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[MOK]

Howdy folks.

This might be an easy question, or it might be a tougher one, I can see it going both ways.

How much food and booze production does one need to retain a static stockpile at 100 pop?

As usual, my population is exploding before I can get anything nailed down.  I don't even have my military in training yet, and I'm at 119 pop.  Now that the last tsunami of migrants has arrived, I see that my once-large food stocks have disappeared, and I'm now frantically augmenting and expanding food/booze sources.  But I wish I could've done this more steadily.  Hopefully an understanding of the consumption growth rate will help smooth the boom/bust cycle.

Anything tangentially related to accommodating for the fast growth would also be welcome.

Thanks!

[Hurkyl]

For consumption, a dwarf eats 2 units and drinks 4 units a season. So, a year's supply for 120 dwarves works out to nearly 1000 units of food and 2000 units of booze.

With very large prepared meals (averaging 50 per stack!), that's 20 stockpile tiles of food. For drink, I don't know how full you can expect your average barrel to be: if it's 20 units (I think that's rather high?), that means 100 stockpile tiles! (probably better to stockpile plants and keep your brewers busy year round)

For farms, most crops take half a season to grow. Pig tails and Plump helmets take a little under a month.

So, 1 quarry bush tile can feed 12.5 * <average stack size> dwarves for a year: realistically, you can harvest it 5 times a year, each quarry bush yields 5 leaves, and each leaf makes 1 meal, for 25 meals, multiplied by the average stack size your growers can grow.

Other crops have less yield. (Dwarven syrup also gives 5 meals per plant, but you can only expect 3 harvests per year)


Similarly, one plump helmet tile should have little trouble producing enough dwarven wine for 3 * <average stack size> dwarves.

I forget what you can expect out of stack size: I think legendary growers average 3? (or is it 5?) Hopefully someone can fill that in.

______________

Since your problems came with a migrant wave, there's a decent chance they brought livestock with them: you can get a lot of food by butchering some animals (make sure you have stockpile space for the products!), which could tide you over until your newly planted farms can produce their first crops.

Maybe you can even get some cheese out of them before the slaughter.

Or if they brought poultry, build some nest boxes: some birds lay a lot of eggs. You could even plan to use those as a primary food source.

[Kofthefens]

Each dwarf needs 8 food and 16 booze per year, if I remember correctly. You can do the math from there. 

EDIT: Ninja'd. At least it's still somewhat relevant.

[AndreaReina]

400 booze, 200 food per season (dwarves eat once, drink twice per season). I think production time is constant no matter how big the stack(s) are, so using skilled farmers and fertilizer will help with your booze situation. Food, I cook quarry bush leaves, supplemented with whatever ingredients the caravans bring, and should all that run out my dwarves eat raw plump helmets.

WRT stockpile sizes, I try to have 10x the number of dwarves in booze, half that for food. I check at the beginning of the season, that way I can prepare for a migration wave later in the season.

If you have a brewer and cook (separate dwarves) that can do their thing faster than the other dwarves can consume them, have then brew and cook on repeat; eventually the still and kitchens get cluttered, and they'll slow down to the point where production equals consumption.

[Hans Lemurson]

Since some food products can also be converted into Booze, I often think about food in terms of "Plump Helmet Equivalence".  Plump helmets can be grown year round to provide both food and wine; other crops (depending on growth speed and processing yields) can be seen as counting for more or fewer Plump Helmets.

1 Plump Helmet = 1 Food or 5 Booze.  Since a Dwarf eats 2 food and drinks 4 booze per season, that's a food cost of 2.8 Plump Helmets per dwarf per season (pretty close to 3), and so about 12 Plump Helmets for a year, and so 1200 plump helmets grown over the course of a year to feed and booze 100 dwarves.

How much land this takes depends heavily on the skill of your growers.  Assuming your growers are all rubbish, we can expect stacks of just 1 PH per farm tile.  Let us also assume your farmers are slow and busy, so you only get 10 harvests per year.  With a little head-math, this leads to the figure of needing 120 tiles of farmland to support 100 dwarves.  However, this assumes your farmers totally suck, and so can be taken as a MAXIMUM value. 

A good rule of thumb for farming is 1 tile feeds 1 dwarf.  However, with good growers, and growing crops like Quarry Bushes (which are processed to give 5x their nominal yield; 5 units of leaves from 1 unit of crop), you can produce food in great quantity and be able to feed closer to 3-4 dwarves per tile of farmland.

