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[Antonater]

My military problem has nothing to do with burrows and persists no matter how many times i reset the military, I tell them to kill X goblin or 20 or so goblins in an area and they will run then and then stand around getting hit, no burrows involved. (it works periodically but usually breaks half way through a large battle).

As for the seeds I tried all the fixes suggested here and they don't really help as i never have more than enough plump helmet seeds to fill half a bag even though I have about 200 dwarves (50ish of whom are growers) I have multiple farms (with different crops above and below ground) and stockpiles and ive tried all the settings I can but im always struggling for food because only one guy will plant at a time! Consequently everything else in the fort is achingly slow due to limited alcohol and therefore inefficent dwarves. Before the recent big patch which changed handling things in the same conditions I would have Thousands of plump helmets and seeds by now, literally overflowing vaults of them.

And for some reason all dwarf caravans stopped after the first one (which left the map successfully and isnt at war with me).

[Aslandus]

My military problem has nothing to do with burrows and persists no matter how many times i reset the military, I tell them to kill X goblin or 20 or so goblins in an area and they will run then and then stand around getting hit, no burrows involved. (it works periodically but usually breaks half way through a large battle).

As for the seeds I tried all the fixes suggested here and they don't really help as i never have more than enough plump helmet seeds to fill half a bag even though I have about 200 dwarves (50ish of whom are growers) I have multiple farms (with different crops above and below ground) and stockpiles and ive tried all the settings I can but im always struggling for food because only one guy will plant at a time! Consequently everything else in the fort is achingly slow due to limited alcohol and therefore inefficent dwarves. Before the recent big patch which changed handling things in the same conditions I would have Thousands of plump helmets and seeds by now, literally overflowing vaults of them.

And for some reason all dwarf caravans stopped after the first one (which left the map successfully and isnt at war with me).

I can't answer for what's going on with your civ, you'll have to ask your liaison about that if they ever decide to show up...

You may just want to use station orders rather than kill orders, I find kill orders to be very inefficient when getting military moving

If you're having trouble with brewing and stuff, are you sure you checked the kitchen tab under the Z menu (I don't know what you mean by "settings")? I don't know what the default settings are on that, but if plump helmets are disabled for brewing they won't get made into alcohol... oh and make sure your dwarves have "farming (fields)" enabled...

[Larix]

The easiest approach to the seeds issue is to never allow seeds to be stored in barrels. Seed barrels force cancellation of reams of planting jobs whenever they get moved, thus getting rid of them solves most planting issues. All that staged stockpiles nonsense can be done without, it does little apart from creating pointless additional hauling jobs.

Since all hauling of seeds interrupts planting, it's usually best to keep farms and seed-producing workshops close to each other - farmer's workshop, millstones and still should be right next to the growing plot. That reduces hauling distances and consequently planting interruptions to a minimum.

You could also try concentrating on plants that can't be eaten raw - the various grains, sweet pods, pig tail, rope reed etc. Those can be brewed for alcohol, but your beards won't pick up raw plants to eat in the dining hall and generate additional seed hauling jobs. Collecting fruit from trees is also an option (set up plant "g"athering zones), since those grow by themselves.

[Reelya]

To keep Breweries working 24/7 you can try giving the breweries a feeder stockpile which takes from your main farm stockpile and doesn't accept barrels, and only accepts the plants you want to brew. A hauler or two should work to keep the breweries busy all the time, this will also make sure that seeds are generated reliably.

So, brewers can be easily prevented from fighting over plant barrels, as above. The "Loop" however is from seed->farm->plant->brewery->seed. To make this work like clockwork and fully efficient with minimal cancellations there needs to be straightforward way to make sure farmers aren't competing over seeds, some ideas would be trying to direct seeds output from each brewery into different piles, and using burrows so that farmers only take from their own piles.

[BigD145]

When has the game ever been unplayable?

[Lytha]

If a plump helmet or prickle berry or any other berry is cooked, you get no seed.

=> z -> kitchen -> turn that "cook" option for your plump helmet red by scrolling to the plump helmet and pressing "c".

While you're in the kitchen menu, scroll to seeds to be doubly sure that plump helmet spawns aren't allowed for cooking (make sure their "cook" option is red). Then tab further along and make sure that they don't cook all your beverages, too. Because lavish meals but no drinks make unhappy dwarves.

Only ever cook plump helmets and berries if you want to get rid of them and of their seeds. However, if you should want to get rid of one of those permanently from your stocks, then you must also cook their seeds into lavish roasts.



Brewing produces a seed. Processing or milling produces seeds. Nibbling on a raw berry also produces a seed.

So that's the things you want to do with your plants until you're drowning in seeds. Even when you drown in seeds, I would personally never allow cooking of the vitally important basic food, because cooks on a rampage of "prepare lavish meal" on repeat can be great destroyers of your stocks. 

