To be honest, running this fortress is starting to feel like kind of a hassle. With all these nobles and religions and guilds making demands, I feel like all I'm doing is dealing with those. Well, them and the couple of stressed dwarves that I can't seem to make happy. And carving out more bedrooms to try to keep up with the population. We also seem to be going through booze faster than we can produce it. We have plenty of plants, but they're just not brewing the drinks fast enough. We have three stills and two repeating "brew drink from plant" work orders. Do I need to create more copies of the work order so that more dwarves can be brewing simultaneously? I dunno, man. At any rate, it seems like I'm just constantly putting out fires (figuratively) and not really making any forward progress anymore. Maybe I'm just grumpy.
- they/them
I live in Portland and sometimes I make video games if I can find somebody who will pay me to do it.
in reply to @czircon's post:
Re: the work orders for brewing, what conditions did you set? I ran into a similar problem and discovered it's because I thoughtlessly put in a condition where they only started brewing if the stockpile of drinks fell below 10. I upped that to 500 and haven't had this problem since.
My conditions are that the amount of plants is greater than 10 and the amount of empty food storage items is greater than 10. Hmm... Maybe the barrels are the problem. I thought we had plenty of empty ones, but it looks like a lot of them are full of meat now. So I guess I need to make more barrels.
I've definitely felt this. You want to work on new projects but the list of immediate needs is ever expanding. It's good to take a break! I find that if I just keep putting out fires I eventually look and the fort has come a long way even though it felt like I was only in maintenance mode.
For drinks, I find it's best to have multiple small-batch orders. You can define a work order for a specific still by going to the still and going to the third tab. So you can make a "brew 2 plants if empty storage is at least 2 and fermentable plants is at least 2, repeat daily", if you add one if these to each still you'll eliminate a class of problems where a larger job gets hung up.
Furthermore you can assign specific brewer's to each still and then restrict then to only brew. This pretty much maximizes output. For barrels you can set up a repeating work order that triggers when empty barrels falls below a number so having that is essential!
1 dwarf drinks 5 per season, 20 per year. 200 dwarves drink on average 12 drinks per day. If you have 2 stills brewing twice per day you'll be outputting 20-100 drinks per day!