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[CaptainBadwheel]

You said you needed bins, is that the primary reason or are the trees a fuel source as well? Once I get a steady source of fuel (lignite and bituminous coal) or a magma based metal industry I typically stop building bins out of wood and instead build them out of whatever metals I have that are abundant but not necessarily useful to me; usually zinc, lead, and copper. It levels your metalsmiths and you can trade to the elves quickly without having to select 100s of items individually.

[wierd]

Two words:

Pressurized water.

Calculate the floor space of your soon to be growing area. Multiply that by 2. That is how much water you want your "instaflood" reservoir (directly above the grow chamber, emptied with hatch cover attached to lever.) To hold.

For instance, say you want to flood a 100x100 room to 2 deep. That's 10,000 water at 1/7 depth. We want 2/7 to ensure equal and uniform coverage. So, we want 20,000 water.  We divide this by however many zlevels deep we want our pressurized deluge system to be. (The more zlevels, the more pressure, th faster it will flood the room) let's say we want 5 z levels. That's 4000 per level. We divide that by 7. That gives us the number of tiles in area each reservoir level needs to be. This comes out to approx 23x23 tiles. (This errs on the light side to avoid having a grow chamber that won't dry.)

Fill the reservoir using a direct connection to a river, brook, or aquifer, with a shutoff floodgate.

Open the shutoff gate, and fill the reservoir. When it is full, close the shutoff. Open the hatch. Pressurized water will blast into the growing room at a frightful rate. When the reservoir has emptied, close the hatch, and reset.

For optimal tree growing, I have found repeat flooding is necessary. Trees grow painfully slow on "dusting of mud" tiles, and grow noticably faster on "pile of mud" tiles.

You only get that from repeat flooding after complete drying.

With some clever engineering, you can use the same reservoir to muddy multiple stacked growing rooms, by channeling out the 'splash point', and building walls around it. The water will safely be directed into the next floor down, and the process can be repeated as many growing chambers deep as needed.

[Particleman]

That's quite clever. Thank you for the advice, wierd.

[Callista]

Just drain the unwanted water off the edge of the map through smoothed wall-->fortification.

Floodgates must be placed both on the inlet and on the outflow, or else you won't be able to control well enough.

A whole level... just redirect the river.

[wierd]

I prefer to know exactly how much water I will need for my agroponics centers. That way I can't screw up due to my lever puller deciding he's just not drunk enough anymore, and wandering off while the fortress drowns.

The reservoir contains exactly the correct amount of water to do the job. That's part of the beauty. It also makes a great aquarium when you are all done. I usually line the walls of it with glass windows so I can use it for that very purpose.

Once finished, there is no more flow, and no fps hell. 

[Rallan]

Skip all that mucking around trying to muddy floors and just harvest lumber directly from the cavern layers. As an added bonus you'll also have a place to plant underground crops and (if you're lucky) a new place to fish.

And it's not quite as dangerous as you'd think. Even without any training at all, one or two squads of properly equipped dwarves can take out a Forgotten Beast, and they'll be more than enough to handle the usual wandering monsters. And the occasional Giant Bat or Blind Cave Ogre blundering into your fortress and laying waste to the dining room will help give the place that properly dorfy feel.

[Callista]

Skip all that mucking around trying to muddy floors and just harvest lumber directly from the cavern layers. As an added bonus you'll also have a place to plant underground crops and (if you're lucky) a new place to fish.

And it's not quite as dangerous as you'd think. Even without any training at all, one or two squads of properly equipped dwarves can take out a Forgotten Beast, and they'll be more than enough to handle the usual wandering monsters. And the occasional Giant Bat or Blind Cave Ogre blundering into your fortress and laying waste to the dining room will help give the place that properly dorfy feel.

Caverns are nice, but I find it a little annoying to track dwarves moving through them. The floors aren't all on one z-level, and since you don't know where a dwarf has gone if you don't see exactly which ramp he used, it can be hard to find them again when you want to check up on them. They're nice for hunting, but I much prefer having tree farms all on one level.

Re. the danger of flooding your fort: Yeah, I've done this, oh, about a dozen times. The thing to remember with water is that you can usually build a design that doesn't depend on the dwarf's alacrity in pulling the lever--a design where the farm is enclosed completely during irrigation, and if the second lever isn't pulled, won't flood anything, only fill the farm up with water. If the water inlet is the ONLY entrance to the farm during flooding, and if the water has somewhere else to drain when the farm fills up, you won't have any trouble. Put a floodgate on the water drain, too. And always have your levers in a room with a door on it; that way you can lock the door and keep insane and tantruming dwarves out.

[Lord Dullard]

I need bins

It's best to use cheap/easily obtainable metals for that. You won't run out as often as you would if you were using wood, and metal can't be used for beds.

[Rallan]

Skip all that mucking around trying to muddy floors and just harvest lumber directly from the cavern layers. As an added bonus you'll also have a place to plant underground crops and (if you're lucky) a new place to fish.

And it's not quite as dangerous as you'd think. Even without any training at all, one or two squads of properly equipped dwarves can take out a Forgotten Beast, and they'll be more than enough to handle the usual wandering monsters. And the occasional Giant Bat or Blind Cave Ogre blundering into your fortress and laying waste to the dining room will help give the place that properly dorfy feel.

Caverns are nice, but I find it a little annoying to track dwarves moving through them. The floors aren't all on one z-level, and since you don't know where a dwarf has gone if you don't see exactly which ramp he used, it can be hard to find them again when you want to check up on them. They're nice for hunting, but I much prefer having tree farms all on one level.

I find that's not too much of a problem as long as you only use the cavern for traditional outdoorsey stuff. Your farmers stick to plots that are near the door, your lumberjacks and haulers only go where you've told 'em to cut, and everyone else stays the hell away. The only exception is when you need to send a squad in to kill some monsters, and generally the threat they pose isn't big enough to need split-second decisions so you don't have to worry much about tracking the locations of your guys. As opposed to topside, where a few seconds of finding your guys on a hillside can be enough for a group of goblins to do far too much damage.