Dwarf Fortress – Required Empty Food Storage Item

Players of Dwarf Fortress have likely come across the frustrating message that their dwarf isn’t producing beverages due to a lack of accessible food storage space. Don’t fret, though – this article covers everything you need to know about effectively managing food storage items!

From understanding barrels to creating designated stockpile zones, this guide can help keep the underground dwellers of your community happy and well-fed!

How to Unlock It

Dwarf Fortress can be immensely frustrating when an error arises that states there isn’t enough food storage for Dwarves to brew drinks despite having plenty of barrels dedicated to making drinks, and finding out how to remedy this situation can be even more time-consuming than anticipated.

Unfortunately, several practical strategies are available to quickly resolve this problem and get your dwarves brewing again quickly. The first step should be ensuring you have sufficient barrels available by setting up carpenters and metalsmiths to produce plenty of them; place these next to your stills within a stockpile area so dwarves can reach them.

An effective strategy for ensuring you always have enough seeds is to use the labor button and assign dwarf gatherers as gatherers, enabling them to harvest plant life from gardens and underground caverns nearby, providing an ample supply of seeds while alleviating some of the burdens of farming and brewing.

Players can maximize their storage by designing specific food storage areas for dwarves to brew in, which prevents them from accidentally turning plump helmets into meals that ruin spawn needed to grow new ones.

How to Fix It

Dwarf Fortress is a prevalent management and construction simulation video game developed by Bay 12 Games and released in 2006. However, many gamers have encountered the “requires empty food storage item” bug when making drinks at their still. This error message typically indicates that too few free dwarves exist to create such beverages – though this issue can be resolved using several methods.

One way to address the problem is to establish a stockpile that accepts only barrels near your still. This will keep dwarves from getting stuck in their supply chains as there will always be room for additional drinks – though this solution might lower food production levels if space for barrels is limited.

Increased food production from your dwarf race can also help address this problem by decreasing barrel requirements while helping prevent wasteful eating habits among your dwarves. You can do this by setting up a Carpenter’s workshop or Metalsmith’s Forge that produces many barrels simultaneously.

Separating food and booze stocks will help the dwarf’s output and input lines from mixing up – another cause of this error message.

How to Make More Barrels

“Requires empty food storage item” has become an issue that dwarf fortress players have recently encountered. When producing drinks, Dwarves receive an error message saying there is not enough free food storage space to make drinks – this can be very frustrating; however, there are several solutions.

One way is to produce more barrels; this can be accomplished by setting up a carpenter’s workshop or metalsmith’s forge and creating several barrels simultaneously. An alternative approach would be for Still to take items from and give things to specific food and drink stockpiles instead of providing generalized caches; this way, the dwarf producers have somewhere to store their drinks, eliminating complaints about insufficient free space.

Making barrels and large pots that hold drinks out of lightweight materials such as wood is also recommended, as this will help to reduce weight and facilitate faster hauling by shortening haul distance. Furthermore, it would be wise to distinguish drink from plant barrels to establish more efficient supply lines between production areas like Stills and farms.

How to Make Drinks

Food and drinks are vitally crucial to Dwarf Fortress’s inhabitants, especially alcohol. Your dwarves rely on it for creating various types of beverages; however, the process can become challenging due to different varieties interacting differently and difficulty tracking available barrels.

Due to this limitation, many players encounter the “Requires empty food storage item” message when trying to create alcohol. Luckily, this issue can quickly be addressed with just a few steps.

First and foremost, you’ll need to create a dedicated drink stockpile. This will prevent your dwarves from mistaking food items for drinks when placing orders with you. After completing this actual drinks stockpile, start brewing beer and wine as soon as you have enough barrels available – otherwise, they could get caught with an error such as “Requires empty food items.”

Making more wooden barrels may also help with the lack of food storage items, though this requires wood and a carpenter (created by clicking on the stone and hammer icon or pressing H). Once created, assign him to make additional barrels.