Growing non plump-helmet crops for variety in booze (sweet pods and cave wheat) will reduce your booze-yield a bit since they don't grow quite as fast as plump helmets (pig tails do though), but is totally worth it for the happiness factor.  Above-ground crops also tend to grow quite quickly, and the Berries(prickle, fisher, straw and sun) have the same "Food or Booze" property as Plump Helmets, and can similarly be grown year 'round.  This can add to booze variety without impacting the availability snack food for impatient hungry dwarves.

If you are facing a sudden severe shortage in food, have no animals for slaughter, and can't wait for crops to grow, keep in mind that SEEDS ARE COOKABLE.  I've warded off famine before by cooking up a load of "Plump Helmet Spawn Biscuits".  The fact that seeds are cookable, means that the actual food yield of a crop is actually a little less then double the nominal value, depending on stack size.  A size 3 stack of plump helmets contains 5 units of food: 3 from the mushroom itself, and 2 from the surplus seeds (one seed needs to get replanted).  Seed-cooking is generally avoided since seeds have a very low value, and don't produce large stacks of cooked food.

Booze-cooking on the other hand is quite the value multiplier.  1 food = 5 booze, but if the booze is used in cooking, then all 5 units become food again.  Just like with Quarry Bushes, you are quintupling your food yield.  The large stack sizes of quarry bushes and Booze mean that they make for great companions for producing vast quantities of large-stacked food.  (I personally consider this to be a bit of an exploit, and neither cook booze, nor use quarry bush leaves.  This is because I feel that farming is too overpowered in DF.)

Using all these tricks, you shouldn't have any problem feeding your whole fort on only 50 or so tiles of farmland.  Hunting wild animals, slaughtering livestock, milking animals to make cheese, or collecting eggs from birds will further reduce the amount of farmland required to support your population.

Due to all these many variables, achieving a balance between food consumption and production is quite tricky, and is generally done by trial and error, but then a herd of Camels wanders into the traps at your entrance, or your hunter takes down an Elephant and you're suddenly 200 food richer, totally wrecking your beautifully crafted "Balance".

Alternately, you could just embrace your massive agricultural surplus and use that as your fort's trade good.  Sell off your excess while keeping your basic food reserve.

At the start though when your farmer's suck and you'd actually rather like to build up a surplus, just aim for 1 farm-tile per Dwarf.  That'll do you just fine.

[krisslanza]

Why am I imaging Plump Helmets as the Dwarven equivalent of the Japanese koku?

(Koku being the amount of rice to feed a man for a year, and for a time was basically the currency of Japan).

[MOK]

That was extremely helpful Hans Lemurson, thank you! 

Finding food sources and setting them up hadn't been a problem, it was finding that balance.

My pop has gone up to about 250 now, and after securing my safe food space, I ended up with a massive over-abundance of crops, all kinds.  I switched to lavish meals, and eventually filled my huge stock with lavish meals.

Booze though, that's the bigger problem.  My stocks seem to go up and down severely, and I keep adding perma-brewing stills.  Bout to build my 5th.  The balance is elusive.

That aside, yeah, farming is too powerful.  Livestock is rendered moot when you can trade one pot of food for 2-9k, and buy all the meat fish and cheese you want from caravans.  And all their leather.  And wool.  Not that you need the wool with the plant-based textile industry. 

Well, anyhoo, thank you again.  By using the Plump Helmet as the basic metric to find equivalencies, that helped a lot.  I'll be using that.

[Hans Lemurson]

You're welcome!  (For surface plants, you can use "Prickle-Berries" as your comparison crop.)

One difficulty with Booze Stockpiles is that Dwarves tend not to finish nearly empty barrels, so you can be down to ~30% booze capacity before barrels start getting emptied and the shortage becomes apparent.

One solution to this is to have 2 Booze Stockpiles.  Brew like mad and fill them both up, and then forbid one of them.  When the unforbidden stock is emptied of barrels, and you notice water-drinking, unforbid the other one and start another brewing run to fill up the now free space.  Forbid these barrels, to force the dwarves to drink from the other stockpile.  Keep alternating like this.  That does sound like a lot of boring work though, so I'd recommend just having one big stockpile, and use the forbidding trick to get your dwarves to actually empty the darned barrels.

