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[Tyu48]

Okay, so I am fairly new at DF and after about 10 losses and forfits I realized what my major problem was. Starvation. Yes, food and time management. I was wondering if anyone had any simple or maybe some not so simple ways that this noob could try out, in order to somewhat succed in DF.

Thanks for the help.

[GhostDwemer]

Farms produce so much food that a single farmer working 5-6 3x3 plots can produce enough food and booze to feed your whole fort. Find a soil layer and fig out a room for farms first thing. You can easily have a farm producing plants, a still brewing them and a kitchen cooking them by the start of the first summer. Make a butcher and tanner workshop and slaughter your draft animals. Bring egg layers and build nest boxes.

[Martin]

To refine GhostDwemer's response a bit.


New players will run into two problems with the default embark.


1) Everyone hauls - which prevents other things from happening as urgently as they need.
2) You run out of barrels/pots.


This is a bit overkill, but it's a good habit to establish until you are consistently getting your food up and running:


1) Disable hauling jobs for your miner. Find a soil layer and dig out a suitable underground space for food/farms. I usually start with one 9x9 room, designate a food stockpile for everything except seeds and have my other dwarves haul all the food in from the wagon. After the first 9x9 room is done, I dig out a 2nd connected 9x9 room, which will contain the farms. When done, I designate a number of 3x3 farms with a 3x3 food stockpile in the middle which only allows seeds. This shortens the effort for your farmer. I then dig a 3rd connected 3x3 room and build a still and a kitchen.
2) Once you start the digging above, decide whether to make wooden barrels or stone pots. If you have a lot of wood and your woodcutters won't die getting to it, take your woodcutter, disable hauling, and have him cut at least 50 trees. In the room with the kitchen, build a carpenters workshop. If you go with stone pots, you'll have your miner start on those after digging those rooms out. Build a craft workshop next to the kitchen instead.
3) While that's happening, I usually take 2 dwarves, disable hauling except for food hauling, and enable all of the farming skills. These are your farmers/brewers/cooks. That's all they do. If you want, designate a 20x20 area or so aboveground for plant gathering and they can do that while the miner does his business.
4) As soon as the farms can be built, undesignate the plant gathering, build the farms, and set 2-3 of them to grow plump helmets. These are your staple crop. They can be eaten raw, cooked, and brewed into booze, and they grow fast. Do not cook them however - as that destroys the seeds. Brewing and eating raw preserves the seeds - and you'll need them. Set each of the other farms to grow the other crop types. Skip dimple cups as they're only useful for dye. Set yourself 10 brew jobs and 10 prepare simple meal jobs at the still and kitchen.
5) If you are going for stone pots, get your miner mining stone. Once you have either wood or stone, start building large pots or barrels. Give another one of your dwarves either carpentry or stone crafting skill, take them off of hauling, and have them make 50 pots/barrels. Early on, what tends to happen is that the plants and seeds that you gather fill up all of your empty barrels, and with no barrels, you can't produce booze. So you typically need to get a healthy number of barrels produced early on.
6) Once you get enough space mined out/cleared, I build a 9x9 or so furniture stockpile which only accepts barrels/large pots, another which only accepts plants, another which only accepts booze, and a 3rd which only accepts prepared meals. The prepared meals stockpile is set with a maximum barrel of 0, so they won't be put in barrels (oftentimes there will only be one meal per barrel, which is a waste of barrels, and its easier to trade meals out of barrels). Make sure you dwarves aren't walking through that room any more than necessary or they'll get destroyed, but otherwise this is safe. These give you a good visual cue where your food industry is. If you are out of barrels, you won't be able to brew. If you are out of plants, you won't be able to brew. If you are out of booze, you're in trouble. If you're out of prepared meals, you might be in trouble. I usually also have a meat/fish stockpile and a milled plant/leaves stockpile. Dwarves will eat meat/fish without processing, so if there's barrels there, you're good even without prepared meals. Dwarves can't eat milled plant/leaves, and while these are good for prepared meals, if you have a fortress full of nothing but sugar, you'll starve.


I find it's good for new players to have very visible measures of where they are on food/booze. When everything is mixed up in the food stockpile, along with a bunch of empty barrels because there's no furniture stockpile for them to go to, then they never really know if they have usable food or not. Eventually, you'll develop a feel for where you are and be able to better use the overview screen to gauge things. Also, by segregating the farmers out from all other activities, it helps make sure that some giant stone hauling activity or such doesn't distract them from feeding the fortress.

