Print

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

[qalnor]

Just out of curiousity, does anyone actually bother with fertilizer?

[Angela Christine]

Fertilizer makes farming more efficient, which is good.  But it is a pain in the ass to produce, which is bad.  On most maps trees are too valuable to burn up wholesale just to get a few more plump helmets.  I do occasionally use fertilizer if I have a shortage of land, a shortage of seed, or a shortage of labour.

1. It can be useful if your fortress gets really big, your farming room isn't big enough to support the population, and you don't want to build another farming room.

2.  It is also useful if you run really low on one kind of seed, and want to increase your stocks quickly.  With fertilizer you are pretty much guaranteed that each seed will produce more than one plant, even if your farmers are newbies.

3.  It is good if through mishap or immigration weirdness you have a shortage of farmers.  You can set anyone to do the growing job, but unskilled farmers produce less food.  Using fertilizer you can produce the food you need with few farmers, or with unskilled farmers.

I'll use it to help get me out of a jam, but it is too expensive to use all the time.

[qalnor]

That sounds good on paper, but at any given point in your fort you need at most 3 dwarves to feed your entire fort and the micromanagement required is negligible.

In order to produce fertilizer you would have to utilize additional dwarves and the micromanagement for that stuff is so bad that I've never even gone through with bothering with it.

If the efficiency of food production were significantly curtailed, I would fully support adding alternate fertilizer routes. But as it stands, to be honest, fertilizer would just cause my food stockpiles to be even more ridiculously full.