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[Noobazzah]

I haven't done much cavern activities yet, my previous forts always suffered an FPS death before/once I reached them (I'm slow to dig downwards). But anyway, aren't there supposed to be water/giant shrooms there? Mine has none. Just mud everywhere. Also, this layer isn't connected to any additional layers, so how come I still can grow underground crops? Lastly, is it possible that this layer is in fact the third one? I've seen trogoldytes, gorlaks and giant bats & cave spiders down there. Thanks in advance.

[xeniorn]

Usually, the caverns have mossy soil and quite dense underground vegetation (various shrubs and mushrooms), but sometimes they don't and they're just full of muddied ground. Some layers are simply like that. It is quite possible that it's the third layer, it's very easy to miss the top two layers by accident, since the caverns usually don't span more than  ~50 % of XY space. Usually you can tell which layer it is by vegetation (clearly you can't, due to lack of water).

I'm not sure I understand the question about crops. To grow crops you only need muddied soil, which you do have even in such a cavern layer.

[Noobazzah]

I meant that if you don't have cavern lakes in your embark, you can't grow underground crops like plump helmets. Dug some of the upper layers, found nothing. But just a minute ago I dug 20 z:s down and found a new cavern! Yay! This time there's "trees" and water and wonderful gems. Unfortunately, I had accidentally ordered my dwarves to channel down instead of making up/down staircases. Reg Tekkundeshal is now learning how to swim DWARF STYLE.

[darkgloomie]

As far as I know, you don't actually need soil or mud to plant and harvest crops.

You do, however, probably need it to get "native" vegetation such as shrubs and trees.


Never been to the caverns, so what I'm saying could be bunch of garbage

[GreatWyrmGold]

Er, farms do need soil or mud...

[nanomage]

It sometimes happens that the third cavern level is considered a "dry" biome and then it has no shrubbs and no trees except blood thorn. It's floor appears as muddy rock then, but actually moss and fungus are still there, and you can see them if you 'k' ove a tile: it will read as "Muddy floor fungus" or something like that.
Floor of the dry third layer caves is suitable for farming and pasturing grazers despite appearing barren.

[Kaos]

Regarding farming, all you need to farm on is either soil floors (can be completely dry) or stone floors (need to be muddy), above ground or underground depending on the type of crop.


What breaching the caverns do is to release the spores making soil floors or muddy stone floors, underground, start to spontaneously grow grass, trees and shrubs like above ground soil floors do, the only exception being that they grow only underground plant life like moss, underground shrooms and shroom trees, and I think  the kinds of trees are affected by the cavern level breached, so if you haven't breached cavern 3, you won't see cavern 3 shroom trees spontaneously grow on your underground soil layers...

[Noobazzah]

The dry level was probably the first layer, this underground paradise must be the second. Regarding underground farming, I've always believed that if an embark site lacks underground water sources, you can't grow any plump helmets etc. despite mud/soil being present.