Something else to consider is to order up batches of booze using the Manager's screen j-m-q to order up batches of Booze production.  Unlike "repeat" orders which get cancelled in case of a temporary barrel or plant shortage, the Manager's orders get relentlessly applied to all appropriate workshops (causing some cancel spam during a supply-chain hiccup).

Another thing to do is go to the kitchen menu ant turn off Cooking for all the plants you want brewed instead, and turn off cooking for your booze.  This will help ensure a steady plant supply for drinks, and that your drinks won't be hijacked by creative cooks.

A population of 250 now means that your drink demands are going to be on the order of 4,000 per year.  That's 800 Plump-Helmet's worth of agricultural production that will be needed to satisfy your thirsty dwarves.  Try to maintain a "One Season Supply" stock of drinks, which would be ~1,000.  This gives you a good amount of padding in case things go wrong.  If your drink amount falls below 1,000, start brewing.  An easily designated 11x11 room should provide plentiful booze-storage capacity.

250 is a LOT of dwarves, and I find that it's just too many for me to handle at the level I like.  With 250 dwarves I usually end up with 100 idlers milling around in an overcrowded dining hall, since there's a limit to how much useful work you can actually DO.  I generally play with a pop-cap of under 100 because I find the fortress to be more manageable, and the population small enough that I can actually recognize valued dwarves by name and role. (and better FPS makes for more fun).

One of the great mysteries to me about the caravan supplies though, is HOW DO THEY GET SO MUCH LEATHER???  Think about the size of animal herd you'd need in your own fort to be able to produce 20 units of leather per year (which means 20 butcherings).  One day I might try a "carnivore fort" where all food must be livestock meat.  Booze would only be made from crops which can't be eaten raw (sweet pods, pig tails, cave wheat, rope reeds, whip vines) to prevent accidental vegetable consumption.  I imagine I'd end up with a lot of bones, and probably enough leather that I wouldn't need to import it all.

[Urist Da Vinci]

See this thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=87721.0

Also, farming isn't the only thing we can use math on:

- A single milkable animal can be milked a maximum of 20 times per year, assuming it is close to the workshop and there are no delays/distractions. Each unit of milk makes 1 unit of cheese. Milking and cheesemaking are ordered.

- Bees produce honey 2 times per year. Each unit of honey makes 5 mead (drink). Collection is automatic. Pressing and brewing are ordered.

- Feeding a fort on meat is complex but depends on your "design animal" selection. Butchering is ordered.

- IIRC all eggs are laid once per season, so 4*"average clutch size" eggs per year. Depends on animal selection. A turkey might produce 4*12=48 eggs per year on average. Collection is automatic, cooking is ordered.

- I always quickly deplete the local fish if I use fisherdwarves, so don't know the math here. They might be excellent for a starting fort. Fish cleaning is automatic.

It looks like eggs are the best contender for constant food source since you could have ~20 birds producing enough eggs to feed 100 dwarves forever. Allow some eggs to hatch to replace aging birds. Crocodiles produce even more eggs.

The meat industry is best with sheep since you can get meat, leather, bones, wool, and milk, all for a low grazing cost. The meat-to-grazing ratio of sheep and goats is probably the best in the game. Goats are similar to sheep, except no wool.

[musicmastermsh]

Alpacas and goats.  Or forget the wool and milk and go with exotics like cougars and giant eagles.  Because you didn't already have enough high value crafts and goblinite to buy out the caravans.  At least they don't eat grass.

[Varnifane]

If you have the number of stills you say you are and are running low on booze, make sure you don't have booze set to cookable.

I haven't done any of the fancy maths but I find 1 farmer, 1 brewer and 1 cook able to way overproduce what I need for 150 dwarves with two 4X4 farms set to change crops by season with an annual purge of random livestock.

[MasterShizzle]

Balance is usually easy if you plan ahead and give yourself a "buffer" zone to work with. Then again, I never go for balance. Food is my primary export good for most all of my forts, and lavish meals are extremely space-efficient to boot. It's a lot easier to haul $100,000 in food pots than it is to haul the same amount in other trade goods, stone crafts especially.

I start by laying out at least 60 squares of farmland with my initial dwarves. This will mostly lay fallow with only 2 proficient growers, but it's a solid basis for the imminent mass migration I always get in the second-year Spring wave. I build an initial hoard of food. Start making booze and lavish meals. I'll usually slaughter my wagon animals before the first caravan comes and make meals from those as well. I embark with turkeys, almost always, and combined with the regular plant haul I usually have a good 500 food or more by the time the caravan arrives, at which point you trade away all your prepared meals in exchange for every last scrap of meat, cheese, booze, and seafood that they bring. Request more from the liaison. Make more lavish meals.

