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[Vexorg_the_Devourer]

I've never done a tower cap farm before.  Any advice, or warnings about potential pitfalls to be avoided?  How do you do it?

[Karnewarrior]

don't flood the fortress, don't flood the farm to high, and quantum dump the stone into a pit, which also serves to help drain the water, which is useful if you over flood the farm, like I did. 3/7 water can really retard the evaporation process. also, make sure to pull the lever Very soon after you open the floodgates, or else you may end up with a huge puddle.

Have fun with your tree farm. we look forward to hearing of your impending doom.

also, watch the farms VERY CLOSELY. towercaps will sprout in doorways and cut off acess, which is annoying, though not fatal. a single recruit will kill any saplings he repeatedly treads on though.

[Quietust]

It depends how big you make it.

In my last fort, my tower-cap farm occupied a ~48x96 area. I just sealed the area, pumped tons of water out of the underground river, then let it drain off the edge of the map through the fortification drains I carved on the other side. Much later, I dug out the level immediately below it and just placed floodgates right next to the river itself, then used another fortification drain to get rid of excess water.

When you're making a tower-cap farm, bigger is pretty much always better, though it helps to use a smaller area and spread it across multiple Z-levels so as to minimize walking distance.

[Quatch]

make sure you have a real underground river or pool, discovered without cheating, otherwise it won't work.

I make a few large farms, fill them with water, then drain it. I set pathing up in the farms so as to restrict people to walking in a 1 tile wide path (in a grid), so as to minimize sapling kills during harvest. I harvest each farm seperatly, one a year or so.

[Wereman]

This was my attempt at an underground forrest/ towercap farm

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Manual pumps put next to the river and certains spots with water flowing underneath the floor.

Turned into a huge main room for dining/kitchens/farms/Workshops above kitchen/ storage underneath; and later a routed magma forge room near the river.
Almost everything in one massive room :3
Even an ajeacent dungeon but my dungeon master dies while i was making it, by trying to take on a goblin invasion.
Wish i never re-opened my fortress to the outside world again ;-;

[guale]

Rather than just flooding a room and hoping for the best build an air-lock type chamber around 7 times (1/7th, not 7 times) the size of the room you want to flood with an extra tile or two, fill it then cut it off from the source then open it up to your farm room so that it doesn't over or under fill it.

[Raminagrobis]

Rather than just flooding a room and hoping for the best build an air-lock type chamber around 7 times (1/7th, not 7 times) the size of the room you want to flood with an extra tile or two, fill it then cut it off from the source then open it up to your farm room so that it doesn't over or under fill it.

Don't forget the evaporation problem. You may want to make your buffer room slightly bigger than 1/7 of your farm.

Also, natural water flowing is slow as hell. Pumping water greatly accelerate the process.

I set pathing up in the farms so as to restrict people to walking in a 1 tile wide path (in a grid), so as to minimize sapling kills during harvest. I harvest each farm seperatly, one a year or so.

Great idea! Sapling trampling is one of the biggest problem you have to manage in a TC farm. Your idea handle it entirely, without requiring any micromanagement.

[Bloogonis]

dang makes me wish I took snapshots of my TC farms. I generally carve them out to look like Mushrooms. I have one planed that is most of my 3x3 site carved out with rivers dug into it and ponds and giant olms. this is all just a plan and has yet to even have the first parts carved out. as part of the plan the surface fortress will be shaped like a tower-cap.

[dragon0421]

Trees never grow directly adjacent to each other. You can, and should, make smoothed pathways on every other row and column for woodcutters, to prevent trampled plants. Use plant gatherers to remove bushes and maximize tree growth.

Remember to dump lose stone.

Water pressure can be frustrating if you have a large farming area to get muddy, so make sure you are supplying excess water, possibly from multiple angles. Remember to build a shut off valve and drain. Keep the farm closed off from the rest of your fort until you are done flooding the farm.

[loser]

The 1/7-size (plus just a little) tank works great for me.  But then it's not exactly that simple. 

