There's also the problem where they don't actually grow properly without DFhack bugfixing.
EDIT: Decided to chronicle my playthrough in version 3.4 of my update to this project of madness, half because I haven't really opened it up since the original minimal version, complete with rave deserts, and half because I don't know if there's anyone up for playing through my stuff, and since the only stuff I added was a single magma-layer creature and a fuckton of inorganics, it's not super spoiler ridden so I'll play through. I was gonna play through for bugtesting and for fun anyways.
So. Embarked on this lovely place....
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It's classed as badlands, with no trees or shrubs, but I brought enough wood and plants to tough it out. There's a brook in the far north of the map, the embark is 4x4 and straddles two roughly-equal but split biomes, it's listed as having deep soil, aquifers, shallow metal and multiple deep metals. This excites me, because while I haven't unpaused yet, I saw that we're in a sedimentary layer (Kazurot is a sedimentary stone), and the two soils I saw so far were black dirt and red sand, neither of which can have that aquifer mentioned. I'm hoping there's no jaded slade, though... because it means that we might have Oxyline on site. If I can smelt some iridium, I'm gonna be ecstatic.
Embark supplies.... 12 flaxseeds, 12 pumpkin seeds, 10 pumpkins, 5 units of tarnish stalk cloth (BTW, both kinds of cloth exist as "tarnish stalk cloth cloth" and "flax cloth cloth", pretty sure that's unintentional), 3 apple wood buckets, 10 bags of red sand, 5 boulders of lunaniumite, 21 boulders of leylite (because we could embark with it for some reason, and it's dragonfire safe, fuck yeah), and 40 apple wood logs. We also brought a pair of water grubs, three ducks, and a couple pack beetles. I intend on using stone for things that don't need to be wooden, so we should last until we get to the caverns and harvest the wood down there. The brook isn't frozen (although I don't know how the game handles freezing of brooks since there's the invisible brook-floor on top), but the embark was mentioned to be temperate I believe... time to go find that aquifer.
Halfway through the first month... relatively routine hobbit hole preparations. Started working the stone into nest boxes for the ducks, channeled out a few edges of the cliffs to make things look slightly less ugly, started to dig underground. Dropped 1 z-level, hit brown dirt. Probably due to the biome differences. The z-level below has blue dirt, though.... and true to its name, it's soaking wet. We're gonna try to go around it.
Dammit. Dug down, hit horichoko instead of oxyline. This is depressing. Ah well. There are huge deposits of Aeresiumite down here, so that's good. Not weapons grade, but maybe we can trade it for some iridium nuggets. Of course, we can't work the stuff without oxyline in the first place...
At least the blue dirt provides an endless, safe source of drinking water, so we won't die. I'm also gonna set up pumpkin farms nearby, so we won't starve that way either. Yes sirree, hobbit life is a fine life.