Print

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

[Zaffre]

I set up a large plump helmet farm and I keep getting this announcement. The farm itself works fine. I would like some advice on this as about five pages of announcements have been filled up with this.

[Clover Magic]

This usually means that they've queued a planting job but their assigned seed went missing or they can't find any.  Usually happens when you're brewing - haulers moving the assigned seeds from the still to the stockpile and thus tasking the seeds for a different job- or when several planters notice that now there are plump helmet seeds available, but there's only one, so one gets to plant the seed and the others cancel their jobs when they realize Urist McSpeedyFarmer beat them to it.

Don't really know how to stop the spam except to fallow the field until you have more seeds than tiles of farm.  Once you have enough seeds for every square of farm plot, then assign that crop.  Should prevent them from all trying to plant the same seed/hauled seeds, otherwise they will all rush to the task of trying to plant the newest seed available.

To cover other bases, are you sure that your seeds are not forbidden and accessible/your dwarves are not burrowed away from the seeds?

[WJLIII3]

There's a slight bug with this in the new version.

Make sure your seed stockpiles don't allow barrels, it'll clear it right up. The problem is, they're taking a barrel full of bags full of seeds, and carrying the barrel, with all its seeds, designating all ~200 of them as used, so now all the farmers are looking for them, confused.

[AndreaReina]

Still happens even without barrels allowed in the stockpile, unfortunately. Bags can store 100 seeds, and with a maximum of 200 seeds per plant type, you'll typically only have 2 bags. If one bag is being used to gather the still seeds and the other is being used to gather seeds in the dining hall, well....

Side note: why is it that my dwarves are still eating plump helmets when there's plenty of prepared meals available?

My next fort will have no seed stockpile, and no farming of raw-edible plants. So all seeds will be left at the still or farmer's workshop, both of which will be close to the fields. No more "can't plant" spam, it will be (inaudible) music to my eyes.

[Ari Lazarus]

The common solution to any of these issues regarding containers is a 2-step logistical chain:

1. Have your seed Stockpile A not allow barrels, and take from anywhere. This is your feeder stockpile.
2. Have seed Stockpile B next to Stockpile A, allow max barrels, take from links only, and take from Stockpile A. This is your main stockpile that will hold the seeds.

Functionally, what happens is that when someone drops a seed somewhere in the fortress, say as a result of eating a plump helmet, it will get hauled to Stockpile A. Once it reaches Stockpile A, the barrel sitting on Stockpile B is brought and vacuums up any other plump helmet spawn sitting in Stockpile A, minimizing the time in which the barrel is unusable by farmers. Even if the seed came in a bag, it would get put into the barrel. Subsequent seeds would also get placed into aforementioned bag unless it is of a different plant.

[HiEv]

Side note: why is it that my dwarves are still eating plump helmets when there's plenty of prepared meals available?

Generally speaking, it's a proximity issue.  Dwarves will usually grab the closest food available when they become hungry.

This means that if your unprepared food stockpile is closer than your prepared food stockpile, your unprepared food will usually get eaten first.

Relocating your prepared and unprepared food stockpiles to better locations should, for the most part, remedy this.

[Mr S]

But, much like with other job assignments, it's the closest XYZ position, regardless of path distance.  Not terribly tough to deal with for workshops, but for food, since dorfs all over your map get hungry at different times, it can get really wonky.  Unless, of course, you decide your raw food stockpile should be in an isolated tower 35 z in the air, accessible only by cooks, or something.