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[utunnels]

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Food

According to the wiki, a dwarf needs 2 units of food each season and perhaps 8 units of drink.
I have 7 dwarves so it's 56/224 per year.

I checked my status menu:

meat: 395
seeds: 403
fish: 34
drink: 404
plant: 588
other: 1138

So I have roughly 2000 units of food, which can last my fort for over 35 years!
But I will run out of booze in less than 2 years, if I don't cook with them(but I do).
And, yes, I sell food to the caravans, sometimes I even offer barrels of prepared food.


My another fortress has roughly 140 dorfs and 3000 units of solid food and 1500 units of drink.


So typically I produce too much food. I wonder how do you guys do? How much solid food/drink do you have?

By the way, it is harder to store more booze than food because a barrel can hold only one stack of drink, so I need more barrels.

[ikachan]

I tend to store way too much food as well but I like to have a little more than I need so that if something unexpected happens and I have to seal off the surface for a while then I still have some stocked food to last me a while.

[Jervill]

Agreed with ikachan, more excess food is better.  Also, consider building kitchens to make more advanced food for your dwarves/.  Also, the specialty roasts they make can also be traded for a profit if they are not eaten.

[Aslandus]

Agreed with ikachan, more excess food is better.  Also, consider building kitchens to make more advanced food for your dwarves/.  Also, the specialty roasts they make can also be traded for a profit if they are not eaten.

I always have roasts being made, since you retain the number of servings after cooking it seems to make more sense to cook the highest level thing all the time as long as you have enough ingredients...

[utunnels]

By the way, why some dwarves like to eat raw food instead of roasts?

[Aslandus]

By the way, why some dwarves like to eat raw food instead of roasts?

Raw food is closer, make a stockpile for prepared meals closer to your eating area and they should go for it instead (dwarves aren't very choosy, even if they do like prepared food more)...

[Thisfox]

I end up with excess food too, but I sell prepared meals to caravans for metals to smelt down, so I figure it's all good.

Nothing wrong with having a few extra stockpiles of food somewhere further away too. Ever since a fiery FB got into my kitchen area and fireballed the hell out of the booze stockpile (and all the food) I've been a bit funny about having alternate, lockable, food and drink storage. We eventually killed the FB, but not before we had no food left but a few units of rotten burning reindeer cheese of doom. Thankfully we were low on dwarfs so the fort barely managed to survive starvation by slaughtering the wool farm.

[Bearskie]

Eh, think of it this way - at least it's not 11380. (Yeah I tend to hoard food too :S)

[Mushroo]

Food production is so incredibly easy in current versions of DF, if you don't have huge overproduction, you're doing something wrong.

[Borge]

I really hope food becomes far more scarce in the future, so starvation of the fortress is actually a real risk. At the moment a fortress can survive off a few chickens and a 3x3 farm plot.

[Naryar]

Yeah, food overproduction wasn't a problem in 40d iirc.

But food should decay, really. Even if it isn't at realistic rates, in DF mode time food should wear in one year or something.

[Aslandus]

Yeah, food overproduction wasn't a problem in 40d iirc.

But food should decay, really. Even if it isn't at realistic rates, in DF mode time food should wear in one year or something.

Then salt could be added to keep food from rotting for longer times and we could build traps with salt to dehydrate invaders and make elf jerky... What? Too early to discuss elf jerky?

[tussock]

About a season after you run out of food the fortress dies. Everyone starves, goes crazy, and there's fun and games all over the place.

Having more food than you need is significantly less fun, saving your fortress' limited supply of it for spending on sunny days outside hugging goblins. With 100 dorfs, you should really have at least two years stock, or 2x4x100x2 = 1600 meals. No shame in holding 7 years supply like real medieval people did, at 5600 meals, in some 200 barrels and pots, feeding into smaller stockpiles near the dining areas for convenience.

Once you've got that though, stop gathering raw food. Turn off the food plots, disable the gathering zones, give Urists McFisherdorf and McRanger something better to do (like learning to use a spear and carry armour), and set about labouring on your latest project with all the new idlers. When food drops back under a couple thousand again (or whatever your two-year safety margin is), get back to producing it.

Food being hard means you can't ever ignore food. If I can't eventually ignore food (and clothes, furniture, and all the other basics one can rack up by the thousands), I can't get on with the more interesting stuff. Speaking of which, I need some bigger food stockpiles, and a lot more picks. Is everyone else buying the caravans with shellcrafts now the vermin-fish don't go extinct?

[Absentia]

Yeah, a real medieval fortress would store several years' worth of supplies as a matter of course. A fortress wouldn't be much use if you could be starved out in a matter of weeks. Of course, a real medieval fortress wouldn't have the option of growing plump helmets in the basement, or keeping livestock that never eat anything and lay ludicrous amounts of eggs.

Personally I let the stuff pile up into the thousands until I'm tired of making barrels, then I switch most of the farm plots to pig tails/dimple cups and give the brewer a new job.

[Minuit]

What? Too early to discuss elf jerky?

It's never the wrong time for Elf jerky.