Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Rokkomies]

One easy solution to make small farms underground is by ponds. This way you don't have to have a water source close by and you can make your farms where they are close to your processing buildings and food stores.

Dig small rooms (I use 3x3) and put a door to them. The door prevents the hallway from getting muddy and makes it a bit faster to get the whole room muddy. Then channel out the ceiling (or part of it) from above the room and designate that open space as a pond. Dwarves will start hauling water in to it with buckets. It only takes 1/7 depth of water to get the tile muddy, so it wont take too long to get a small room fully muddied.

This is enough to keep a small fort fed, at least until you have managed to create a more efficient irrigation system.

[Firehawk]

I think for a newbie the bucket brigade is the easiest no-brainer method. Channel out the area you want to be your farm, and then designate the level above the actual farm level as a pond and let your dwarves manually wet the area.

[Double A]

Oh, so THAT'S how you do the bucket brigade.

And it took me a while to figure this out: you don't need continuous- or even re-irrigation. Once soil's muddy, it stays muddy.

[psilocybes]

5. Put a lever somewhere else and connect it to the door or floodgate.

This is where i'm stuck. I have the floodgate in the middle of a 1wide 3long hallway between my soon to be farm and my water source.
A few rooms away I have a lever installed. I 'q' over the lever, assign a task to link it to a flood gate and... nothing.  I cant seem to get the link to hold or work...

Suggestions?  I've been playing for days and have yet to get an indoor farm up and running.

[morikal]

Hey,
I just started playing two days ago. This is my fourth attempt now and irrigation is driving me nuts. I was using the "Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial" but as I understand it I can no longer grow plants on plain soil, I need mud. And for a permanent plant farm I need irrigation from a river or aquifer, right?
But I can't seem to get irrigation working, how do I build that corkscrew pump I need? Do I even need that?
I've flooded a room from a river. The connection from room to river has a grate so I don't get eaten by giant fish. The room has stairs up so the water ends there. Now I need a pump on the upper floor so I can pump some water from the basin below to the upper floor without flooding it entirely. Correct so far?
I've been able to build the three parts of a pump in my carpenter's workshop, pipe section, giant corkscrew and the blocks. But what now? I tried building a mechanic's workshop but nobody came finish the construction site, am I maybe lacking someone with the right profession?
Is there any other, easier way to do this? I've never played with aquifers because the tooltip when embarking says not to. Is it maybe easier to irrigate with an aquifer?

Please help!
ZMC

One of the first things I have my miners do is mine out a few farm areas, which I make 7x7, but with one square taken out of the top, so it looks like:
XXX_XXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX

I put a few of these side by side, and dig out a line of 8 squares from the bottom of each (7 squares at 7/7 depth water will cover all 48 squares of the farm, plus the 1 square that the floodgate will be in):
XXX_XXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
       F
       X
       X
       X
       X
       X
       X
       F
XXXXXXXX


F = floodgate (or door, which is probably better)
X = mined out

That lower line of X's is a tunnel connecting to other farm areas and their channels.

From the very bottom line, mine out a tunnel that runs to a river. Leave 1 square unmined right by the river.
Hook up all the flood gates to levers.
Open the lower floodgates, close the top ones.
Channel the river from above (usind d-h for designate a channel) on the square that you left unmined in the tunnel below.

Side view:
____C       <-- ground level (C = channel here)
XXX_RRR  (R = river) <-- Z-1


Now your tunnels will fill up. Whenever you need to re-irrigate, lock all the doors in the 7x7 farm areas (which can have 5x5 farms in them, with room along the sides for dwarves to run around without trampling crops), close the bottom floodgates, then open the top ones. You will have 7 squares of 7/7 depth water flow out over the 49 squares (48 from the farm area, 1 from the square the top floodgate was in), wetting each, and evaporating relatively quickly.

[Double A]

How is 48 squares better than 49?

[SmileyMan]

I can't stress how much easier I have found it since I have switched to above-ground crops as my starting food/booze source.

You may not realise this, but if you channel an area in soil/sand/loam, then you can build an above-ground farm inside the channel without having to worry about boulders/trees etc.

Take a dwarf with proficient Plant Gatherer and Grower, and designate a nice big area of plants to gather.  The crops you want to plant are fisher berries, wild strawberries and sunberries, which can all be eaten raw and brewed - just like plump helmets - to produce more seeds.

[diriel]

One thing I have not seen any of you say is how to calculate how much water to use to irrigate a room to 1/7 - 2/7. Ok, so here it is: each 1x1 tile at full 7/7 water value holds about 5 *End Value Usable* units of water. Each 1 unit of water will "flood" a 1x1 tile to a water depth of 1/7 which is actually optimal.
-- So what I do for a quick start is make sure I have a Brook/Stream/River upon embark to make life easy. Now you can use ANY water source you like. I personally use a 5x5 "water flood tank" (5x5 area * 5 units of water per tile = 125 squares "flooded" @ 1/7 water fill level). On the same level, or 1 below it, I make an 11x11 (121 tiles, so that 5x5 water fill tank can fill up to 125 tiles @ 1/7. Water will evaporate at 1/7 - 2/7 so this works). You make an inlet "door/floodgate" that leads into the 5x5 water flood tank from the water source, linked to a lever,  and you make a "door/hatch" to "flood" the 11x11 farm area, also linked to a lever. You may also want to make a normal door so you can enter both of these I usually use Forbid these entry doors when I am about to open the flood doors, especially on my Water Flood Tank room! I would not want some bone headed Dorf to open the door while it was fill-flooding
Now the upside is you end up with a 5x5 farm and an 11x11 farm Really the most important thing to know is how to use the Water Flood Tank calculations to exactly fill the desired area, easily / safely / reliably every time.

Have FUN

Edit: To label or read labels on levers you hit Shift+N. It sucks to have many levers in an area and have a moment where you can't quite remember what lever does what.

[Double A]

I can't stress how much easier I have found it since I have switched to above-ground crops as my starting food/booze source.

You may not realise this, but if you channel an area in soil/sand/loam, then you can build an above-ground farm inside the channel without having to worry about boulders/trees etc.

Take a dwarf with proficient Plant Gatherer and Grower, and designate a nice big area of plants to gather.  The crops you want to plant are fisher berries, wild strawberries and sunberries, which can all be eaten raw and brewed - just like plump helmets - to produce more seeds.

If you floor off the opening, flyers can't get in, and the tiles are still able to grow above-ground stuff.

[morikal]

How is 48 squares better than 49?

All the 5x5 farm squares are still reachable, and the water can evenly cover everything. If you used 49, the water would have 50 squares to cover because of the square containing the upper floodgate. (And to cover 50 squares evenly, you'd need an extra square with water in it, and then you would have an extra 6 water depths, which would take longer to evaporate)