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[Eidre]

Looking for some conventional wisdom on ratios and efficiencies...I think I'm past the basic survival learning stage (at least in average surroundings), but I'm sure I'm overdoing some things and underdoing others (last fort, for example, I had 3 kitchens on repeat and was well past 100 lavish meals per dwarf in stockpile before I gave up to FPS death).

Does anyone have any anecdotes on how many Xs to have per Y dwarves (i.e. "every X dwarves should have a still and a 3x3 plot of brewable plants to support their drinking habit" or "you need one pig tail plot + farm workshop + loom + clothier per X dwarves").  Alternately, which industries can I survive without (either ignoring completely or entirely subsisting on merchant caravans)?

Also, what's the "best" industry to maximize trading potential with the cheapest/easiest/most common inputs?  And yes, I realize this is deliberately vague and highly dependent on personal preference, embark site, etc.

[itg]

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:How_large_a_farm_do_i_need

Basically, there's no reason to go above a 5x5 area's worth of farms for food and drink. Not sure how big you clothing farms need to be, but they certainly don't need to be any bigger than that.

The best industry for trading depends on where you are in your fort's life cycle. For an early fort, it might be most effective to make a bunch of wooden spiked balls, since they're easy and ridiculously overpriced. In a mature fort, roasts are absurdly valuable (a stack is commonly worth 50,000 dwarfbucks or more), but you can generally get everything you need by trading worn-out clothing.

[ImagoDeo]

The age of the fort tends to determine what ratios you need on various things. Since grower isn't a moodable skill, you can't have a legendary one right off the bat, which complicates things somewhat; a proper food/drink curve is pretty difficult to figure out and most of the time I just overdo it with 3-5 3x5 farms, split between various crops and seasons. My current most successful fort ran 3 3x5 farms for fifteen years, followed by two 3x3 farms and one 5x3 farm for overground crops (growing under a few drawbridge skylights). Eventually got extremely overstocked on food and drink, so I let everything lie fallow for the last seven or eight years and we've still got somewhere around fifteen thousand drinks and twenty-eight thousand expensive roasts.

My dream is to figure out the numbers such that I can curve a fortress exactly right and never overstock by more than 1 year's worth of food and drink. But I doubt it'll ever happen.

Rule of thumb: three 3x5 farms with 2-5 dedicated growers can easily wine and dine a fort of up to 250 dwarves, especially once the growers are all legendary and ESPECIALLY if your dwarves don't mind plump helmets and wine for every meal. I don't know any ratios for clothing.

One other ratio that kind of makes a difference: beds-to-dwarves. It really depends on how many married couples you have. Check migrants for married status and adjust accordingly; can be as low as 2:3 or 3:5 if you have few children and many married dwarves. I have to say, it's one good benefit of having a lot of married couples; you can keep them all happier more easily.

[smurfingtonthethird]

It should be pretty easy to feed a fully-fledged fortress with one big 5x5 plump helmet farm and several smaller plots growing different plants for variety. Clothing, on the other hand, takes forever to set up nicely. My strategy (at least for some of my largest fortresses, 500 dwarves plus) is to leave clothing workshops to create clothes on repeat. Keeps my weavers and clothiers busy and makes sure all the dwarves aren't running around naked. Worn clothing is either burned or traded off to a passing caravan. Furniture to dwarves is also pretty important, so make sure your dining rooms have at least half your populations worth of seating. Also, only give married couples private bedrooms, leaving singles to their dormitories. This helps with them getting married and spawning the next generation of dwarves.

[wierd]

Since food usually doesn't go bad if it is in a proper pot or barrel in a food stockpile, I usually spam the production of crops, up until around 2000 plant, for 200 dwarves, then convert into lavish meals.  There is usually around 500 meat, and 600 cheese at this point, mostly from the caravan. I try to avoid eggs anymore, because they complicate lavish meal creation without micromanagement. (Stacks of 20 chicken eggs tends to do that... and barrels filled with dozens of such stacks makes creating omlets all too frequent.)