[Hyndis]

Limit stockpile sizes to arrange for stable, hands off food forever.

First build a farm. Above ground or below ground, it doesn't matter. Build a full sized, 10x10 farm. Have it grow your main food crop year round, be it plump helmets or sun berries.

Create a smallish stockpile, only around 10x10 but no bigger, that stores plump helmets only, and nothing else. Forbid plump helmets from being stored in any other stockpile anywhere in the fortress.

Your farmers will happily grow your main crop to fill up your stockpile, using up only 100 barrels/pots maximum. The rest will be available to store other food items or booze. Any extra crops will rot in the field, but rotting plants produce no miasma. You can just let them rot in the field if there is no room in the food stockpile for them.

Once food is eaten from the stockpile, there will be space for a few plants to be put into barrels. This will form a natural balance, giving you forever a fixed amount of food. The more food that is eaten, the more crops planted. The less food eaten, the fewer crops planted.

You can do something similar for all other crops you want to produce.



Also, pottery! You can make large pots out of nearly anything, including junk stone. Don't worry about wood for barrels, just make rock pots. If you have magma and sand, go with glass pots instead. It trains up glass workers, and glass workers will get you many other useful items.

[micha]

add a small pile accepting just the seeds for your main crop to hyndis's suggestion and make it a 3x3..5x5 area for plant storage and you have what i do. but the number one rule is:  GATHER PLANTS at least once if you want to eat. at least once.

[bluea]

Barrels always seem to be a problem.

So:
1) Make a "Prepared Meals Only" food stockpile that does not accept barrels. Or any other food types.
2) Drinks Only stockpile that -does- accept barrels.
3) Seeds only stockpile that does not accept barrels.

Focus on getting one -good- cook and one -good- brewer over quantity. To the point of excluding hauling for them. Then cross train them. Once they're decent they'll have plenty of time for hauling. (Or cross training in yet-another-food-skill).

Turn off cooking for all seeds and plants, turn on brewing for all plants. Cook anything that doesn't have seeds. Except tallow - you'll want to make lye from that. (Or I do.)

[wierd]

I usually use stone or green glass pots. Depends on if magma and sand are around or not.

Wood is more valuable in beds, and in making rocknut soap/clearglass.

A stone pot can hold liquid without glaze, so stone pots can hold booze straight up. Make these at a craftsdwarf shop.

For collecting food, in the initial stages of fortress construction, I assign 1 or 2 herbalists with plant gathering labor, and designate a close by bush thick area to get some surface crops. Strawberries and prickle berries are in pretty much every biome.

Once I have surface crop seeds, I build a relief farm plot on the surface near the depot, and near the entrance. This supplies me with nasty flatulence inducing elf food until I can get the other basic necessities going below, such as beds, a dining hall, etc.  With invaders on, you need your dwarves safe underground asap, and plowable subsurface soil is not always present. This means you need buckets, a clothier for rope, a mason for stone blocks, and a mechanic for mechanisms so you can build a well, then you have to mine out and plan a growing room that you can muddy.  If you have convenient access to flowing water, you still need a metal crafter for a floodgate, and a mechanic for mechanisms to build a floodgate for the growing room.  All this takes considerable time.  The surface crops provide food and booze while you get this all hooked up.

Food management isn't that hard.

The first thing I do to get surface crops into full swing is crank out a ton of stone pots at the craftsdwarf shop I build right on the surface. Using stone that I make by digging out the fortress's initial stage, I spam construction of pots, then in the z kitchen menu, I disable brewing on subsurface crops, then brew booze.  This ensures that all the picked berries by the herbalists release seeds for planting straight away.  This let's you get a much better first season harvest, and bolsters the booze supply in anticipation of all those useless fishery workers that are sure to show up later.

Stop brewing at around 400 booze while at 7 dwarves. This is plenty.  Let the farms puke out berries all 4 seasons, then fallow the fields once you have abou 600 to 900 plant.  You can then decomission the inital provisions farm plot and surface buildings, and head underground completely.

Combined, this enough food and drink to get the secure growing chambers built. Avoid using the merchants too heavily until you are well established to avoid the migrants of doom too early. 

