Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[ac31]

make sure you take enough seeds at the start, at LEAST 50 for me, as well as plenty of booze and food to last, early on i experienced problems because i would have plenty of seeds in the ground but nothing to eat at that very moment, and a dedicated seed stockpile will save your life, stops seeds from rotting on the ground

dedicated grower is ESSENTIAL, and adding some herbalism to your woodcutter for an extra duty is extremely handy, you can create an aboveground farm to supplement your food

[Derakon]

Seeds don't ever rot, in my experience. And 50 seeds is overkill; 10 should more than suffice unless you're cooking them.

[Jimmy]

Trade for food. Traders will bring enough food to feed and water approximately 30 stout dwarves year round. Then once you have a decent breeding pool of animals, you should never have to harvest a single plump helmet.

[Porpoisepower]

Seeds don't ever rot, in my experience. And 50 seeds is overkill; 10 should more than suffice unless you're cooking them.

50 isn't that much if you break it down into wheat, helmets, pigtails, dimple cups etc...

[Sir Pseudonymous]

Food is really something you shouldn't have to worry about. I never hunt or fish, and always have a massive surplus of food and booze. To the point where I simply set things up and assume from then on out that things are running smoothly, just checking the stocks page now and then.

Seeds to bring on embark? Ten plump helmets, five of everything else. If you bring a metric fuckton of meat and booze (if you want to be more than safe, ~130 alcohol, ~200 meat) on embark you don't have to worry about the first year, and can just work on other things until the first immigrant wave appears, at which point you turn those without any useful skills into dedicated farmers, brewers, or cooks. Just two or three farmers should be fine. That's what I've started doing now.

[Elliott_Thinas]

Whoever suggested a meatfarm is incorrect as animals, along with dwarves, reproduce by spores. If you have several adult animals, every few months you should be getting messages of baby animals being born. Babies seem to provide just as much meat as animals so as soon as an animal is born order for it to be slaughtered. Make sure all the fat is made into tallow as well; that adds up to a lot of food.

[Rowanas]

Actually, I always keep all my babies in a cage and release when they hit adulthood. Then whenever I need meat I just cull all but one male (maybe some females depending on how many I have). For seeds I usually take about 20, 10 of the primary booze/food type, and 10 secondary booze plant seeds. Almost all of my points go into getting one piece of meat for every animal (yay for bins).

[Skorpion]

Whoever suggested a meatfarm is incorrect as animals, along with dwarves, reproduce by spores. If you have several adult animals, every few months you should be getting messages of baby animals being born. Babies seem to provide just as much meat as animals so as soon as an animal is born order for it to be slaughtered. Make sure all the fat is made into tallow as well; that adds up to a lot of food.

Ahh, but I'm not wrong. Putting them all together just means they're all in one place conviniently.
Also, babies don't provide as much meat as adults. Neither do they have as much fat or bone. I wait for them to mature before tagging them for slaughter in batches when I have hauling capacity ready.

[Hyndis]

I have a small 4x4 or 5x5 farm plot dedicated to a single crop. Next to each farm plot is a 5x5 stockpile for that plant and only that plant. No other stockpile will accept this plant.

These farms then grow all year round, or at least as much of the year allowable. Thus, my dwarves will always have an ample supply of [EDIBLE_RAW] food. This food is not to be cooked, only brewed.

Then I process quay bushes, booze, meat, and fish into roasts. Roasts are stored closer to the main fortress so dwarves will preferentially eat the roasts over the plain plants, but should I ever run out of roasts they will not starve.

I also have a well set up, so even if I completely ignore food production, my dwarves will be fine indefinitely.

But paying attention to food I can make them happier by providing them with legendary meals and drinks.

[Taffy Foxbat]

Embark: I use the defaults because I'm lazy.

