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Using bins and barrels
v50.15 · v0.47.05 This article is about the current version of DF.Note that some content may still need to be updated. |
 | This feature has one or more outstanding bugs. Please view the Bugs section for details. |
Ordinarily, each item or stack (e.g. ≡Dwarven Ale Stew [12]≡) of items occupies one space of stockpile room. You can consolidate stockpile space by making bins, barrels and pots that can hold many items at once. Barrels and pots store food and alcohol; bins can store many types of smaller items, such as finished goods, metal bars, ammo, and gems. Building a steady supply of containers helps reduce the space you need for storage. If resources permit, it's very easy to keep a nominal amount of bins and/or barrels available by using Manager work orders.
Food storage[edit]
Food can be stored in barrels and pots. Each barrel or large pot can hold up to 60 total units. Each unit in a stack counts towards the total storage.
Foods will only be stored together if they're from the same category. For example, dwarves will never mix plants and meat in the same barrel.
One thing to note about storing seeds is that bags are required to put seeds in. These bags will then be placed inside the barrel or pot. Otherwise, the dwarves will end up with one seed per tile. Furthermore, as seeds will rot outside of a stockpile, you may find that your fortress is not getting seeds from the plants you're consuming when the food stockpile is full. Get your textile industry started early; you may want to avoid milling plants until it ramps up. [1]
Drink storage[edit]
Alcohol must be brewed into either a barrel or pot. Each container can hold a single stack of alcohol. Larger batches should be, but aren't, split across multiple containers automatically.
You can empty a container of alcohol by drinking, cooking, shotgunning it out of a minecart, trading, or application of extreme cold that destroys the container.
Goods storage[edit]
Most non-food items can be stored in bins; the quantity allowed depends upon the items stored. Each bin can store up to 12 bars or blocks, while 30 or more small crafts may fit into a single bin.
| Good | Bin Capacity |
|---|---|
| Bars/Block | 12 |
| Bolts | 400 |
| Coins | 193 (stacks of 500) |
| Cloth | 303 |
| Leather | 45 |
| Small Gems | 305 |
| Thread | 205 |
Managing stockpiles directly[edit]
It is possible to set whether bins and barrels can be used in a stockpile by opening the stockpile's menu (
p and clicking on the pile, or creating it) and then clicking on the barrel icon within the menu. By default, bins are used for Bar/Block, ammo, gems, finished goods, cloth and leather stockpiles, and barrels are used for food stockpiles. Also by default, the stockpiles that use barrels or bins to store other items will permit a barrel or bin on each of their spaces. You can override this by specifying the maximum number of barrels and bins that an individual stockpile is allowed to utilize by clicking the plus and minus buttons or by clicking the pound sign and typing the desired number. These buttons are invisible in ASCII mode currentlyv50.11. Take care when changing a stockpile's allowed contents or size: it can reset the allowed numbers of barrels and bins.
Bin/Barrel reassignment[edit]
If you have a limited number of barrels and pots (possibly due to a lumber and stone shortage because you're playing in a Fun place like the tundra) and your food stockpile is using too many barrels and you need some for booze, or if for some reason the opposite is true, you can force the dwarves through a series of steps to have the barrels switch from one stockpile to another. Assume you have too much barrelled food and you need barrels for booze. First, designate a small garbage dump zone nearby. Then set the maximum barrel limit on the food stockpile way down--possibly to zero. Don't worry, the existing barrels won't be dumped as a result. Now you can dump items in the barrels individually, by clicking on the barrel and clicking the dump icon on each item within... or, you can dump en masse with designations: 
i
p and click on each barrel. When dumping en masse, you can leave designations with esc or right click and click into each barrel afterwards to remove dumping on the barrel itself.
Once the contents are marked for dumping, the dwarves will take the food from the barrel and throw it into the garbage zone, and once the barrel is empty they will immediately move it to a furniture stockpile because the food stockpile barrel limit is exceeded already. Now you have a free barrel with which to brew. You can reclaim the food from the garbage dump now, and the dwarves will do what they can to store it. Be warned that this might end up being on the floor in the stockpile which could attract flies. Remember to set the barrel limit on the food stockpile back up to some reasonable level if you get your hands on some new barrels.
This trick does not work on artifacts as these cannot be dumped. One way to remove artifacts from a bin is to select them for display on a pedestal.
Barrel and bin material[edit]
Heavy barrels and bins slow down hauling, so it is wise to make them from light materials when possible. Even the heaviest types of wood are lighter than any metal (excluding adamantine) - the wood of feather trees is the best of all. As an alternative, you can place small "feeder" stockpiles that disallow barrels/bins and link them to larger storage stockpiles nearby to greatly reduce the distance traveled while carrying a heavy container.
Metal barrels are supposedly better for food stockpiles because they resist vermin; unfortunately there is no good way to convince your dwarves to allocate metal barrels for food storage aside from using them exclusively.
The material of the container also determines whether the container is fire-safe and magma-safe.
Bugs[edit]
- Hauling jobs block access to all the items in the destination containers until the hauling is complete. This often results in cancellation spam and work delays.Bug:9004 One workaround is creating a "feeder stockpile" with containers disabled.
See also[edit]