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[mek42]

Has anyone done as a challenge a no plant fort?  Chopping trees is fine, but no growing plants for food or drinks, subsisting on meat, fish, eggs, milk, cheese and mead?  Pretty much living exactly the opposite of the elves?

[Ildac]

It'd be hard to survive on traded booze alone.  Unless you still allow plant gathering, and just forbid growing.

[Splint]

Modding milk to have a reaction or some other means to make it a drinkable drink would probably make such a fort possible.

[wierd]

A few minutes on google reveals that humans are disgusting creatures that will literally eat anything.

Behold, a dynamic duo of fermented dairy products.

Kumis, an asian beverage made from mare's milk
Mursik, an african fermented milk ...product... made from milk that has been allowed to ferment inside specially prepared gourds.

That you can make alcohol from milk is unsurprising, given that it contains maltos and lactos, as well as glucose sugars. The fat and protien content however, may prove troublesome.

But that's the LAST thing I want to imagine.... inebriated and raucous dwarves that reek of sour milk. Ugh.

[Baffler]

It probably doesn't blend well with the normal vomit and blood a dwarf is covered in either...

[acetech09]

Mead? Dunno how bugged it is, does only 1 beekeeper work at a time still?

[wierd]

Beekeeping is a lesson in EXTREME micromanagement, because you also have to watchdog the actual work tasks themselves.

You can have multiple bee keepers, and this "can" increase the rate of production, but it makes the pernicious bug in the beekeeping system more pronounced and agrivated.

Basically, the game does not properly track and lock hives for tasks.

What does this mean?

Urist McBeekeeper decides he wants to collect honey. Sure. No problem. But now there is an "install hive" job. Urist decides that the nearest hive is suitable. However, his fellow beekeeper, Ducim McBeekeeper has decided to harvest that hive for honey!

Does urist do the sensible thing, and pick a different hive to select from, or do the dwarven thing and announce "Install hive cancelled: Job item missing or misplaced"? Oh hell no.

He walks to the hive he was GOING to get bees from, AND STANDS THERE FOREVER.

No announcement. No cancellation. No locking on the hive to stop Ducim from processing it before he gets there. Nothing. Just Urist standing around like a dipshit, looking for a hive that doesn't exist anymore.

The way to fix it? Use the U menu to check the building that issued to the collect live bees/install hive job, then cancel it manually. This causes Urist to re-evaluate where to get bees from.

The more keepers you have "tending" hives, the more they will derail each other, and screw up bee keeping, and the more you have to spend time just holding their little deformed hands to manage their workflow for them.

Beekeeping can produce a LOT of honey, and thus mead, if you manage it carefully. (Especially if you mod bumblebees to be installable! The you can double the hiveboxes on the map!) The problem is that it makes getting a root canal seem pleasurable, when trying to make it work.

Urist will literally die of thirst or hunger, looking for the hive that doesn't exist anymore, if you don't intervene.

[mek42]

I didn't know this about the honey industry.  Maybe this idea will be less likely to induce overseer tantrums in a future version.

Regarding traded booze, how frequent is mead as a trade good?

[Splint]

It's not traded at all unless you sell it to others.

EDIT: You know what, I'm going to try this, and see if I can't figure out how to make a milk processing reaction so booze is less of an issue.

[Larix]

Two minor notes on the stuck beekeeper problem:
just to clarify, the wonky job must be cancelled by toggling the 'c' option on the hive that issued the order. Switch to 'do not install', then back to 'install colony when ready'. _Nothing else_ will properly get rid of the screwed-up job.
Beekeepers won't actually starve/dehydrate, they'll abort the installation job when they're past the normal hunger/thirst thresholds. But if you don't clear up those jobs it means one beekeeper per broken hive will spend its entire time standing in one spot counting grass blades.

There's a 'too many hives' note that shows up whenever you have over 40 occupied hives. I don't know what it actually does (it says something about 'reduced output', which suggests honey gets produced at a slower rate or something like that); but it may well be that the effective maximum for beekeeping is forty hives.

I'm also not sure of the production speed of hives - in dry/hot biomes, i was getting frequencies of about three seasons per harvest. Considering one harvest produces _one_ honey which converts to five mead, while a single dwarf consumes about four drink per season, it should be hard to provide enough booze even for twenty dwarfs with a full battery of hives.

Yeah, for a booze source that makes a kind of real-world sense and can keep a fort supplied to any degree, you'll probably need to mod fermented milk.

[wierd]

If you mod bumblebees to be installable, you can have 80 hive boxes. The 40 box limit is PER honey producing species. I know, because I routinely poked bumblebees to be installable.  Considered modding in honeypot ants as another installable, but thought better of it.

[Fluoman]

Isn't it possible to burrow beekeepers around an assigned beehive to avoid the multiple beekeeper problem entirely?

[wierd]

That would probably make that even worse.

It isnt just one keeper taking a hive for  honey that causes the problem, it is also keepers looking for hives that are ready to be split.

The logic for choosing which hive to use for a given task seems to be "Which one is closest, and suitable", but that isn't gospel. Since hives arent tracked or locked by tasks properly, dwarves can all race to the same wild hive location, or split hivebox, after another dwarf collects it for bees.

Since the hives are not locked or tracked correctly, i dont really know if burrow restrictions would be beneficial. they may be very deleterious, or even expose other anomalous behaviors. (Like burrow restricting a moody dwarf away from the workshop he has claimed before begins construction on an artifact)

Sounds like a good science experiment, but I think what will happen is that Urist will STILL want to pick hive boxes that are outside his burrow for doing install colony jobs.

[Di]

For me the main problem with mead is that you can't set pressing honeycombs to auto like web collecting or tallow processing.
This means you have to watch for every harvest and personally queue the job, which gets frustrating as number of honeycombs usually fluctuates near zero.

[Kolnukbyne]

I saw a while back a mod that adds reactions to create alcoholic beverages from animal blood and extracts which I suppose would be useful for such a fort.