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[Arkansan]

My new fortress is coming along nicely save for one problem, food. I have a single 3x3 farm plot, 4 farmers after my second migrant wave, though one of my farmers had like 4 or 5 ranks in grower at embark. I also have 3 turkey hens and one gobbler producing eggs and two or three female dogs with one male that way I can butcher the puppies.

I figured that I had everything covered for the minute considering I only have 22 dwarves. However at any given time I only have around 20-30 plants, 30-40 meat, but I have around 100 prepared eggs. I am only growing plump helmets at the moment.

Anything I could be doing more efficiently to keep more plants on hand? I end up with only 50 booze at any given time, which is concerning to me. Is there a better way for me to be making use of the resources on hand? There does not seem to be anything available to hunt or fish.

[Arcvasti]

You'll be fine. I usually sustain a whole fortress of ~100 dwarves on a 3X3 farm plot of plump helmets. Good planters and fast brewers help a lot. Eggs will also help a ton. You should be set for basically forever. Although getting some other plant to brew is often helpful for othe reasons.

[sal880612m]

If you mean you have 100 prepared turkey egg biscuits, stews, or roasts your food situation is okay. I would set up another 2-3 farms for other crops. Also if you have the wood to spare make ash and turn it into potash to fertilize your fields. Use large pots to store your food. Large pots can be made out of stone or wood at a craftdwarf's workshop. If you check your kitchen stock be sure that you aren't cooking plants but saving them for brewing.

[ancistrus]

You'll be fine. I usually sustain a whole fortress of ~200 dwarves on a 3X3 farm plot of plump helmets. Good planters and fast brewers help a lot. Eggs will also help a ton. You should be set for basically forever. Although getting some other plant to brew is often helpful for othe reasons.

That hardly seems realistic. Care too elaborate?

[GavJ]

If you have plenty of non plant food, then I suggest growing plants that cannot be eaten raw, and then turn off cooking them, to ensure you have material for brewing. For example, pig tails (bonus for pig tails is that you can use them for clothing if you end up with an excess)

[Arcvasti]

You'll be fine. I usually sustain a whole fortress of ~100 dwarves on a 3X3 farm plot of plump helmets. Good planters and fast brewers help a lot. Eggs will also help a ton. You should be set for basically forever. Although getting some other plant to brew is often helpful for othe reasons.

That hardly seems realistic. Care too elaborate?

Typo. Meant ~100 dwarves. Which is a lot for some people. And farming ISN'T realistic. You get a batch of plump helmets quickly. And with a good farmer, each one is 4-5 plants a stack. Fertilizer probably helps. I also reccommended an auxiliary brewing crop, like cave wheat or sweet pod. Having a bunch of farmers and only a few farm plots is a bad idea. That way you end up with a lot of mediocre skilled farmers and small stacks of plants, whereas having only a few farmers will lead to a few very skilled farmers and large stacks of plants. If you're planning on TONS of farm plots, then have 5-8 farmers. Otherwise, 2-4 should be fine.

If you have plenty of non plant food, then I suggest growing plants that cannot be eaten raw, and then turn off cooking them, to ensure you have material for brewing. For example, pig tails (bonus for pig tails is that you can use them for clothing if you end up with an excess)

I still endorse plump helmets because they grow so fast. Pig tails are important for thread though, and grow almost as quickly.

[Arkansan]

I actually have the pop cap set at 100 for this fort because it is my first in a while and I would like to learn a bit from it before I try a bigger fort. So basically only use the plants for brewing? Should I let a batch of eggs hatch that way I have a few more hens and gobblers? Also are dogs workable as food or am I wasting time with them?

[deepfreeze78]

I actually have the pop cap set at 100 for this fort because it is my first in a while and I would like to learn a bit from it before I try a bigger fort. So basically only use the plants for brewing? Should I let a batch of eggs hatch that way I have a few more hens and gobblers? Also are dogs workable as food or am I wasting time with them?

Dogs are perfectly fine for food, but I usually prefer to train them all for war and assign them to my main squad. One squad of 10 legendary swordsmen and 20 wardogs, a war tiger, and a war giant cheetah can break most sieges really easily.

