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[JTTCOTE]

My fort is dying of lack of wood (I've got 12 left) and I can't go to the surface as I get hordes of goblin ambushes. It's a reclaim fort, so will there be trees in caverns, and will they regenerate? How should I get wood?

[WealthyRadish]

Getting wood is easy at the beginning of your relationship with the fort, as things are new, fresh, exciting, and titillation abounds with the numerous trees readily available. I'd recommend getting as much wood as possible during this early period, and putting that wood to good use. Later, as things fall into a routine you just don't have the time or energy to get wood, what with the goblins, you may want to seek other sources of getting wood. Descending into the exotic depths of the caverns is one way, but is fraught with peril. Make sure to keep these two spheres of wood getting as separate as possible, as things get explosive when they mix, and then you'll likely cease getting wood for quite a while (and maybe have to sleep on the couch).

Uh, to actually address the question, there should be plenty of trees in the caverns. Give your woodcutters war animal assignments, put up drawbridge in case of emergencies, and put you military on escort duty. Once caverns are pierced, you can also dig out soil layers and irrigate stone, which'll grow trees and plants over time. For an immediate shortage, your only real option is to go cutting in the caverns themselves, though.

[DTF]

Underground trees grow on anything that is soil, a 'cavern floor' or a muddied stone floor after you have created at least one path into a cavern. If you have access to either water or soil layers like sand or clay, you can set up your own tree farms.
The only thing you need wood for is beds. Everything else can be made out of stone (large pots = barrels) or metal (bins).

[Spinning Welshman]

Getting wood is easy at the beginning of your relationship with the fort, as things are new, fresh, exciting, and titillation abounds with the numerous trees readily available. I'd recommend getting as much wood as possible during this early period, and putting that wood to good use. Later, as things fall into a routine you just don't have the time or energy to get wood, what with the goblins, you may want to seek other sources of getting wood. Descending into the exotic depths of the caverns is one way, but is fraught with peril. Make sure to keep these two spheres of wood getting as separate as possible, as things get explosive when they mix, and then you'll likely cease getting wood for quite a while (and maybe have to sleep on the couch).

Damn... I would sig that if it wasn't so long. 

OT, yeah, the caverns are your best bet for emergency wood, but also as has already been said, you can make all the absolutely essential things, (like food and alcohol containers) out of rock (making rock pots is done at a craftdwarf workshop) aside from that beds are really the only thing that has to be wooden.

That is until some dwarf makes an artifact jade bed menacing with spikes of steel. 

[Fredd]

Wood is also rather necessary for ash(lye, potash, pearlash) all needed for some industries. Wooden barrels are needed for some shops, and foodstorage products. As stated above, have your miners dig out some areas for future tree farms, pierce the caverns, wall it up, let the tree farms get a good start early. As a side benefit, herbalists can collect the plants that sprout up. As a side benefit, mining can create underground pastures for livestock. Both need time, so its a good reason to pierce the caverns early

[Garath]

I usually make underground tree farms. One thing to keep in mind: the various underground trees seem to grow much faster than the above ground ones. This may make it a bit annoying since the need for wood decreases sharply with the maturity of the fort

you've got enough beds, you've got steel bars to last you a dozen years or more, enough soap, not bothering fertilizing anymore since you've got too much food anyway. Making clear glass doesn't seem worth the effort.... sooo, strange moods are left. The only wood eating thing later on is making charcoal, which you only really need if the magma is very deep.

[Panando]

Probably the way to get wood which is the least hassle is to just use it like there's no tomorrow. If you have no logs (or if you feel like being tricksy, forbid the logs you have) then traders will bring quite a lot of it, about 20 logs. Thus you have to "spend logs to get logs". Requesting all logs from the liaison will get an additional ~20-40 logs depending how many species of trees the mountainhome has access to. Thus if you continuously use up all your wood, or forbid the stockpiled logs, you can easily get 50-80 logs per year from the dwarf, human and elf traders.
Systematically buying common carpentry items from the traders, such as buckets, barrels, splints and crutches will produce significant log savings, allowing all logs to be used for bins, beds and power.