Farming: I usually have about 6-8 plots of 4x4 size, half underground and half surface. I can't always remember which crops are which, so aboveground I generally just plant the berries. I do a little local (d)esignate-(p)lant gathering in the first year to bootstrap the aboveground plots. Belowground, the first plot obviously gets plump helmets, then I usually do sweet pods and cave wheat in the next plots to get more booze variety. Obviously all the subterranean plots are set to plump helmets in the off seasons. This does require a fair amount of farm labor; I generally turn on farming for every brown-class migrant I get - soapmaker becomes farmer, lyemaker becomes farmer, milker becomes farmer, etc.

Brewing: I usually have just 1 carpenter shop, set to repeat bed/bin/barrel, which seems to be able to keep up with one still doing brew drink on repeat. I'll often keep a small food stockpile set to take only raw plants nearby, and a furniture stockpile set to keep only barrels. If the booze runs low it's usually because the brew job stopped because the barrels ran out because of a problem in the wood pipeline.

Fishing: The process-fish order does get cancelled (for lack of fish) more often than the brewing task does, but if you remember to check every season or so, it's fairly productive. My solution to the refuse problem is usually to have workshops and the main dining hall on one level, stairs down from each of those to a connecting tunnel on the next level down, and a big refuse storeroom (10x10 to start, growing as it fills up) a little ways off that tunnel, midway between the two. Short walk from the dinner table to the scrap heap, short walk from the craftdwarf's workshop to the scrap heap.

Hunting/Meat: Since immigrant hunters come with equipment, I just leave them to their task and hope for the best rather than trying to train & equip new ones. Their productivity and life expectancy is entirely dependent on what kind of local wildlife you have. I alternate training war dogs and hunting dogs, so any hunters that survive a season or two generally get a little buddy to improve their odds - (v)iew dwarf, (p)references, (e) work dogs, if you didn't know about that one. I butcher the fuck out of kittens, foals, calves, etc, and request every kind of meat from traders and buy it all, which means plenty of meat available -- not that you really need meat to run a fort.

[Elliott_Thinas]

@Skorpion: you're correct about the yield of meat and fat, I rechecked that and you were correct. But you don't need a meatfarm though, I stand by that. My fort has several independantly caged and free roaming animals and they all have children every so often, including those in the cages all by themselves (the wild horses I catch and tame generally stay in their horses and still have foals). As most people will be able to you, creatures in Dwarf Fortress get pregnant, as we joke, by spores, which is why we have stories of wild animals on the far fringes of the map inpregnating tame animals deep within the forts.

[andrea]

on my current fort, i buy all my food and drinks from caravans. all the food produced in my fortress is few turtles from a single fisherman, and some plants gathered during hard times...  last time i had to gather anything was many years ago ( in game, of course). i have 110 dwarves, and both population and stockpiles keep increasing. but i have to start donating things to caravans... i iwll soon need more wagons.

but in my experience, a 10x10 plot should give you all the food you  need for any fortress

[nutzy]

I read a thread once where someone had a dozen or so planters and he couldn't get enough food because they were all novices. All you really need is one planter (and for that matter one cook and one brewer).

In the orders menu set only farmers harvest and have your planter with only farming (fields) enabled---no hauling. He will be legendary in no time and then you can allow peasants and children to harvest if you want. One planter sewing a single 5x5 plot with nothing but plump helmet spawn should exceed your food and brewing needs early on.

In my current fort, I have one planter, one brewer, and one cook serving 200 dwarves with no problem. It would take at least another cook and brewer to keep up with my planter's output, so I have him hauling food about half the year.

[milaga]

I read a thread once where someone had a dozen or so planters and he couldn't get enough food because they were all novices. All you really need is one planter (and for that matter one cook and one brewer).

This is correct. It doesn't matter how many planters you have, it matters the quality of the planter that does the harvesting. Be sure to turn off "all dwarves harvest" in

Up until recently I always had one dwarf who I started maxed in cooking and planting. If you do that you really only need about two farm plots per 10 dwarves, assuming you cook your food. A single 3x3 plot can easily provide enough food and drink for 100 dwarves if tended only by a legendary grower and has legendary brewers and cooks preparing the feast.

[Lord Shonus]

You MAY have too large a farm at the moment. When I shrank the size of my starting farms, I got more food early on, because my farmer could work it better. Also, try fertilizer.