Every season, check your stocks screen.  Never let food or booze fall below 150. Never.

[friendguy13]

I always embark with Two growers one with cooking the other with brewing make several large fields and put lavish meals and brewing on repeat.  Those two dwarves can make enough meals and alcohol for any size fortress and still have plenty of meals left over for export.

[Klitri]

Same problem, I really suggest (if you have alot of people) is to go with the old plump helmet farms. They grow VERY fast as im sure you should know. I got 1000 plant food because of plump helmets!

[Niyazov]

It's fallen out of favor lately, but fishing is still a low-maintenance way to provide a lot of food in the first couple of years. Most fish have to be cleaned at a fishery by a dwarf with the fish cleaner labor enabled, but some can be eaten raw. Fishing is also one of the few ways that you can get shell, which is important for some moods. The danger is that it requires a dwarf going outside unless you have an enclosed fishing area attached to your fort.

If you find yourself running low on food, don't forget that you can buy meat and plants  for super cheap from the caravans. The dwarf and human caravans usually bring large amounts of meat and cheese and smaller amounts of plants, seeds and drinks. The elves only bring plants and drinks. Even the worst-supplied early caravans usually bring 100-200 items of food (in stacks of 5).

[Garath]

and cheap too

bring some animals. A turkey costs 6 points at embark but when butchered gives 8-9 meat, which would be 16 points or so. Dogs breed extremely fast. Don't be sentimental and butcher excess dogs, it will save your fps

[wierd]

Excessive dog and kitten populations get the atom smasher!

>:[

The only time cats and kittens are good, are when they are all the same sex, and penned on the food stockpile. Kitty cat mind control must be prevented, or you will suffer the deadly tantrum spiral!

DWARF SMASH!

[Saiko Kila]

Excessive dog and kitten populations get the atom smasher!

>:[

The only time cats and kittens are good, are when they are all the same sex, and penned on the food stockpile. Kitty cat mind control must be prevented, or you will suffer the deadly tantrum spiral!

DWARF SMASH!

Some care must be taken when the "guard" cats are also pets. They will kill creepy crawlers and the like but keep them in mouth, trying to give them to their master. But since they cannot move out of the penned area the master has to came to them instead, which may happen very late.

As for dogs, when war trained they fell easily to goblins and kobolds (seriously, kobolds) so their abundance is not problem to me.

[Garath]

when killed by goblin or kobold, they can't be made into sausages. I usually try to get something tougher than dogs from the elf caravan anyway.

[HiEv]

One other problem you can have is running out of seeds.

Make sure that you do not have any seeds or seed producing plants set for cooking on the Z-Kitchen screen (unless you have an excess of those plants).  Cooking plants destroys the seeds.

Most seeds are produced by brewing or by dwarves eating the plants.  Some seeds can also be gained by plant gathering or purchase from traders.  Other ways besides brewing and eating plants to get seeds depend on the plant:

Blade weeds only produce seeds from milling at a millstone/quern (no brewing option).
Cave wheat produces seeds from milling at a millstone/quern.
Dimple cups only produce seeds from milling at a millstone/quern (no brewing option).
Hide roots only produce seeds from milling at a millstone/quern (no brewing option).
Longland grass produces seeds from milling at a millstone/quern.
Pig tails produce seeds from the "Process Plants" labor at a farmer's workshop.
Quarry bushes only produce seeds from the "Process Plants (bag)" labor at a farmer's workshop (no brewing option).
Rope reeds produce seeds from the "Process Plants" labor at a farmer's workshop.
Sliver barbs produce seeds from milling at a millstone/quern.
Sweet pods produce seeds from the "Process Plants (barrel)" labor at a farmer's workshop or by milling at a millstone/quern.
Whip vines produce seeds from milling at a millstone/quern.

Plump helmets, prickle berries, wild strawberries, rat weed, fisher berries, and sun berries only produce seeds from being brewed or eaten.

Valley herbs, bloated tubers, kobold bulbs, and muck roots do not leave seeds.

FYI- You can produce a maximum of 200 seeds of each type (200 of each, not 200 total).  Since you can have up to 100 seeds in a bag, be careful not to sell your whole stock of seeds away by selling those seed bags.

EDIT:
I added a seed production table to the Seed article in the wiki.