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[Metalax]

Nice to see that Drink has been separated out to it's own tab, but I have a few more suggestions for the kitchen screen.

As there are now so many plants with potentially multiple ways of being processed, would it be possible to get a millable toggle in the kitchen screen? A potential second would be a process toggle for any processing not covered under cooking/brewing/milling.

Particularly as seeds are now millable to paste I've had several occasions when overzealous millers have gone through my entire rock nut supply, leaving my dwarves reliant on forage or trade to obtain more.

A more complex request is to be able to set a reserve level on a kitchen item such that it won't be brewed/cooked/processed if the stock falls below that point. This would let you reserve seeds for planting/booze for drinking while allowing excess to be cooked. It would also allow you to keep a supply of raw meat for animal training. A few exclusions such as allowing Growers to plant seeds ignoring the restriction(likely to be why you set it in the first place) or hungry dwarves that can't find any permitted food would likely be needed as well. Similarly to some other processes, this capability may need an appropriate Noble assigned to be available. I'd suggest Bookkeeper, perhaps with a minimum level of accuracy, or have the likelihood of the reserve being respected depend on the current level of stock accuracy.

A final request would be to add an order to the Farmers Workshop that lets you specify a stack of plants/fruits, that will drop seeds when eaten raw, in order to extract the seeds. As it stands a large number of the garden fruit and vegetables that can't be brewed/processed can't be set up sustainably in farms while allowing their cooking, as the only way to get seedstock back is to allow a dwarf to choose to eat the raw plant/fruit.

[LordUbik]

Totally agree. We can do much of this trought DFhack, but i would love to see that in vanilla.

[Reelya]

Particularly as seeds are now millable to paste I've had several occasions when overzealous millers have gone through my entire rock nut supply, leaving my dwarves reliant on forage or trade to obtain more.

You can get all the requested effects in vanilla by forcing buildings to take from links, and also creating buffer stockpiles, which don't feed to any building. Those buffer ones will only be used for planting etc, not processing. Stockpile management gives you finer grained control over usage than the kitchen screen does.

For milling, set up a set-sized rock nut "buffer" stockpile, which takes from the main food stockpile, but doesn't feed any mill. set the mills to only take from links back to the regular food stockpiles. The buffer should ensure that there are always rock nuts to plant. Another layer of insurance would be to make a feeder stockpile for the mills and allow it to hold rock nuts plus other stuff. Generally, rock nuts should be more likely to go to the rock-nut-only buffer than to the mill-input buffer, until the planting buffer is totally full.

the same trick will work on meat. make e.g. a 4x4 animal-feeding meat stockpile, and a kitchen-feeder stockpile that can take meat and other stuff. Guaranteed most meat will go to the animal feeding stockpile rather than the kitchen input stockpile, at least until it fills up, and any excess meat will end up being cooked.

[Metalax]

Yeah, I know that you can use stockpiles to emulate much of the idea. The first part is to bring milling and processing in-line with brewing and cooking in the level of control easily available.

The problem with the buffer stockpile idea to hold the reserve is that there is no way to limit it to holding only the reserve level of seeds unless you completely avoid having bags in your fortress. This then ends up with all of your nuts in the buffer with none available for milling. It is also reliant on the dwarves choosing to preferentially fill the buffer stockpile rather than the mill stockpile.

[Niddhoger]

a final problem is that dwarves don't choose jobs, jobs choose dwarves.  Worse, when a dwarf is chosen he picks up the nearest item to WHERE HE WAS not the workshop/stockpile.  Thus, you can't simply put the stockpile adjacent to the millstone, but you have to set it up to only take from links.  You also have to set up a bag stockpile link to the same millstone and have both of these stockpiles properly linked to source ones.  About my first point... the dwarf sees an empty spot in the source stockpile so picks something up and moves it there since its closest to him, and ignores the actual buffer stockpile that is left empty. 

The point is all this hassle is a mess that we shouldn't have to deal with.  We should be able to disable milling of everything but rock nuts and save our hemp for textiles from the same kitchen stock screen.  In fact, it should probably be renamed "organics" or "Food-stuffs/Plants"  so that we can easily control textile-plants from the same menus (as some plant fibers can be either brewed or milled instead) While we are at it, seeds (and olives) should have the "press" toggle by them as well.  We can already  do this type of functionality with cooking and brewing- so we can turn off brewing for everything but 1 type of plant (say to quickly gain seeds to start farming) or disable certain foods for cooking to force higher value prepared meals (Dragon roast made with quarry leaves and dwarven syrup, anyone?) In general, the inability to select what you make out of what materials is a general annoyance.  We can choose what gems to cut and use in encrusting, but we can't choose WHAT to encrust.  We can tell a mason to build 5 stone doors, but not out of what material.  We can ask our bone carver to make ram horn crafts, but we can't ask him to make figurines specifically out of them.  The same as how we can't just tell the miller to only mill 10 rock nuts and leave the dimple cups alone for now, we don't have the textiles/dwarf power to fool with them now but the farmer needed a little extra experience and we couldn't plant any more plump helmets.  Don't judge me.