How to Get Empty Food Storage in Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress is a game with many mechanics, some which may drive you up the wall. It leaves a lot to figure out by yourself, however some issues just don’t appear to be resolving no matter what you do. Having empty food storage is another problem that many players face when trying to brew drinks under the impression that they have everything they need. Here is how to get empty food storage in Dwarf Fortress.

How to make empty food storage in Dwarf Fortress

One infuriating message you may receive is that your dwarves aren’t brewing drinks due to no free food storage. ‘Free food storage’ refers to an empty barrel that they can throw the drinks in. There are a few methods that you may need to try to solve this issue.

Make more barrels

One possible fix would be to simply create more barrels. Set your Carpenter’s Workshop or Metalsmith’s Forge to produce a whole bunch of barrels. This way, there is more than ample space to store your drinks and your food. You can never do with enough barrels in Dwarf Fortress.

With all of your empty barrels in a stockpile dedicated to food (which includes drinks), your dwarves shouldn’t have a problem throwing their produced drink into a barrel of their choice.

Note that there are many different types of drink available, such as ales and wines that they won’t put into the same barrel. So even if you have many barrels with some booze, they may complain that they don’t have enough space because the type of alcohol they are creating can’t mix with the existing barrels’ content.

Sort out an input and output

Select the Still and click on the stockpile button in the top right corner. You may have to directly select which stockpile that the Still should take items from and the stockpile that the Still should give items to. In this case, choose your food stockpile with empty barrels as the output stockpile and select any other stockpile with plants as the input stockpile.

Related: How to get seeds in Dwarf Fortress

One stockpile cannot be both the input and output stockpile, so you will have to separate your drink barrels from your plants. With the new instructions, your dwarves may have an easier time knowing what barrels to use. Even in this case, make sure you have plenty of barrels spare.

Keep this in mind

Your Still itself may have a barrel with alcohol in it. You can check this by clicking on the still and looking at the bottom section, where there will be the item used to create the Still and the barrel of booze. This barrel will still be in the brewing process even if no one is there working on it. Barrels may get trapped in the supply line if you didn’t have enough plants to brew enough of that one type of alcohol.

Make enough barrels and establish supply lines and you should be brewing in no time.

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