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[Thedogjob]

In every fortress I've made this error always shows up repetitively; Farmer cancels Plant Seeds: Needs plump helmet spawn.
this message keeps coming. It starts out only appearing once and a while but then it gradually appears more and more often until every five seconds this message pops up, until my dwarfs start canceling their jobs to go hunt for vermin and then they eventually all starve to death. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong but I would like some help knowing how i can fix it, because once again this has started happening in my current fortress. My dwarfs haven't quite started hunting vermin but I have a feeling they're close so i would like to stop them from starving so i can actually advance my fortress. My farm is only 5x5 and I only have 23 dwarf's, I don't know if that's important information or not but if someone could help me that would be really great. Thanks.

May our fortunes rise and fall together.

[Tacomagic]

The messages are one of those things that you'll have to live with at some level or another.

The best step you can take is to make a small stockpile near the farms to take only seeds and have it set to 0 barrels and then forbid seeds from every other stockpile you have.  That'll prevent farmers from running off with the one barrel/pot you've got all your seeds in.  It won't stop the messages completely, as multiple farmers will all be vying for the same bag of seeds, but it will reduce the messages by a lot. 

This will help streamline your farms a bit and allow multiple crops to be planted at the same time.  When you've got everything in 1 barrel, it means you're limited to planting 1 crap at a time, which will eventually bottleneck you and cause everyone to starve.

The other thing you'll need to keep track of is how many seeds you have at any given time.  As your cooks use up vegetables they won't be producing any seeds, so you'll need to go in the kitchen menu from time to time and forbid crops from being cooked so that your seed populations can recover.

You'll also want to diversify your food production beyond just farmed products.  I highly recommend embarking with a set of turkeys or blue peahens and get the egg industry moving along.  Or at least plan to trade for any that show up in caravans.

[Vgray]

What kind of decadent overseer ever cooks plump helmets anyway?

[Toxicshadow]

planting 1 crap at a time

Only one who caught this? lol .-.;

[Tacomagic]

planting 1 crap at a time

Only one who caught this? lol .-.;

That's one of my best typos in a while.

[Thedogjob]

Then how come people like captnduck, who's videos i learned a lot from, never got any of these error messeges?

[Brilliand]

Then how come people like captnduck, who's videos i learned a lot from, never got any of these error messeges?

I'm guessing he made his videos before the DF version where dwarves started carrying barrels around to pick up seeds instead of picking up seeds to carry to the barrels.

[Vgray]

But they would still be getting food right? That would not make them start hunting vermin.

[Brilliand]

But they would still be getting food right? That would not make them start hunting vermin.

True.  If it gets that bad, then you've probably run out of seeds, which captnduck probably never did.  (Make sure you're not cooking plump helmets or plump helmet spawn, as Vgray mentioned - that's pretty much the only way to run out of seeds.  You can enable/disable those specifically in the kitchen section of the 'z' menu.)

[wierd]

There was a recent suggestion for using the workshops themselves as quantum dumps for seeds, and trading the clutter inefficiency for the reduction in seed error spam.

Basically, link the workshop with a stockpile, then forbid seeds in the stockpile. This will pevent the seeds from ever being stocked into the stockpile, (or any other stockpile), and just accumulate in the workshop and the dining halls.  They never get put in sacks, or barrels, so individual stacks of seeds are pathed to by farmers for planting. 

Naturally, this will start to add up if lots and lots of seeds are cluttering the workshops. Possibly combatted with having lots of redundant workshops to distribute the seeds amongst, and relying on the 200 max seeds of each type hard limit.

[Brilliand]

There was a recent suggestion for using the workshops themselves as quantum dumps for seeds, and trading the clutter inefficiency for the reduction in seed error spam.

Basically, link the workshop with a stockpile, then forbid seeds in the stockpile. This will pevent the seeds from ever being stocked into the stockpile, (or any other stockpile), and just accumulate in the workshop and the dining halls.  They never get put in sacks, or barrels, so individual stacks of seeds are pathed to by farmers for planting. 

Naturally, this will start to add up if lots and lots of seeds are cluttering the workshops. Possibly combatted with having lots of redundant workshops to distribute the seeds amongst, and relying on the 200 max seeds of each type hard limit.

Whoa, a way to keep seeds out of bags!  This I gotta try.

[vanatteveldt]

I think you can also use two adjacent stockpiles, both accepting seeds, with A taking from everywhere and giving to B, and B taking from links only. That way, they will bring seeds from the fortress to A but they are transferred to B immediately. The bags in B will not be toted around the fortress as B doesn't accept from the rest of the fortress. That way, the main seed bags should be available for the farmer most of the time.

(although I get so much message spam that I stopped caring, I wish there was a better way of specifying which messages interest you...)

[laularukyrumo]

Vanat, that method is the "old" method for reducing spam. And it still doesn't work 100% because they have a tendency to grab a bag from B just to go get a seed from A. Or if you're unlucky, from anywhere else.

I'm also pretty sure that dwarves don't like taking seeds out of one bag to move to another. At all. Ever. So you'll get to the point where you have bags full of seed in A, and farmers will target that stockpile for getting their seeds from since I believe they target the most recently created item. Or basically just the random probability and Law of Big Numbers will get you, and you'll be back to square one.

Bags are the crux of the issue. Barrels merely compound the problem because there is a secondary container, but it doesn't stop the fact that you can't tell dwarves to stockpile seeds outside of a bag, unless you forbid every single fucking bag. The solution given by wierd is the workaround.

[Parsley]

You can reduce the problem by doing a few smaller farm plots, and have them each grow different plants at different times, and fertilize to increase yields. One thing to remember is that because the seed cap is a few hundred, and each bag holds something like a hundred seeds, it is nearly impossible without extensive planning or micromanagement to have more than two seed items in the fortress for a single type of plant ever as long as you choose to use bags (and the alternative is far worse). You can micro-manage stockpiles and having lots of seed production points (multiple stills, farmer's workshops, etc. depending on plant type) each feeding a different stockpile with seeds enabled, each with a reserved seed barrel, but I find this totally unnecessary just by using a few different types of plants at a time. I know it works though, because I built a fortress around the limitation of only growing food in the Spring and Summer, and not growing plump helmets at all. If you use surface plants for food production and fertilize, you will have absolutely no problems keeping your fortress fed and boozed up. One thing to be aware of is that you have to make sure some of your stocks are consumed by seed producing activities or you will run out of seeds regardless of what you do. You can find more by gathering plants, but you can't effectively feed a large fortress that way. Two 1x7 above ground and two 1x7 underground fields always growing different crops generates more than enough food and booze for even my largest fortresses... and occasional textile products as needed (mostly whiny kids who can't wear armor--everybody else is in the military, set to wear uniforms at all times, so I don't need much of a textiles industry)