[Reelya]

If you use 1 x seed + 3 x drinks for a lavish meal, you never run out of those seeds, since the 3 x brewing jobs produce more seeds than went in to making the 3 plant stacks you brewed. What a kitchen uses can be enforced via custom stockpiles which feed into the kitchens: e.g. cook 1xPlump Helmet Seed + 3xPlump Helmet Wine, and this will always produce enough seeds to keep going. It gives you permanent food supply and empties out the barrels quickly, just brew other things on the side to keep drinks going.

In theory, this is more efficient once you hit the seed cap since you're turning a wasted seed into a whole extra meal, and is a nice idea for a super-simple and efficient food production system, but the current seed-hauling issues with bags makes it hard to set up without cancellation spam.

[taptap]

I could barely get any food from farming no matter how many growers I had, which was infuriating.

Apart from all the other good advice in the thread:

Less (not more) growers or even a single, fully dedicated (no distraction by hauling jobs etc.), grower would go a long way to avoid complications and should be perfectly able to feed quite a sizeable fortress all by himself (without any stockpile fiddling, just general proximity of seed stockpile to agriculture, still, farm workshop and quern). Take a number of your growers (say 5 at most) remove all other labours, take a few others and make them primarily food haulers, wait, this should improve things. How large are your farms, anyway? 50 growers is way too much, employed efficiently they could easily feed 2000+ dwarves still doing only part time work, but you have only 1/10 of that. Less growers = more experience per grower = higher yields.

In my fort (40.14) planting takes a single seed out of barrel and plants it, while seed hauling usually takes a seed brings it to the seed stockpile, another dwarf takes a bag out of a barrel puts the seed into it. Then takes the barrel puts the bag into it. Then puts the barrel back. While the process is a bit convoluted, it does not involve long travels as all the useless movements happen within the seed stockpile. Also, if your plant processing happens in general out of growing season for this plant the seed hauling interferes less with farming. With plump helmets it may be hauling back seeds of plump helmets eaten raw in the dining room that messes up your seed hauling. Just observe closely what is going on and you will able to pinpoint where your setup fails you.

[Larix]

there needs to be straightforward way to make sure farmers aren't competing over seeds,

?? What do you mean? Farmers don't compete over seeds - one seed is assigned per planting job, and farmers _take the seed out of the container_ to plant, i.e. they carry the solitary naked seed around. Cancellations happen when the seed container gets moved, and that only happens in hauling, not planting. I have a fort with completely ludicrous distances between farms and still and over a dozen dwarfs with planting enabled, and i haven't seen a planting cancellation in over a year, simply because seed _hauling_ has largely broken down.

If you have a great many farmers and a hauler moves a crucial seed bag, the farmers all simultaneously cancel their planting job, but that's not a case of "too many farmers". Obviously, the number of cancellations depends on the number of farmers, but the cancellation itself isn't caused by the farmers or their number. It's like having a dozen clothiers and assuming that a hauling-based spike of job cancellations is caused by too many clothiers - since cloth _containers_ don't get moved in clothiering jobs, it's not the clothiers who disrupt workflow, it's the hauling set-up.

[Madman198237]

taptap is right in that LESS growers makes for more efficient growing. I read somewhere on the forum that having 1-3 growers who do nothing else  (And are, as a consequence, very skilled at growing) is better, because they grow things faster and plant them faster.

And the military bug, I've never encountered it. Try having your military dwarves not be assigned to a burrow, not being assigned to protect a burrow, and use kill orders on whatever you want killed-I use them all the time, and it works every time. Unless, of course, the dwarves being used die. But, then, that's just a minor setback, right?

[smeeprocket]

one day we will figure out how to harness the murdering power of murderous ghosts and no one will be able to stop our dwarvenly forces.

[Madman198237]

You just need a way to keep the ghosts locked up until you REALLY, REALLY need them to clean up that otherwise unkillable, slade MB/FB that is right outside your flimsy gates.

[Larix]

If the wiki's right, the most reliable way to make murderous ghosts is to demolish a dwarf's resting place. This presents an easy way for on-demand ghost release: just let the FB release the ghosts! Lure it through the graveyards, where it'll dutifully smash all the graves and invoke the wrath of the dead (hopefully). You might need to wait a while until the ghosts materialise.

PS: i'm pretty sure you only get ghosts if a dwarf goes to completely unburied - demolishing the sarcophagus does nothing if there's still a slab somewhere dedicated to the deceased.

[smeeprocket]

ages ago I had trolls destroy my graveyard, and I don't remember any ghosts popping up from them doing it.

[Antonater]

Hey, have the recent updates fixed the farming inefficiencies? I cant quite tell from reading them but a lot seem to refer to farming and hauling