In order to minimize evaporation, you'll want the water to get to its destination tile as quickly as possible.  That means a vertical drop from the tank

You want it to spread as quickly as possible as far as possible.  That means a more or less circular growing room.  I don't make the tanks circular, but I guess you could.

carve out a tank above your growing room that is 1/7 the size of the growing room, plus some extra tiles. 

Channel holes in the floor for one out of every nine tiles, so that each hole has at least two tiles between itself and the next hole and one tile between itself and the wall.  This ensures that each hole will have access to the maximum nine tiles for its drop. 

Put hatch covers over each hole and hook them all up to the same lever.

Pave every single other tile in the tank and in the path the water follows to get to the tank.  This will prevent tower-caps from growing in unwanted places and clogging up your works.

Put at door or a floodgate between the tank and your water source, so that you can seal it once it's full.  Attach that to a different lever.

Now fill the tank, preferably with pressurized water so that it fills quickly.  Once it's full, close the door or floodgate I mentioned a moment ago.

Now, whenever you're ready, throw the lever that opens those hatch covers.

Swish, down goes your FPS for a few moments!  And afterward you should have a room full of 1-depth water with a couple of 2-depth tiles chasing around and mud, mud, mud.

My current fort has three of these stacked on top of each other.  Each growing room has around 700 tiles.  Each tank has around 120.  This totally does not produce enough wood to feed my pearlash and charcoal habits.

I totally didn't know either that they wouldn't grow side-by-side or that you should clear the plants out.  I just might do the walking-grid and brush-clearing to try and improve the efficiency of my own tower-cap farming complex.  All I had was traffic restrictions of increasing degrees across grids of smaller and smaller sizes.

If you're going to make some kind of no-growth paths, pave them.  You'd have to smooth the ground after each dump, but paving lasts forever.

[MrLobster]

I used a cascade tree farm on my last fortress and it worked pretty well:
http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-7335-relicchains
Each floor is an 11x11 square linked by paired stairs at opposite corners. Open a gate at the top, wait until you're pretty sure you've got enough water, then shut it. Water flows down through the levels back and forth and out the drain.  Lots of good things about doing it this way. The access stairs make it fast to dig and harvest, with fewer trod-upon plants. You can have the first stack already drained and growing while you're working on the second, and it's easy to add more stacks later.

As far as I can tell, there's no point in hauling stones away.

[Retro]

Personally I differentiate heavily between tree farms and tree underground gardens - the latter can be anywhere in a fort, but my farms are sealed off with restricted door access so the saplings can grow in peace. Why worry about dwarves pathing through at all?

[Aspgren]

The only experience I have with tower-caps is purely accidental. See I built a canal, a canal that moves across several Z layers and runs down slopes (there are walkways following it, I wanted to make it so there are no waterfalls and thus minimize the risk of water splatter and currents messing up my nice walkways and endangering pregnant dwarves passing by.)
The towercaps seem to thrive on those slopes. The canal has only been functioning for a little less than 2 years and judging from the sapplings and grown tower caps, it's going to be clogged up in another 2 years.

This is actually a good thing, because I'll be able to go down there and replace a bunch of faulty floodgates when the waterflow stops, and then I'll be able to maintenance it properly and redirect the water flow towards my newer constructions without endangering dwarven lives.

Thank you, tower caps!

EDIT: I'll sum it up, so the post is atleast somewhat thread-relevant... tower caps, in my experience, seem to thrive in moving water (or perhaps, fresh water?) in an area where the water level is between 3-6.

[loser]

Trees never grow directly adjacent to each other. You can, and should, make smoothed pathways on every other row and column for woodcutters, to prevent trampled plants. Use plant gatherers to remove bushes and maximize tree growth.

The bolded portion is definitely not true.  I have tower-caps directly side-by-side in my current farm complex.  There's even three in a row in one place.

[Aspgren]

Trees never grow directly adjacent to each other. You can, and should, make smoothed pathways on every other row and column for woodcutters, to prevent trampled plants. Use plant gatherers to remove bushes and maximize tree growth.

The bolded portion is definitely not true.  I have tower-caps directly side-by-side in my current farm complex.  There's even three in a row in one place.

Tower caps aren't trees, though.