What prepare meal work order do you use?

[Giant Space Hamster]

I'm having trouble making a prepare meal work order that doesn't constantly trigger alerts.

Make 5 if:
Amount of unrotten prepared meals less than (<) 10
Amount of unrotted cookable solid items is at least (>=) 10

I constantly get "...cancels prepare fine meal: Needs unrotten cookable solid item"

For other work orders, the requirement to have them prevents the warning from popping up. Is there a hidden requirement here I'm not aware of or something?

[NimrodX]

I have yet to figure out how to prevent work orders from generating job canceled alerts. I mean I'm not sure if it can be done completely even if you're really exact with the numbers, especially if multiple work orders are drawing from the same materials.

[Jaregon]

yeh it's odd if you set up an order to only do at certain times, just to have it tell you it failed due to the reasons you set. *Like, yeh i know you failed cause you tried to do it without checking your handbook.* it both annoys me, but does remind me to remove my butcher animal order every so often after my hunter randomly feels like hunting. otherwise i normally just ignore the failed job alerts.

[NimrodX]

Animal butchering and fish cleaning can be done as a standing order and shouldn't require a work order.

[Harmonica]

Prepare fine meal 1/1
Amount of unrotten cookable meat is > 14
Restarts if completed, checked daily

Then I have prepare easy meal that checks against having less meat than that.

Same for fish.

This doesn't throw up failed notifications when they're not satisfied, and makes meals every/most days.

14 is just an example based on more or less the starting pop. Scale up the 14 based on your population and meat/fish supplies (if dwindling meat, increase it so that they tend to make easy meals).

Kitchen might compete against the still (for barrels), so you can add some conditions covering barrels and/or amount of drink and vice-versa if you need.

[Sinclair]

I have two orders:

Prepare easy meal (5/5):
Restarts if completed, conditions checked daily
Amount of unrotten cookable solid items available is at least 10
Amount of unrotten cookable items available is at least 10
Amount of unrotten prepared meals available is at most 400

Prepare lavish meal (1/1):
Restarts if completed, conditions checked daily
Amount of unrotten cookable solid items available is at least 10
Amount of unrotten cookable items available is at least 10
Amount of unrotten prepared meals available is at most 300
Amount of unrotten prepared meals available is at most 500

Remember that an easy meal takes less ingredients than fine, which takes less than lavish. I usually buy a lot of food from every caravan, so I don't run out of stuff for making meals. Of course, I also haven't built the kitchen until year 3 or so, so ingredients could accumulate.

[Commisar Jon Fuklaw]

In general, I don't even bother with work orders for stills and kitchens. In forts that aren't well established, kitchens don't get used and I keep only enough stills that a constant high priority brew order will supply the fort.

In well established forts, kitchens are used to produce constant fine meals at high priority until 2-4 cooks are at least proficient, at which point the order is changed to lavish meals. Still orders do not change at any point, only the number of stills.

Cooks and brewers are rotated out every 6 months for stress reduction except in the case of unforeseen events or of "oops I forgot."

[Grimmrog_SIG]

Originally posted by NimrodX:

I have yet to figure out how to prevent work orders from generating job canceled alerts. I mean I'm not sure if it can be done completely even if you're really exact with the numbers, especially if multiple work orders are drawing from the same materials.

yes the spam of "I dun hav it" makes the player absolutely ignore these messages as you get them spammed left and right. If we could cusomize in the workshop which throws emssages and which not, that would be fine.

[Arson]

Originally posted by Giant Space Hamster:

I'm having trouble making a prepare meal work order that doesn't constantly trigger alerts.

Make 5 if:
Amount of unrotten prepared meals less than (<) 10
Amount of unrotted cookable solid items is at least (>=) 10

I constantly get "...cancels prepare fine meal: Needs unrotten cookable solid item"

For other work orders, the requirement to have them prevents the warning from popping up. Is there a hidden requirement here I'm not aware of or something?

If you're seeing a cancel message it means that the work order was created because it met your conditions, but the conditions don't ensure that when the order is created there are enough materials to create the 5 you want it to craft. So, one easy way to avoid a lot of that is changing your prepare order to just 1 unit. That way, you should only receive 1 cancellation messages and then not again until the conditions are met once more.

