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[Stargazer]

Hey there everyone, I just grabbed the game today after having browsed through some tutorials on Youtube. However, I've hit something of a snag. I can't seem to get anything to grow underground. I'm definitely only planting in soil, not rock, I've brought seeds along, I've built a planting area, and I have to available farmers...but it won't let me plant anything. Is there something I'm missing?

[existent]

You've got to flood the area first.

[BlackRat90]

I'm definitely only planting in soil, not rock,

I believe your problem is that as of DF:2010 you cannot just plant in soil underground you do need to flood the floor first, this only needs to be done once and is not that hard once you know what your doing. You can drain ponds into your farming area, or pump water from a river into it.

This is from .40d but the concept is the same.
http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/40d:Flood

[Yasrynn]

New player here.

I haven't seen anyone else mention this, but here's what I did:

1) Channel out a linear plot about 11x1 wide, and remove the ramps, except for a ramp on one end.

^HHHHHHHHHH

^ = up ramp
H = channeled area

2) Make 1 tile pond zones over the plot, about 3 of them, spaced out.

^HXHHXHHHXH

X = tile underneath pond designation

3) Wait for your dwarves to dump water on your plot (you'll need buckets).  When they've spread a nice 1/7 layer of water in your plot, remove all the pond designations.

4) At this point I just waited a while for all the water to evaporate.  In retrospect I could've channeled a drainage area to speed up the process. 

5) Once the water dries you have a 10x1 area muddied, ready for planting.  I did about 4 of these with breaks in between, so the water would spread where I wanted it to.

[Tokeli]

You could also do the same with a 6x6 area or so and make a bunch of single-tile ponds along the edge, making it fill faster. It only works if you've got enough dwarves to fill the thing faster than it evaporates though, but then it works pretty well, without having to be too close to water!

OR, you can just dig into a small pool (make sure a large enough area is mined out, and your farm does not have a door on it, so when you flood the farming plot the water will spread through that part of your fortress and evaporate.

[petersohn]

I usually use plumbing instead. Dig a channel from your farm plot to the river (but don't breach the riverside). Install a door at the end. Breach the river when the door is in place. After the miner escaped through the door, attach a lever to it. Pull the lever, wait until the farming area is flooded, then pull it again.

Oh, and I forgot the last step: Profit!

[greycat]

I've been making four 2x2 farm plots, thus:

Code: [Select]

.......
.~~.~~.
.~~.~~.
.......
.~~.~~.
.~~.~~.
.......

I use the temporary-pond-zone trick to fill them via buckets from the Z-level above.  I make some of the central walkway squares into a food stockpile restricted to the 6 underground seed types.  I also restrict all other food stockpiles from accepting seeds.  This is sufficient for a fortress of at least 50 dwarves (though you may want more plots as your population grows, if you aren't supplementing these with above-ground farming, or if you're doing a lot of cloth/dye planting).

I haven't been using fertilizer lately, though I did explore that a bit in previous games.