The final way to get logs, is to simply embark with them. Logs are cheap and good value for points, and I'll often embark with up to 50 logs if the embark has little tree coverage. Logs are a point-dump which is just really hard to go wrong with (unlike a lot of the things which embark points can be spent on).

Thus by being frugal in your use of logs, and milking the traders, you can easily produce the necessities for a large fortress even without tree farms.

This in itself doesn't help your current predicament unless the traders can make it safely inside the fort. But I would say you really have more problems than just a lack of logs.

[JTTCOTE]

This in itself doesn't help your current predicament unless the traders can make it safely inside the fort. But I would say you really have more problems than just a lack of logs.

Indeed.

So I just have to open the caverns and wall them off right away and trees will randomly sprout inside my fort? Even though its a reclaim?

[weenog]

This in itself doesn't help your current predicament unless the traders can make it safely inside the fort. But I would say you really have more problems than just a lack of logs.

Indeed.

So I just have to open the caverns and wall them off right away and trees will randomly sprout inside my fort? Even though its a reclaim?

They'll sprout on soil, and on natural rock which has been muddied.  Not on bare rock nor constructions.  And if the tile has ever been exposed to light, it will remain light, and cavern plants can't grow there.

[Stefrist]

.. This subject on a friday end-of-the-day is dangerous. I've got wood!

But.. I was never really succesful with using tree farms, as they generally just grow too slow. (and when I get to it, I don't have a high FPS left).
Those games I've gotten most wood by trading, or by replying on an internet scam mail...

[Starver]

Again, not much help to your current situation, but at one time I used to regularly devote as many woodcutters to deforesting the the area as I could, and as many other unoccupied workers[1] set to construct a wooden stockade from this wood, around the entrance, several tiles thick, thus creating an emergency woodstore that was a bit more awkward to get wood from than a regular stocpile, but strangely invisible to the elves, when they cared about such things.  (I'd also make the very first workshops, and the Depot, out of wood... to be later replaced with whatever form of Stone Blocks I decided was my fortress theme.)

And that was also before rock pots, so barrels (also, AFAIK, it's still wood-only when creating axles?) might well need that covert wood-store to extract from.


[1] Although, these days, unoccupied workers start off on plant gathering or as a last resort, dedicated haulers to augment these gatherers.

[theothersteve7]

My first action in every fortress is to safely wall of a large part of the map and put up a raising bridge as the only way in or out.  I would recommend you do the same.  As your capacity expands, claim more and larger areas of the surface.  Throw up some archer towers, moats, and grazing areas.

I also take every single log that the caravans bring.  Three dwarfbucks per log is an awesome deal.

The long-term goal that I usually have for wood production is to dig out most of an entire layer, muddy it, and breach a cavern.  That's late-game though; muddying an area that big requires some dwarven engineering.

[TheCoolSideofthePIllow]

Getting wood is really easy in the morning.

[WCG]

... at one time I used to regularly devote as many woodcutters to deforesting the the area as I could, and as many other unoccupied workers[1] set to construct a wooden stockade from this wood, around the entrance, several tiles thick, thus creating an emergency woodstore...

Note the danger in that: I recently had a dragon attack my fort, and although the moat was dug, I didn't have the stone walls completely finished yet. Anyway, one flaming dragon attack from across the moat set a fire which swept through the jungle in my compound, burning up everything made of wood. In that situation, I suspect that your wood store would have gone up in flames.

The jungle fire was really pretty neat, I must admit. (It was winter, the dry season in this otherwise-rainy biome.) Luckily, most of my stuff was made of stone, and I had my wood stored underground. So the flames just burned up my windmill and my wooden cages (and the goblins inside many of them).

[Starver]

Not that I ever had to handle a dragon, under those circumstances, but...  Constructions are (at least so far as I have had cause to observe, and often mentioned to be in all circumstances) invulnerable.  And this extends to building a wall with ice that safely contains magma with absolutely no delitarious effects.

Vegetation would be at risk of going up in flame, and growing trees in particular.  And so harvesting the trees and making them into walls is actually reducing the availability of flammable material.  (You might also need to heavily trample the grasslands or lay down dirt or constructed roads to stop a bog-standard brush-fire in its tracks, as well, though.  But I believe my stockade would have been a good barrier should the worst come to the worst at all.)