Containers

Containers are, typically enough, boxes (or barrels, or bins, or even bags) made out of a solid material and are used to hold everything from personal possessions, to gems, to beer, to quarry bush leaves[25], and even living creatures. Their use is context-sensitive, so you cannot use your =tower-cap barrel=s for storing +1052 Boatmurdered Gold Coins[2500]+.

Barrels, bins and bags

Barrels are (usually) wooden containers that are useful for storing items in a food stockpile and are used primarily for flammable, unstable and volatile liquids, 2nd-stage cooking items (read: dwarven syryp and quarry bush leaves), unlucky stacks of =longland beer biscuits[8]=, and so on. They are also found to have been used for seed disposal, with some barrels being occupied by bags filled with plump helmet spawn, rock nuts and so on.

Bins are, esentially, smaller barrels (although these can be made of metal) for everything that doesn't want barrels. They are sent to all the other stockpiles (with exclusion to the refuse and graveyard piles) and will hold much larger stacks of items, making organising those endless piles of +giant cave spider silk cloth+ much more easier to manage. They will also resize, much like the wizard's hat in Fantasia.

Bags are some of the most widely-used containers in dwarf fortress, due to their use as both seed preservation and sand collection. These are only made from plant fiber or animal (silk) cloth, or Adamantine if you're that much of a rich bastard (although you can make *anything* from that accursed stuff. These are also the only stockpile containers that can be used as a stationary container, if you want one for that sort of thing.

Cabinets and Coffers

These two containers are both furniture items in your fortress, and are useful if you don't want your fortress drowning in dumped items. These are only used as containers after you build them in an undercover (note: this term is used, as you can make a bus-shelter of a hut and have tables, chairs and all the indoor items in it as long as the ceiling's up). As long as a nearby bed/table/chair/armour rack/etc has been query-room-assigned to a dwarf, they will store their clothing items in the cabinet (look out for those dwarves with shoe fetishes ;) ), and all the other items (including coins), into the coffer.

NB: a coffer is also a chest for the wooden equivalent