When planting a forest for wood or a field of wheat measure out your tilled space in multiples of 3x3. In the middle of 9 spaces place a barrel.

After the barrels are built click one and open the management bar and exlude everything using the large red X button and then select the item you'll want stored. Use the small crate pile icon to copy that configuration to all the other barrels and then lock it in. Unfortuanatly you will need to open each barrel in the field to lock them all (you don't have to close the bar each time, just click "Manage" on the next to be done). If you have large groups of unmanaged stockpile barrels elsewhere you will need to click one to enable all items and copy that setting to the rest again. Once each field is set, you won't have to worry about them again.

To save townies from running to the river or lake simply dig a 1x1 hole, add water and set up some fishing lines. If you keep them 3 spaces apart you can add a decoration for additional happiness. The same can be done for sugarcane and bamboo.

As the basics of the town being built instead of a roof over the bakery place different land types to plant the various specialty foods. Then all the townies have to do is go upstairs to gather. You can do this with the fishing holes too, as long as there is a 2 layered floor to hold the water.

Pause the game at the very start while they are all happy and place 15 or so sleeping rooms. Unpause the game and get settlers and start your town with 15 folk instead of 11. I like to make a room of 9 personal spaces(3x3) (though this screenshot I've messed up because I built them over the Smithy/carpenters which I didn't measure). Then place a single luxury item in the middle. If they see in 6 spaces line of sight it should cover them all.

Planting trees to harvest is much safer than randomly hacking down trees until you can equip wood armor and stone weapons. I keep a minimum set at 5 of each armor and weapons to cover new arrivals or sell in the market.

Off to the side of the town I've built a small plot of flowers. Many of the merchants who visit accept flowers and color for trade. If you have minimums set from 30-100 of each color flower and color extracted from those flowers it will be very easy to build a nest egg to buy metals, golden items or those expensive and rare weapons.

Also, when you get the chance dig a trench along the entire edge of the screen behind your town. Attach the trench to bodies of water and fill it in with the add fluid tool. It will need to be filled in manually but it's worth it in the long run. You can limit where seiges come from and then build a single entrance with a line of traps for easy defense

When you reach level -4 of the dungeon you can begin to dig out lanes of travel. At level -2 you'd hit the river and flood the place.

It's simple, just order the townies to dig straigh through north to south and east to west and some angles to the corners (hold shift and dig small squares). After that build roads. At various points you can build stairs down to lower levels. In this way a townie gathering somethin on level 8 will go to one of the elevator points to level 4 then take the straigh path back to town. you will still want to cut holes between rooms to minimize the zig zagging but the haulers will not starve to death nearly as often.