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[rathlord]

I'm having trouble getting my dwarves to plant correctly. It's in an underground room, a full sized plot, on soil. They plant things on it, but very slowly and often spits out errors about not having any seeds. For instance, in the first plot:

1) They plant about 8 spots at a time
2) Constantly spits errors(name... cancels Plant Seeds: Needs Plump Helmet Spawn)
3) I have (currently) 143 Plump Helmet Spawn sitting in my stocks. My stock counts are set to highest accuracy and they should be a perfectly accessible stockpile.
4) It's set to plant Plump Helmets for all seasons
5) Lots of dwarves with the labor enabled

Am I missing something silly? Can anyone offer any insight here?

[rathlord]

Oh, and is there an IRC that's active enough for me to ask my stupid questions in in the future so I don't waste space in the forums?

[Laurin]

Seeds are stored in bags and bags of seeds are stored in barrels, if allowed. Because of the new hauling system a dwarf will haul the entire barrel with all your seed bags way across your fortress to collect a single seed in the dining room or whereever.

A way to prevent this and the accompanied spam, is to build special seed stockpiles with zero barrels allowed and forbid seeds on general food stockpiles.

[rathlord]

Thanks Laurin I'll give it a shot and get back to the thread if it works!

[rathlord]

I can't tell if it's working or not. It may be due to the fact that there's just so many seeds in a bag so only 1 or 2 farmers at a time can be working with them... but still, i just got a "can't Plant Seeds: No Plump Helmet Spawn" error with a bag of plump helmets in the stockpile right next to the field (I don't think anyone had time to set it down).

Caution: Image

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I just think that with close to 150 seeds I should be able to fill a full sized plot >_<

[Laurin]

Your farms are quite oversized ... ^^

You will still get cancellation spam, but fewer than before.

[AutomataKittay]

I just think that with close to 150 seeds I should be able to fill a full sized plot >_<

Dwarves are very bad at inventory managment. They'll run off and grab the bags to pick up plump helmet everywhere. I don't like to use raw edible plants once my fortress' advanced enough because they'll run off to clean dining room of seeds.

Each bag can hold the full inventory of 200 seed possible, so it can be infurnating. Only work-around I've found is to just not have any seed stockpile and have dwarves grab from wherever, but I don't like to rely on that and use unbarreled seed stockpile for raw edibles. With plants that's not raw edible, it's pretty safe to disable seed stockpile if the workshop that processes them are close enough to farm, dwarves are happy to take seeds right out of workshops.

I can feel the pain, I routinely keep a full size plot of plump helmet as food security measure and they're maddening about seeking the seeds even after optimiztion

[rathlord]

How hard do you think it would be to mod the game so that dwarves took seeds out of bags to plant them rather than taking the container?

[Merendel]

You actualy need 2 stockpiles to cut the spam down to almost nothing.  1 stockpile set to take from everywhere and the second set to take only from the first stockpile.   Neither should have barrles enabled.   What this does is forced dwarves to first bring seeds to the first pile and once there they realize they need to move it to the second one.   If the 2 piles are next to eachother the bag the farmer needs is only unavalible while a dwarf moves a few steps between piles so its comparitively rare to get cancelations.   With only a single pile you still have the issue of the bag geting carted accross the fortress, its just not as bad because a bag wont slow the dwarf down as much as a big barrle so its quicker.

and like someone else said max size is too big.   I start a fort with a 3x3 on year round helmets and upgrade to a second one after a year or two.  By that point I'm mostly useing them for booze anyway and sometimes as meal componants so I'm not trying to feed the whole fort off a single plot.  a single farmer wont ever be able to finish planting a max size plot befor harvest anyway.


Dwarves do take the seeds out of the bag when they go plant.  The issue is that when seeds need to go into the stockpile instead of bringing the seed there and puting it in a bag the hauler will get the bag, take it to the seed, put the seed in the bag and then take itback to the stockpile.   While the bag is in transit your growers cant get seeds out of them.  Hence why we come up with ways to limit the amount of bag transit time that happens.

[AutomataKittay]

How hard do you think it would be to mod the game so that dwarves took seeds out of bags to plant them rather than taking the container?

They does that by default. It's -gathering- the seed -to- stockpile that causes the spam, since they takes the container to pick things up.

Also hauling behavior's not moddable, either.

[rathlord]

How hard do you think it would be to mod the game so that dwarves took seeds out of bags to plant them rather than taking the container?

They does that by default. It's -gathering- the seed -to- stockpile that causes the spam, since they takes the container to pick things up.

Also hauling behavior's not moddable, either.

Ah. Well crap.

Perhaps I'm being dense but can you explain in short terms what adding a second stockpile with the take from first stockpile command actually does for you?

[AutomataKittay]

How hard do you think it would be to mod the game so that dwarves took seeds out of bags to plant them rather than taking the container?

They does that by default. It's -gathering- the seed -to- stockpile that causes the spam, since they takes the container to pick things up.

Also hauling behavior's not moddable, either.

Ah. Well crap.

Perhaps I'm being dense but can you explain in short terms what adding a second stockpile with the take from first stockpile command actually does for you?

Making the second stockpile take from first stockpile and having it set to take only from linked encourage dwarves to use multiple bags and reduce the issue somewhat of not being able to get the bag of seed that they need. It's not really a perfect solution since not being able to get seeds still happens, but it's an improvement. And if you can make seed faster than they can plant and you doesn't uses more than 100 squares of farm plot for a specific plant, it works out pretty well.

Make sure both stockpile are set to a specific seed you want, it doesn't works well for multiple seed types in same stockpile.