Harder farming still isn’t really all that hard if you follow all the rules; my 120 dorfs trade away lavish meals and I have less than 100 tiles of fields. You only need
plants for the thatchery to make paper and for seeds (oil and such for the explosives). And I suppose wicker, if you want the lighter bins. Otherwise, what you really want are FOOD and BOOZE and those are a function of stack size. Five beats one by a lot, so to speak. The Wiki pages on Grower and Quarry Bush detail this cascade effect. I embark with two proficient farmers and they’re the first ones through the Guildhall (one is also the starting broker because somebody has to do it and it doesn’t take very much time away from the fields). I take more seeds and spawn than necessary and after that first chair and a few bins, my carpenter makes barrels; this avoids the planting bug #5964 and ensures all tiles are planted without micromanagement. Meph emphasizes the library for good reason; my Scribe also starts out proficient and after a few military and medical essays, he writes on farming. During winter, my Growers read and are both legendary (or close) by the third year. I plant 3x5 plots just out of habit from when fertilizer was hard to come by in vanilla, mostly rope reed and red jute only because that seems what paper should be made from. And plump helmets because it’s DF, after all. Every caravan comes by with cloth, leather and thread and farming silk is now easy, anyhow. I buy all the cheap seeds that are offered because they all make oil and come with a bag. Even with unguarded caravans, with a little help enough will make it through to provide variety and in any case, that’s what the Embassy is for. I butcher large animals because of the larger meat stacks. Like Smake, I keep a few egg-layers around (again, habit) but I don’t cook the eggs, they’re just breeding stock because you want smaller stacks for bones (more accurately, you want many stacks of bones, the size is immaterial). Cheese is not expensive so I don’t fiddle with making any, but caravans bring it unasked. A stone pot with masterwork lavish meals can top 30K as a trade good even without the bloody expensive cheese. Meph is on record saying he made farming harder just so players can’t do what I just described so, the next release will probably include “incredibly harder farming.”
Mushrooms: “harder mushrooms” is pretty much the only thing that comes to mind where Meph has posted something that is factually incorrect. He wrote the mushrooms take longer to grow “as they should” but the only real-world mushrooms cultivated in the dark are
Angaricus and they still flush pretty much like any other mushroom, with commercial cultivation cycles of 30 – 40 days (and as it turns out, it isn’t really necessary to grow them in the dark but the French do like their limestone caves). Plump helmets are purple. There aren’t many real-world purple mushrooms. Dwarves are also drunkards and basically stupid. That’s an interesting combination and several DF players are amateur mycologists and we’ve traded some interesting PMs about that. (Write me if you’re interested; there are several NAMA members who post on Bay12.)
