v0.31:Quickstart guide/Stockpiles

This page contains some additional details on customizing and optimizing your stockpiles using detailed stockpile settings. This isn't absolutely required, so to keep things simple it isn't included in the main guide.

After you have things going pretty well, you may want to follow the advice on this page to make your food, booze and seed stockpiles more efficient.

Changing Stockpile Settings

At a minimum keep corpses, refuse, stone and wood out of any "general use" stockpiles. Try to remember to disable/forbid types of things on general use stockpiles as you create more specific stockpiles for things.

After you have defined a stockpile, you can change what sort of items the stockpile accepts. To do this:

1. Hit q (Set Building Tasks/Prefs)
2. Place the cursor on the stockpile you want to change
3. Press s to get to the stockpile settings.

Stockpile for Seeds Only

Dig out a nook (2x2 is fine) near your farm plot(s) and create a custom stockpile that only accepts seeds. The easiest way to do this is to create a food stockpile in the nook, then exit the stockpile menu and hit q. Place the cursor on the stockpile, hit s, select Food, hit b for "block all", then move to Food->Seeds and hit p to permit seeds.

You will need to go disable seeds on any stockpiles that accept food in order to force seeds to be moved to the new seed stockpile.

Keeping all your seeds stockpiled near your farm will let your farming dwarves spend more time farming and less time hauling seeds around.

Dining Area Stockpiles

Level -6: Dining level with dining hall, kitchen, still, and storage area.

This will give you some help optimizing stockpiles for your dining and food production areas. You should have:

• A stockpile around your still
• A stockpile around your kitchen
• A general food storage stockpile in a food storage room

For the still stockpile, customize the stockpile as follows:

• enable Food and Furniture - select each one and hit e for enable.
• disable other top-level categories
• forbid all subtypes of Food except Plants - You can also select Food, hit b for Block All, then move to Food->Plants and press p for Permit.
• Forbid all subtypes of furniture except Furniture->Type->barrels and Furniture->Type->Large Pots/Food Storage (The latter of which is at the bottom of the list. Keep scrolling down.)
• Make sure "prepared food" is turned off for this storage area - select Food and press u (see lower right where it says u: Prepared Food)
• Now hit Esc to exit the custom settings.

For the kitchen stockpile, use the same commands but:

• Enable Food
• Disable other top-level categories if they aren't already disabled.
• Disable Prepared food - go to Food and press u.
• Forbid Plants - select Food->Plants and press f for Forbid. (You want your brewers to get first shot at the plants so keep them away from the kitchen and close to the still.)
• Forbid Seeds - as with plants, select Food->Seeds and hit f.

For the main food storage room, enable only Food and forbid Seeds. Leave prepared food and other food types as permitted.

For your custom general use stockpile (the one on the ground floor) use q to change the settings to disable Food and also forbid (under Furniture->Type) barrels and large pots. This will cause these things to get moved to your new stockpiles.

This way your still will have easy access to the plants needed to create alcohol, your kitchen will be near the ingredients used in creating meals, and your food storage room will keep the ready-to-eat food near the dining hall.