This nets around 50 to 60 lavish meal per dwarf, if all goes correctly, and if you deny alcohol in cooking. (Its hard to get a good mix with alcohol, or at least I seem to have trouble with it.)

Being very cosmopolitan with the ingredients maximizes the chances that a given dwarven roast will give a preferred food happy thought, while compactifying the food stockpile.

After that point, I basically just use the farm plots to increase booze supplies intermittantly, and to produce textile industry trade fodder. (Milled dyes, and textile goods. Rocknut oil soap is lucrative, but then you end up swimming in peanut butter-- er... rocknut press cakes. Milled bags of dye are readily consumed in the textile process itself, and can be controlled with stockpile restrictions.)

I use masterfully dyed masterful fabric bags with masterful images of masterful renditions of cheese (ahem) as a cheap and effective means of permanently boosting fortress networth, since I couple them with the glass industry, and have them constantly being filled and emptied of sand. (Most end up with spikes or hanging rings of green glass as well.)

That way I at least get a nice perk from spamming the living hell out of textile work. Elves just loves them some cloth crafts. (I like to remind them that the crap they bring me is simply nowhere near as good as what dwarves make, hoping they will figure out that we don't want their lumpy hippy homespun crap, but they never take the hint. They are basically just a garbage dump. I give them the crappy craftgoods and xclothingx, and sell the dwarves the good stuff in trade for valuable cut gems and metal bars.)

I usually try to keep 10x full sets of clothing per each dwarf when I am expecting migrants to show up, then cut that back to 3x per dwarf when I hit max pop.

Booze, I try to keep 2x of each kind for each dwarf at all times. (That's 2x each of prickleberry wine, strawberry wine, river spirits, dwarven beer, dwarven ale, dwarven wine and dwarven rum. I don't bother with sewer brew. Its worthless. Whip wine and sunshine when possible, but that's now always the case.) That comes to about 14:1 on booze. This prevents "same old booze" bad thoughts, but is probably overkill. This allows some use in kitchen without sacrificing availability and variety.

[Larix]

Holy overstocking, Batman!

But it's true - booze/food/clothing shortages are usually not caused by insufficient farm space. Depending on optimisation, fertiliser use and cooking setup, you can feed between three and ten dwarfs with a single farm tile. One tile of rope reeds should also be enough to clothe up to twelve beards, eight without fertiliser and five or six with middling-skilled growers.

A large fort subsisting entirely on home-grown food and plant fibres can use substantial farm space, but "substantial" doesn't need to mean more than three or four 5x5 plots. You can use more for variety and less efficient production lines like dye plants or flour, but if i have farming trouble, it's usually overproduction.

Food and booze production is more limited by seed management (seed hauling notoriously interferes with farming by whisking away the seed bags) and still and kitchen setup (especially booze cooking, which is the most efficient way to turn farm produce into edible food, takes careful permission setting and stockpile design to work). The limiting factors of the plant-sourced clothing industry are usually the throughput of the workshops.

[Sutremaine]

I tend to buy in a lot of booze and food, and allow goblin clothing to be claimed and worn. Since I like to seal the caverns early and keep animals for food and parts, I have resources on-site if there's a long-running siege. I would consider a decent supply to be six months' worth of food and drink.

That's 2x each of prickleberry wine, strawberry wine, river spirits, dwarven beer, dwarven ale, dwarven wine and dwarven rum. I don't bother with sewer brew. Its worthless.

Sewer brew and prickle berry wine have the same value. The other two 1-value boozes are gutter cruor and swamp whiskey.

[TheDarkStar]

I tend to have a small farm for food and then just buy clothes from the caravans. For trade goods, I always use trap components - it's relatively easy to get 10 silver, iron, or steel serrated discs to sell for the first caravan. Steel discs can be worth up to about 45000, so making them gives a huge amount for very little work. It also uses the huge amount of metal bars that I tend to amass, even though I do things like make armor and weapons with it.