Since you added a lot of liquid food, having a way to force dwarf to cook with them first would be nice or we risk to overflow our cooking stockpile with liquids

I tried to account for this. Every plant that produces milk also produces flour. Plants that produce syrups also produce sugar, either directly through milling or by boiling the syrup further into sugar.

Forcing dwarves to cook with liquids is a tedious process of stockpile linking and distance, and it's not something that can be changed with modding. Meals are not produced by a moddable reaction, but by a vanilla job (technical terms from how the game works internally; reactions are available to modders, jobs are not.) Reactions that produce meals don't have a way to remember the materials added to them, so they end up as just generic meal items with no ability to cater to citizen preferences. There used to be a way to force cooking with specific materials in DFHack, but gui/workshop-job hasn't been updated for version 50 yet.

Bummer, on another note having a file with all the plants "tags" sorted by product would be nice to have so that setting up autofarm is easier (the same with saplings).

The categories would be I think :

clothing : (crops and saplings)
thread
dye

alcohol : (crops and saplings)
roast
direct drinks

cooking : (crops and saplings)
oil
roast
flour
sugar
syrup
milk
tofu
1 step cooking only (are soybeans/peanuts cookable directly ?)

wood :
only wood

all :
crops
saplings

I probably missed some but it would be great to have until gui/autofarm exist please.

I'll look into making something like that, it's a good idea. You've probably already seen it, but there is the plant materials spreadsheet[docs.google.com] that shows which plants produce which products and which material is used in the process. I should probably make that sortable by product.

Word of warning on autofarm, though: it only works well with structural plants. It doesn't keep track of growths, so plants where you're using the fruits, leaves, flowers, etc. will just be continually planted until you're out of those seeds because it's only looking for the structural plant materials in your stockpiles. It's great for crops like grains, mushrooms, and root crops where you're stockpiling and using the structural material, but for berries, fruits, and leaves it will never stop planting them, even if your stockpiles are overflowing.

I'll look into making a file that will setup autofarm for the plants that work with it. I would look into fixing autofarm, but it's a compiled .dll and I'm not sure how the DFHack maintainers feel about adding mod support to such files.

I've added an autofarm_commands.txt file to the Work Orders directory. Its use is described in the discussion "DFHack Files: Work Orders and Autofarm." It should be more helpful than just a list of which plant IDs fall into which categories.

Thank you, could you do the same for the saplings ?

I've been working on it, but the script I use to generate saplings is a bit more complicated to change and I've had less free time since I'm starting a third job this week.

I've added a similar file to Advanced Orchards for autofarming saplings.

Droseran, modder has created Advanced Agriculture, a adamantine mod! He offers it to The Steam Community.

when I was playing around with reactions, I found it helpful to use buckets preferentially for reactions, since dwarves will pour the contents of a bucket into a barrel in a stockpile when they can.

Which specific reactions do you think can benefit from this change?

I found it particularly useful for honey and oil pressing reactions on presses

The issue with using buckets for these is that honey and oil are cookable, and honey is also brewable. Being able to control the stack size of these items is important to ensure the prepared meals and mead made from them can fit in barrels for storage. That is why the reactions for oil in this mod make oil (and other food ingredients like flour) in batches of 5 (5 * 4 = 20 prepared meals, exactly 3 prepared meal stacks per barrel), and why there are reactions to make 20 units of honey directly into a barrel (20 honey * 5 = 100 mead, the limit a barrel can hold). Using buckets would end up with containers holding odd amounts of these reagents. This is fine for lye, since as long as there's as much or more lye as there is oil in the reaction things don't break. This is why I changed the lye production reaction to create it in batches of 5 as well.

Also, due to a bug with reactions involving liquids in containers, there must be exactly the amount of honey in every barrel being used for mead brewing as the reaction requires. The only way to ensure this is to have a reaction that produces the exact amount of honey required in one barrel in a way that can't be added to or removed from. At the moment the barrel of mead reaction is using a (hopefully temporary) work-around that avoids the bug by requesting 20 honey directly instead of in a container. This has other issues, namely that the honey can't be taken back out of the still once an order for mead is made, and if the still is broken the honey in it spills on the ground since it's not in a container.

I do like the suggestion, and if not for the quirkiness of Dwarf Fortress's reaction/job systems regarding liquids, I would implement it. It's a realistic manner of dealing with liquid processing in the era Dwarf Fortress is set in.

Do you have any plans for "process plant to bag"? It's fairly neglected in vanilla, and I've used it for edible leafy greens.

I ignore it/remove it. I think it's a leftover from when growths were first implemented and wasn't removed when the design no longer needed it. Growths are given when plants are harvested/foraged, and the level of abstraction in DF indicates that a single leaf item is actually meant to indicate a unit of harvest like a bushel based on how much food is provided.