[GavJ]

Note that if you want farming to be more realistic (or egg laying for that matter), you can modify these things in the raws.
Namely, for plants, GROWDUR and CLUSTERSIZE
GROWDUR = a number of time units for a plant to grow, where one season is 1008 units of time. So if you want a plant to take two seasons to grow to maturity, change it to GROWDUR 2016 (note that you probably want to give such a plant at least 3 or maybe all 4 seasons, because if it is growing and it becomes an invalid season you just lose the whole crop). Plump helmets by default are only 300.

CLUSTERSIZE limits how many plants you get in a stack, no matter how good the farmer. For realism, you may also want to set this to 1 or 2 instead of the default 5.

clusters of 1 and growdurs of 2000 would together require about 30x as much farm space and many more farmers, which would be about a realistic amount by my judgment. If changging that, you would also want to limit egg production and meat production in order to not just make the players ignore plants entirely (you can do this by changing adult vs child meat amounts and the amount of time it takes creatures to grow to adulthood, and CLUTCH_SIZE (for example, to 1 for most things).

It would be nice if egg size affected how much you need to eat for a meal, then you could make it a bit more realistic, but it doesn't.

[wierd]

A walled in surface crop plot will produce more than enough food to keep your little drunken sociopaths so fat that they can hardly walk, practically indefinitely. (You may need to add a second one, when you exceed 200 of them-- This of course, is in addition to the underground farm plot, and at a size of 10x10.)

By walled in, I mean literally walled in-- with a roof.  Perfectly safe from sieges and flying animals that way. Will not impact the ability to grow food in it. You can more effectively get 100% utilization by smoothing the plot site, then flooding mud, before building the plot. Works like a charm.

Currently, Surface crops dont have any seasonal restrictions, so you can grow any crop on any season. That means you can grow strawberries in the spring, prickle berries in the summer, fisher berries in the fall, and lowland grass (or ropereed, or whip vine, or the coveted sunberries, if you can source them) in the winter, and have at least 3 crops that are directly edible, AND brewable on demand, throughout the year.  Balance that with plump helmet in the winter, and there will ALWAYS be a directly edible plant crop in your fortress that is in season, and your little bearded bastards wont have any bad thoughts about always eating or drinking the same old stuff.

Just make sure that cooking seeds is turned off, and that you have properly configured your stockpiles (both for harvested crops and for seed storage in regard to efficient planting time), and you will be literally ROLLING in raw plant based food items. Set it up, and forget about it. Literally. 5 planters that get good at their jobs can feed the whole fortress effortlessly.

I abuse the crap out of the "no seasonal restrictions" thing on surface crops, since I can bulk process roprereeds (which have the same value as pig tails, which do have a seasonal restriction) 24/7, nonstop, through a clothing industry for trade fodder purposes. (also ensures that nobody gets nakedness related bad thoughts, as a bonus.)  Couple that with ceramics and green glass, and you will never want for trade goods again.

Just one 10x10 surface crop plot, and one 10x10 underground farm plot, used at maximum efficiency, is all you will ever really need, barring some special industrial purpose. (Like with my mass-production of ropereed for clothing industry.)

[Melting Sky]

Dogs are perfectly fine for food, but I usually prefer to train them all for war and assign them to my main squad. One squad of 10 legendary swordsmen and 20 wardogs, a war tiger, and a war giant cheetah can break most sieges really easily.

As effective as dogs are as distracting meat-shield additions to your military be very careful to keep the number of dogs per dwarf low since nothing is worse that taking out some huge siege without losing a single dwarf only to have 10 berserk weapon lords rip your fort apart the next day because they've gone over the edge while mourning their fallen pets. Avoid assigning dogs to dwarves with traits such as easily upset or prone to insanity etc. and allow a max of one or two war animals per dwarf. Once the grizzled old military dwarves get the "doesn't care about anything anymore" trait you can probably get away with assigning them more war animals.

As other have pointed out dogs make a decent secondary food and leather source later in the game in addition to serving as outlooks, guards, etc.

I'll also add my vote to turkeys. They are almost game breakingly good sources of food. If you are having food problems definitely let one generation of eggs mature and that should solve your food needs pretty much permanently.

