Hey guys, I've just started getting into DF and had some questions.
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I was counting on the Kitchen to make egg biscuits and whatever meat we could scrounge and am just growing plump helmets to brew and pig tails for my clothing industry... My question is how big of a population could just this sustain? I also have cave wheat and other seeds from embarkation I brought with me but I haven't bothered to plant them yet.
I don't know how many poultry you brought, nor have any feel for how fast eggs are produced and etc., but if you get those crops in asap you'll be fine. They usually take a half-season to mature, so if you're lucky you'll get 2/season or so* (altho' 'Helmets grow faster, and year-round*). I usually go with 6 3x1 plots
(non-identical, trying to balance yearly production, diff discussion), and that along with the odd wild animal and maybe some above-ground crops or plant-gathering usually can feed 50 or so no problem, and 1 designated Farmer can handle the whole thing and more with plenty of time left over for other tasks (but "All Dwarves Harvest"). And now with plant-gathering buffed up, probably a lot more, np.
Pig Tails can go to both cloth industry and Dwarven Ale, so you might(?) want to increase that plot and have enough for both uses. Toss in some Dimple-Caps as Winter crops* in some plots and you'll have dye to upgrade all that cloth.
(* It's more productive to NOT rotate crops if you can, so a "growing season" is either 2-seasons long (for Cave Wheat and Pit Tails) or year-round (for Plump Helmets and Dimple Cups), etc. so you don't lose a fraction of a season at the end as often. So, for example, a plot dedicated year-round to Dimple-Cups might produce 9 crops/year, instead of only 8 (or less if you're Farmer is not prompt in planting). Whether that's worth it or not is up to you.)