"Leap-frogging" it in this way means that every caravan, Elven, Human and Dwarven, brings up my food total. I use the job manager to queue up drink and food in batches of 30 according to what I've got on hand, and after that it's smooth sailing. Once my food stocks are set for life at 2,000 and above I have enough breathing room to start switching to pig-tail production for cloth or anything else that strikes me. Caravans boost the output of my kitchens the most, followed by farming, eggs, and the occasional jolt from slaughtering migrants' livestock.

[melphel]

Wow, am I the only one who uses small farm plots?  1 farm-tile per dwarf or 60 farm-tiles is way overkill for me.

I usually start with a 1x3 plot for each crop (sans dimple cups because they can't be eaten and I find the cloth/dying industry a hassle).  That's 15 tiles for underground, and if I'm not on a freezing embark, I probably have three or four more above ground crops from plant gathering.  21-24 tiles total.  In the beginning I'll set an order for only farmers to harvest, that way they get high skill a little faster.  In a couple years I'll have two or three legendary growers.  With potash production in place to fertilize (even without it) I have more crops than I need.

[MOK]

I do have way too many dwarves.  They hover at 40-70 idle at a time.   I haven't modded the game to set controls on the population... Especially the damn babies.

I'm seeing here that a difference in preference is a major factor.

I prefer to assign a few dwarves to their supply-making craft, and then never deal with them, or their craft, again if possible.  They would keep busy, as one of the persistently non-idle dwarves.  So for me, the idea of making a large surplus is against my intentions, as that would mean I'd have to start and stop them depending on surplus/needs.  Or continue growing their already-significant stockpile.

That would mean that for me, it's not about whether I can keep them fed and boozed...  As we can see, that's potentially very easy, and appears to have been a stumbling block for not a single person here, myself included.  Instead, for me it's about not over-feeding and over-boozing them(to a lesser extent).  The goal is a perpetual-motion machine, so that I can spend as much time as possible managing other things.  Primarily stuff like the military and it's infrastructure, happiness courting, and the metal industry.

Regarding the cooking of booze:  It's always been turned off, and near as I can tell the stills are running almost all the time.  The only significant stops in the works had been a lack of barrels and pots, due to my over-production of food.  I don't know how to account for the difference between my experience and Varnifane's.

Urist DaVincy posted a link to an analysis of the farming industry but....  Unfortunately I don't think I fully understood it.  I didn't get any takeaway conclusions from it.

Livestock other than sub-terranean egg-layers are right out.  Not bothering again.  Protecting them has, over the course of multiple fortresses, required a large setup-time.  Meanwhile they usually require a lot of maintenance without producing all that much.  I'm not bothering next time, even though I wish it was more necessary.

I've tried bees twice, because the idea of it sounds fun, but they function just like livestock, and don't yield much per time/effort.  Not bothering next time.

Fishing, like livestock, also requires a large initial setup of a protection racket.  Or more often, just a live-and-let-die acceptance of the risks of the dwarves who get caught outside during an ambush.  The yield is decent, but not very sustainable at larger scale.   I'm not going to bother next time.

My running theory now is that next fortress, I'd be better off growing far fewer foods, and dedicate most of the plant economy to booze.  Eggs, meanwhile, can efficiently catch up the kitchen without a need for management.  But the hole in this is that I'll want to find some other way to make up for the happiness loss from homogenized foods, while my production and stock-space for booze needs to be much higher since cooking the booze will also contribute to the kitchen's balance.
...Or perhaps my theory's all wrong.  We'll see.

[Emily]

The meat industry is best with sheep since you can get meat, leather, bones, wool, and milk, all for a low grazing cost. The meat-to-grazing ratio of sheep and goats is probably the best in the game. Goats are similar to sheep, except no wool.

Actually pigs, dogs, and cats all don't graze, so they would function better as a meat source if grazing is an issue.  (In fact the wiki's comparison of domestic animals gives dogs as providing as much meat as cows, but I can't think that's actually accurate.)

Cats obviously have the usual cat-issues, but dogs have a wide variety of purposes in addition to meat, and pigs can be milked, and are slightly larger than goats, so if size is indicative of meat yield, pigs would be better than goats.