[Bwint]

I'll add my vote to turkeys for meals. The biggest advantage to turkeys for me is the ability to supply your kitchens with eggs exclusively, and use plants for brewing only. Set up an egg stockpile near your nest boxes, and tell it to give to kitchen. It looks like you have more than enough egg biscuits for now, so it's a perfect time to hatch a clutch or three of eggs, which will give you enough egg layers to sustain quite a few dwarves.

One reason you might be low on booze is that you're cooking all your booze/plants with the eggs. Consider using plant stockpiles to give to your still, and remove plants and booze from your kitchen stockpiles. You can also change kitchen settings with [z] -> kitchen and set plants to brew only. That should solve your booze/plant problems.

If you want a buffer in case one of your farmers dies, or if you're still having problems, buy all the spirits/plants from one of the caravans. With 22 dwarves, that'll give you a huge reserve. If you have idle labour, gather plants from outside. Herbalism alone isn't nearly enough for large forts, but it should help in your case.

[Melting Sky]

If you want a buffer in case one of your farmers dies, or if you're still having problems, buy all the spirits/plants from one of the caravans. With 22 dwarves, that'll give you a huge reserve.

Very good point. Elves in particular bring some great booze. I make it a point to buy out every barrel of booze from every merchant that shows up. Always try to keep a larger booze stock pile than food because when it comes to a food emergency you can always just go slaughter some of the fort's dogs or go hunting but with booze it can take an entire season before you can restock if they run dry.

[callisto8413]

When in doubt trade useless junk for booze.  Or different types of meat and organs.  Dwarfs hate drinking the same type of food or drink again and again.  And most traders always carry something that can be cooked or brewed into something.  Even animals to breed. 

You can never have enough booze.  Sober (or idle) Dwarfs are unhappy Dwarfs. 

[Reelya]

When you brew booze, it gets 5 times the food units of the plant stack. That booze can then be used in cooking, and retains the higher amount. It's a good trick to boost food amounts quickly. You don't need plants sitting around. Brew it, then that frees up seeds straight away for planting, or cooking (they're not edible before cooking).

You will definitely end up with too many seeds. At 200 seeds per fortress they stop stacking. This is hardcoded. You can cook them down until there's just enough for your field, then switch to egg cooking.

Another recent thread talks about how to fine-tune what a kitchen uses for cooking:
 
You set up 4 x 1x1 stockpiles feeding to that kitchen. Then, the cook will only ever cook meals in that kitchen when those stockpiles are full. You could, e.g. allow seeds in the first stockpile slot, and booze in the other 3 stockpile slots (one 1x3 stockpile set to take from your main booze stockpile). Queue up make lavish meals forever. Then you end up with lots of seed+booze roasts. Or, switch to eggs+booze roasts when you've used up enough excess seeds. With the feeder stockpile trick for kitchens, it's easy to switch over. Eggs stack forever and are also edible raw, so it's better to save those up than save up seeds (which won't stack over 200 in the fort, and can't be eaten).

Booze is the ultimate food filler:

Booze is 5x the food value of the initial plants that made it, but is only edible when cooking into a roast at a kitchen. Make sure you're brewing all the frikkin time. 30 fresh plants is 30 pots of 5x booze that could have been made, then cooked into 5 times the food amount. You don't need fresh fruit sitting around. Brew it rather than let it sit there. When you're short on food, all that prepared booze from plants planted by high-level farmers converts to A LOT of prepared meals very quickly.

So:

- check that your farms are planted all the time
- only let the best farmers farm. Have one "trainee" at at time, max, plus your best 2-3 farmers. That increases average stack size. Only let designated farmer harvest, too. Which maximizes experience gain for those who need it.
- keep brewing all the time. You should have all brewers going, and very few excess plants. If plants keep stacking up but you still have a brewer going full time, build a second brewery.
- cook seeds to use them up as an extra food source that normally goes to waste, and booze for fast food units.
- more kitchens, and fine-tune the allowed cookery items, and/or do the feeder stockpile tricks, so that you cook excess booze. Kitchens don't need to be going all the time, if you use efficient ingredients like booze a lot.