Meat and milk cannot be transported from the barn.
About half of the meat and milk produced goes straight to the barn to rot.
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This has been brought up a couple of times here and on steam, shame nothings been done about it.
I’ve noted it in every single playtest so far, milk shop and smokers take from barns, but workers should be moving meat to cellars and they are not, and a barn has no excuse with its 16 workers 
That’s strange, so you never see milk stored in your root cellars? Because I checked and it seems to work in my game.
I do get the occasional popup though that milk spoils and that usually comes from barns, but I just assumed that is because milk spoils very quickly and doesn’t always get transported out fast enough, while the cheesemakers will take milk from root cellars first before going to barns.
Some of my milk and meat goes the cellars but not all. I have fully staffed barns and 75+ free laborers (at pop 300), they should be able to move the inventory. I have min storage on the root cellars too.
Free laborers unfortunately don’t empty production buildings, not even to fill minimum storage quota.
It’s one of the things I hope they’re going to change in the future, I hope, because in my 1700 pop town, it’s frustrating to see workers of many buildings spend over half their time transporting goods, while my laborers are Idle over 70% of the time.
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Do they transport between storage buildings? You can try putting a storage building close to the barns and another close to the cheesmaker (or whoever needs it).
I had to do that with my coal mine recently and it seemed to reduce the % spend on travel. Worth a shot imho.
That’s what I usually do. It’s the best way to reduce travel times I think, but it’s still a pain because especially the minimum storage quota are very often only filled infrequently by laborers.
It’s just annoying that they can’t pick up from production buildings directly, but instead have to wait until the production building has full storage and starts transporting its produce to storage.
This works badly mainly because workers of other buildings CAN pick up directly from production buildings. That’s what makes it dumb, because imagine you have a mill and a bakery both with a granary next door, with the minimum quota of flour set for the one next to the bakery. The idea is the bakers don’t have to walk all the way but can just pick it up next door, while laborers take over transport duties.
But as long as the mill doesn’t get full storage, no flour goes to the mill’s granary, the laborers will just stand by idly, the bakers’ granary remains empty and because the bakers can’t get anything from there, they will walk all the way to the mill to pick up flour, exactly what you DON’T want to happen. And because the bakers drain the mill of flour now, the millers don’t transport any flour to the granaries, no flour enters the transport system and the laborers remain idle. The transport system you designed does not work at ALL.
Only when you overproduce flour so much that the mills get full storage despite the bakers picking it up directly, the granaries next to the mill will start filling with flour, and the laborers can start filling the quota in the granaries next to the bakery. And only at that point, after having the bakers make countless trips to the mill back and forth while the other bakers idled, will the transport system you designed finally start working.
All of this would work flawlessly if only laborers could pick up goods from production buildings directly. It’s a QoL improvement this game desperately needs.
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Yeah I’ve seen that happen as well. I paused production on my bakery (or equivalent) to give the production some breathing room to start filling up the storage.
I agree it would be nice if we can prevent unwanted pickups from production buildings in some way.
That’s not even necessary I think, just give laborers the ability to take over any transport duties between buildings, both loading and unloading them, laborers generally have very little to do anyway as the game progresses. It probably would make professions like hunter a lot more efficient as well if they didn’t need to haul their yields all the way back to town from their far out cabins.
Yeah but at the start they do (and I’m always short on them).
My major major gripe is that what’s the point of the upgraded barns having 16 workers, there’s just no excuse for stuff spoiling in the upgraded barns 
Sure, but if you’re short on them, the workers in the buildings should still be able to transport the goods or stock the buildings the same way they do now. The only change needs to be that laborers can take this over if they don’t have anything else to do anyway.
This may be the same as smokers, who always show “red travel” on my maps, even if I put then right next to barns, close to a firewood splitter, and near every kind of storage building, all set to hold a minimum quantity of meat, fish or firewood (as permitted by the building type). I also have all the storage and transport needed, such as barrels and wagons. I tried putting shelters, market, rat catcher and other buildings close by. My guys just walk for days across the map. I wish my smokehouse was just an optional extension to my large barn.
Having the smokehouse be an extension of the barn would not work, as you already need it from the beginning of the game to smoke hunter’s meat and fish.
The game could use more manual controls for the player to force villager behavior. Just allow the player to set preferential buildings for the smoker, where he can take his meat from, and only have him go somewhere else if none of them contain meat or fish.
As it is now, the game leans too much on its own AI for villager behavior to organize transport of goods, and it becomes more of an issue as your settlement gets larger.
I meant to add a “extra smoker” for the upgraded barns (maybe just processing meat) That smoker can be staffed by barn workers, during the spring culling season, but not disable the normal one from the early game. Upgraded barns could also have vet service, that use medicine, barrel stored food supplies etc. Maybe some DLC in 3 years… So many upgrades are possible to many buildings.