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[Spectre9000]

As the title says, I  want to be able to survive without crops, animals, water, and wood. I want to dig deep away from everything and stay there. No caravans or caverns. Is this possible at all? I'm guessing not as I've pretty much ruled out all means for food I'm aware of.

[Dunamisdeos]

It would be theoretically possible to gather enough food with plant gathering, provided you had a tiny population.

But no, I think realistically you would need to at least grow plump helmets. I guess water wouldn't be too much of an issue, because sealing yourself away permanently removes a great deal of risk from injury.

You would need either a little bit of wood or immediate access to magma. You would also take a permanent happiness hit from a lack of beds.

[Akoto]

I don't think I ever did that in any of my old games. At least, not on the surface.

I had one really fun game where I started on a glacier, and there were absolutely no resources of any kind. However, I dug down and found a massive cavern complex, and that's where the kingdom grew. So, it ended up subsisting off of cavern resources, deep and sheltered from the harsh cold!

[Flarp]

It would be theoretically possible to gather enough food with plant gathering, provided you had a tiny population.

But no, I think realistically you would need to at least grow plump helmets. I guess water wouldn't be too much of an issue, because sealing yourself away permanently removes a great deal of risk from injury.

You would need either a little bit of wood or immediate access to magma. You would also take a permanent happiness hit from a lack of beds.

If you settle in a forest with enough fruit-bearing trees and keep your population below 30 or so (and maintain access to the surface, if only a walled-off section) this seems pretty plausible.

Alternatively: embark somewhere with extremely deep soil, dig some open-air pits, wait for trees to grow, then wall them over (with glass, if you feel like being realistic). You're not technically farming, so much as maintaining a wild tree or two.

[Dunamisdeos]

It would be theoretically possible to gather enough food with plant gathering, provided you had a tiny population.

But no, I think realistically you would need to at least grow plump helmets. I guess water wouldn't be too much of an issue, because sealing yourself away permanently removes a great deal of risk from injury.

You would need either a little bit of wood or immediate access to magma. You would also take a permanent happiness hit from a lack of beds.

If you settle in a forest with enough fruit-bearing trees and keep your population below 30 or so (and maintain access to the surface, if only a walled-off section) this seems pretty plausible.

Alternatively: embark somewhere with extremely deep soil, dig some open-air pits, wait for trees to grow, then wall them over (with glass, if you feel like being realistic). You're not technically farming, so much as maintaining a wild tree or two.

Open-air pits and letting trees grow might make that viable! But I think his idea was to completely seal off from the surface, so keeping access to the surface might break the challenge?

If not, problem solved.

[Fleeting Frames]

Without crops, animals, water, wood....

No crops or animals - no booze, no most food.
no water - no fishing either, so no food and nothing to drink.
No wood - eh minor. Aim for artifact bed and make a dormitory?

Overall, it's possible, but you'd need vampires/necromancers/goblins as your fort's members. Perhaps werebeasts....

If you do 0 point embark on a glacier, you'd need to get really lucky with a library/tavern and confiscate a slab and pick.

[Foxite]

My two cents: Embark on a site with very deep soil, and breach the caverns ASAP. Spores will start to spread, and you will see wild underground crops growing inside your fort. You can harvest those, which is an admittedly non-reliable and hard-to-manage food supply, but it is still a food supply. You can seal the cave off right away, a single spore is enough for every type of underground plant life to start.

But if you find that cheaty, then I don't think you can get a food supply. Maybe you could live off your pack animals for around a year, but then you've reached the end. And if you don't want to get water from the caverns or from rain, then you cannot survive after your starting alcohol supply runs out.

[CaptainArchmage]

Without making anything related on site, if you bring or can get access to enough food, booze, and wood to survive until second caravan you can do it. Essentially put in a mass order for every type of food, booze, cloth, and of course, wood and then trade.

You probably can't avoid going to caverns or getting water off the surface if you want to have a hospital though.

[Urist McVoyager]

As the title says, I  want to be able to survive without crops, animals, water, and wood. I want to dig deep away from everything and stay there. No caravans or caverns. Is this possible at all? I'm guessing not as I've pretty much ruled out all means for food I'm aware of.

Without mods you are SOL my friend. Dig deep and stay there without caverns? No wild plants grow down that deep without a visit to the caverns. No surface? No gathering plants from there. No caravans? No getting food from that either. No water means people start dying within the first season after your supplies run out.

Only way this works is if you mod out the food and water requirements. This game is a sandbox but it's not pure construction. It's population management and story telling. If you want pure building, then mod in the most boring race imaginable.

ETA: Now the big question is why do you want to play this way? If we know the why, maybe we can find a different sort of challenge that fits the bill without being quite this difficult.

[Grus]

This is totally possible. Not sure why everyone is so negative about it, but just make all your dwarves vampires or werecreatures. Probably easiest to limit yourself to as few dwarves as possible, but they don't really need any resources to live and perform jobs.

[Urist McVoyager]

This player wants to burrow into the ground and stay there, no interaction with the surface. We don't know how long they want to stay up top before burrowing and locking themselves in, and without water there's not much you can do about vamping an entire fortress. Werecreature maybe, if they want to stay open that long, or game the system with an adventurer. And we don't know how much micromanagement the player wants. Weres are building destroyers and would obliterate nearby workshops once a month unless sealed away from them.

[Sanctume]

Collapse the surface +1z worth of dirt down 6z at least. 
Then roof that.  But you have to wait for the fruit trees to grow because all those grown trees will be gone/smashed.
Close of the are until sapplings grow.

If there are honey bees, then beehive industry, that's food and drink. 

Without water, infection can happen, and injured dwarfs will not be able to drink alcohol while in the hospital.
So, just consider those injured as part of the attrition. 

Although ice is not water, technically.  You can build floors and stairs made of ice, then collapse that into a 1x1 pit which should break down to ice that melts into water?

So you need part glacier biome for the ice, and part temperate where honey bees can have hives.

[Fleeting Frames]

Bees require an adjacent outside tile, right? That would disbar them.

I suppose an orchard would work, though you'd have to floor over the non-tree grass to prevent crops.

[Sanctume]

Beehives adjacent to fortification and outside lets them go out, even through constructed floors. 

Code: [Select]

.._.
hF^#

. = dirt floor, _ = constructed floor, ^ = up ramp, # = wall, F = fortification, h = beehive



[Fleeting Frames]

That's adjacent to inside/subterranean, given the dirt floor is still there, but wow. That suggests humming is also a job.

Going to test that out for sure next time I get bees and great beekeeper.