have a drink, and go back to what they were doing as effectively as possibly, as it happens a bit more than monthly.
Additionally, the invisible "Haul to depot" jobs you generate by selecting something for trading are high priority, so dwarves tend to drop what they were doing to help. But that means that dwarves that had already gotten a bit thirsty (or hungry), but held off until they finished their current task, will have a moment of "no task" and prioritize getting a drink before they go do something else. This is why people complain about their broker going off work the moment they are needed; you should pull them off their duties (bookkeeper, etc.) enough ahead of the caravan's arrival, or at least immediately upon arrival announcement, to let them drink and eat at least, and possibly sleep.
Author
Topic: My dwarves are some serious alcholics! (Read 1725 times)