Since the conditions of the order are to repeat it if the order was successful, then it will only continue until just 1 fails if setup this way. The way you currently have it if the order is triggered if may successfully craft one, you run out of materials, and the other 4 are still queued. You'll receive an error message for each one of those.

I recommend just using 1/1 on nearly all your standing orders for this reason. Alternatively, you could change the conditions of your standing order to have the number of items available set higher. That way, you stand less of a chance of queuing up 5 items when you might only be able to make one.

[LaChouette]

Fine meals take three ingredients. So by making sure you have at least 10, you're only making sure you can make 3 fine meals.
Which means you should ask for at least 15 ingredients to cook 5 fine meals.
Then there's also the fact that your dwarves can still eat those ingredients without them getting cooked. So if you have exactly 15 ingredients and a dwarf eats one, you'll get a notification that you can't make your 5th meal.
I'd personally ask for at least 30 ingredients, just to be sure.

[Grimmrog_SIG]

you will still get these errors unless you give a big enough buffer, because some other workshop may claim the stuff and then the kitchen isn't havign access to them. it took em ages to understand that i need to have TALLOW to disallow it in the kithcne menu first. becaue if you miss that moment you cannot disallow it and poof it's gone to food before it cane become soap.

[Sinclair]

Originally posted by Commisar Jon Fuklaw:

In general, I don't even bother with work orders for stills and kitchens. In forts that aren't well established, kitchens don't get used and I keep only enough stills that a constant high priority brew order will supply the fort.

In well established forts, kitchens are used to produce constant fine meals at high priority until 2-4 cooks are at least proficient, at which point the order is changed to lavish meals. Still orders do not change at any point, only the number of stills.

Cooks and brewers are rotated out every 6 months for stress reduction except in the case of unforeseen events or of "oops I forgot."

In contrast, I do automate my stills as soon as I'm able, because my brewers tend to run out of ingredients fairly regularly in the early game, and while a basic job on repeat will get canceled and disappear, one set by manager will restart as soon as there's enough stuff in the stockpiles again.

[Giant Space Hamster]

Thank you for all the helpful replies, especially (but not limited to) Arson for the tip about running out of materials post-task-start and LaChouette for pointing out the cost of meals. I have no idea how many units of anything is required for or produced by in this game.

My industry is running much more smoothly now.

[Arson]

Originally posted by Giant Space Hamster:

Thank you for all the helpful replies, especially (but not limited to) Arson for the tip about running out of materials post-task-start and LaChouette for pointing out the cost of meals. I have no idea how many units of anything is required for or produced by in this game.

My industry is running much more smoothly now.

My pleasure.

The DF wiki may be the most comprehensive wiki of any PC game I've played before. Though the UI has changed somewhat from the classic game, nearly all the mechanics remain the same. I highly recommend it, especially the industry pages such as Paper Industy, etc. All very helpful. Also, the Kitfox Games Discord is where the DF community is mainly on Discord. Their DF Questions channel is also full of helpful vets. Links below for both.

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Main_Page

https://discord.gg/kitfoxgames

[CoolNitro]

Prepare lavish meal 0 ( unlimited ) with no conditions, same goes for drinks.

My current fort has roughly 190+ dwarfs and guests, has always only had one still and kitchen and 3 farmers with locked cooking / brewing / farming ( only they do it ) I have around 2k lavish meals and about 600 drinks and only recently had to disable cooking drinks for balance.

Basically food and drinks are fire and forget as long as they are always on and you import what ever food stuffs the traders bring.

[graalGGTV]

Originally posted by Giant Space Hamster:

I'm having trouble making a prepare meal work order that doesn't constantly trigger alerts.

Make 5 if:
Amount of unrotten prepared meals less than (<) 10
Amount of unrotted cookable solid items is at least (>=) 10

I constantly get "...cancels prepare fine meal: Needs unrotten cookable solid item"

For other work orders, the requirement to have them prevents the warning from popping up. Is there a hidden requirement here I'm not aware of or something?

A simple meal uses 2 food ingredients. The lavish uses 4. So, if they have 10 unrotten food items, they can only create 5 simple meals, or 2 lavish meals, which would explain your current problems

Edit: after reading the thread, I noticed that people have already pointed out everything that's relevant