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[mickel]

Yes, in a game like this, where running out of food is spelled "lose the game", making sure the food situation can manage itself is essential.

Compare with for example a railroad simulator, if anyone's played them. Usually you can get info on each and every train, you can start and stop them manually, you can set them to pass signals, you can send them somewhere else. Similarly you can override every individual signal, set it to whatever you like... all of this is really useful to resolve a crisis, but during normal operations you set the signals and trains up once and then you can leave them there for ten years, totally unattended. So long as nothing changes, they're fine.

Similarly, once you have the farms set up and the orders for what to plant, it should take care of itself so long as you don't get 20 new dwarves or the mountain collapses and swallows half your farms, or something similar.

And you really need a bit of overview, too. A screen where you can see what's being produced, where it is, where it's going to, and what's going to happen to it. In that screen you should be able to see how many meals are available now, how much booze is available now, how long the current stores will last, things like that.

I don't mean it should happen right away though, but I think some parts of the interface are more important than others. Once this major update is done, I think some of the more annoying holes in the interface really need to be patched.

[RPB]

If your dwarves are drinking water it's no wonder your farmers are underproducing.

I also have a sneaking suspicion they're wasting a lot of time on hauling jobs. Tweaking labor (primarily hauling) preferences on incoming immigrants seriously saves you a lot of micromanagement in the long run. Having important workers running around hauling stuff on a whim makes production a lot more unreliable.

Still, it would be very nice if farm plots would stay up (but unproductive) through winter and remember their seasonal planting orders.

[ September 29, 2007: Message edited by: RPB ]

[mickel]

quote:Originally posted by RPB:
<STRONG>If your dwarves are drinking water it's no wonder your farmers are underproducing.
</STRONG>

They're drinking water because there's not enough crops for both food and booze. I might have my priorities wrong when I cut down on booze first though, I dunno...

Yea, since dwarves have hauling on by default, they spend a lot of time hauling. I've been turning it off on some of them lately, but I usually don't bother touching job settings on immigrants at all. I'm guessing that, too, is something that'll be adressed in future releases.

[Kholint]

Okay; how about this: Either you'll have it from the start of the game, or it'll become available when the manager shows up. You'll be able to select a new type of zone- that, if tiles under that zoned area become muddied, they'll automatically be set to become farms (growing produce that is specified beforehand by the new zone type).

Then it'd be perfectly automatic for nile-style farmers- although you'd still have to pull the lever every spring if you use floodgates*.

*Unless water can trigger pressure plates, and then you could set up a system where frozen winter ice thaws out, flowing over pressure plates that set off your flood gates, allowing your farms to become irrigated.  

[Savok]

Am I getting the math wrong or is the following true?

Plump helmets can grow three times per season. To account for non-instant planting, that's 8 times a year. Each time a plump helmet grows, when planted by a sufficiently skilled farmer, you get plump helmet [5]. Each stack is brewed, making 5 times the amount of food. Since alcohol can be cooked, it is, for our purposes here, the same as a prepared meal. We'll call them food units. Thus, we have 200 food units per square per year.
According to one player, each dwarf eats 6 food units and drinks 16 per year. We'll call that a total of 25 food units per dwarf per year consumed, to be safe.

Thus, each square can provide for eight dwarves. A 200 dwarf fortress can live off a 5x5 plot.

Am I right or am I bonkers?

[mickel]

quote:Originally posted by Savok:
<STRONG>
Thus, each square can provide for eight dwarves. A 200 dwarf fortress can live off a 5x5 plot.

Am I right or am I bonkers?</STRONG>

It's probably right, but it assumes dwarves actually spend time doing the work you intend them to in a competent manner. When that happens, someone needs to mod in flying pigs.  

[Jaqie Fox]

quote:Originally posted by mickel:
It's probably right, but it assumes dwarves actually spend time doing the work you intend them to in a competent manner. When that happens, someone needs to mod in flying pigs.  

They do, if you actually change their labor preferences correctly / edit the raws for pigs correctly. Both the farmers and pigs, ironically.

[mickel]

I've recently been turning hauling off for them, that improved things a bit. It doesn't change anything about either what the original poster said about replanting farms, or anything I've said about farming interface though.

[Shades]

quote:Originally posted by Savok:
<STRONG>Thus, each square can provide for eight dwarves. A 200 dwarf fortress can live off a 5x5 plot.

Am I right or am I bonkers?</STRONG>

You play it too safe Savok   you can do it all off 11 squares if you fertilise....

[greatleapforward]

Something that might be useful is the ability to set "permanent" jobs in the manager screen that wouldn't be cancelled for lack of resources. Instead, they'd hang around, periodically checking to see if the pre-requisite items were available.

Also, the ability to set intermediate priorities for each job on a dwarf's labour screen, rather than an on-off toggle could help here. Has this been raised before? It seems pretty obvious.

[mickel]

It's been suggested before, but I think it's good enough that it merits periodic resuggestions, just so people don't forget about it.  

[Joker]

(First post! New DF addict here.)

Anyway, I have to agree with the suggestions to look to your hauling assignments and job specialization as the problems if you are having any trouble with food.

Related to hauling and VERY important is stockpile customization. Dwarf Fortress mirrors real life in this demand for success: logistics, logistics, logistics.

Keep barrels in reserve for brewing and stash them right beside the still. Don't have long walks among the farm/still/kitchen/stockpiles. Sort stockpiles to the finest level of detail, i.e., only seeds, only barrels, only "output" food (next to dining area), etc.

I usually use a slightly enlarged version of the "food-at-the-centre" layout found here: http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Design_Examples

I make the workshop areas deeper and use a horizontally-aligned dining room, but the idea is the same: Nobody has to walk more than maybe 10 squares at any point in the food chain from farm/fishing to dining room.

I am still pretty much a newbie to DF and I find food production trivial to the point of leaving farms fallow for seasons at a time. I don't even cook booze, either. Nor do I use hunting/trapping. With farming, fishing and plant gathering I can generate TONS of food with just 3 or 4 dwarves doing the work, and without using cheesy booze-cooking tactics. All I really have to do with those dwarves is make sure they aren't hauling stone or wood and there's usually no downtime or waste in my food chain. Sometimes I have to scramble a little to keep up with booze demand, but food just piles up.

Edit: Almost forgot livestock. Get a horse/cat/whatever breeding program going, and restrain the animals you plan to use for food/bone/leather in a room behind your butcher/tanning/leather workshop area so it doesn't take forever to haul them to slaughter. This has an added benefit of getting all your livestock out from underfoot and slowing Dwarf movement. I find horses to be especially fruitful if I have 3 of them to start, and before the first winter is done you can have a nice meat-farming operation going.

[ October 02, 2007: Message edited by: Joker ]

[ October 02, 2007: Message edited by: Joker ]