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[coinich]

I wish.  Every fortress I'm playing with is starving to death within the first winter or so.  Obviously I'm not very good at this.

Now, I've tried underground farming, but they rarely plant more than one or two plants at a time; the field is never filled.  I say for them to gather plants, and I think that is tiding them over until winter or so, but by then I've gotten most of the best areas and the gatherers quit gathering to hunt vermin.  Fishing works ok, as I keep catching stuff, but even when I remember to build a fishery and prepare the fish, they don't seem to eat the fish.  Do they need to be prepared into meals?  It says I don't have enough for a basic meal.

I've tried reading/watching the lovely tutorials above, but I'm kind of hitting a dead end here, and its paved with the bodies of my poor little hungry dwarves.

[DarthCloakedDwarf]

Let them eat cake.
The cake is a lie.
Let them eat a lie.
Lies cannot sustain the body.

[Urist McUristy]

That sure was helpful Darth  try making your gatherers only do gathering, no hauling or other jobs and for your farmers, same thing. Also put a custom seed stockpile by your farms, it will make it faster.
Also you could make your own world with parameters and have more embark points so you can bring more food.

[DarthCloakedDwarf]

That sure was helpful Darth  try making your gatherers only do gathering, no hauling or other jobs and for your farmers, same thing. Also put a custom seed stockpile by your farms, it will make it faster.

Heh, was going for funny, not helpful, since I haven't the faintest idea what's actually going on in his fort. I've never had such a problem.

[Xelek]

Make sure you give your farmer(s) skill levels at embark as the quantities of food produced vary quite bit with skill. Also, instead of bringing plump helmets, bring some meat and lots of seeds. A plump helmet is 4 points, whereas a piece of cheap meat is 2 and a seed is a 1 and you can eat the meat while the crops grow while you cannot grow plump helmets before you ate them. It's a win-win.

[Saladman]

I started off making farm plots too big.  Even if your irrigated cave is big, smaller plots give you more fine control to mix crops or just leave things fallow when you don't have seeds to plant.

Also, it wasn't clear to me until I checked the wiki that only plump helmets can be eaten raw.  The other dwarfish plants either require processing to be eaten or cooked, or else can only be brewed.  So, bring plump helmet spawn (otherwise follow Xelek's advice) if you're buying supplies and focus on that at first.  (Fast/auto embark has worked out pretty well for me tho.)  Also buy every spawn and seed off the first caravan.

Or, since you're starting off gathering plants anyway, try immediately walling or channeling off an aboveground farm area.  I wish I'd done that sooner, I'm trying to get it done now in between bouts of surface Fun.  But again, check the wiki for plant yields and designate multiple smaller farm plots.

[coinich]

All right, so its linked to how I distributed my stat points?  I have every initial dwarf have about 1 point in as many areas as possible, to reduce the amount of idle dwarves I have at any given time.  You all say this is wrong, and specialization will give better returns?  Also, diversify my fields so that they plant each field more often and have a variety of stuff growing?

And Darth made me chuckle at least.

[LordBucket]

they rarely plant more than one or two plants at a time; the field is never filled.

Remove all labors other than farming-fields on your dedicated farmer. Sounds to me like he's too busy hauling things to do any planting.

[Absentia]

Yes, specialization is usually preferable to generalizing. Higher skill makes dwarfs work faster, produce higher quality items, and, in the case of farming, produce more units of food per seed planted. And typically you won't need more than one or two dwarfs doing a task at once, so if you specialize you ensure that the dwarf(s) doing any given task are doing a better job.

If you have an idler problem you can do all kinds of "public works" to keep them busy: smooth every surface, build some roads, make a bunch of craftsdwarf shops and have them churn out stone crap to give to traders, etc. Just take them off the related labor when you need them to do something more pressing.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

Having different fields for all edible plants possible is a good strategy - especially since eating the plants frees seeds that can then be used for planting.

I have to disagree with some of the recommendations made by others:

Specialization is not necessary: I always give just single points in skills just as you do and I regularly have to watch out for my farms OVER-PRODUCING (granted, I stop immigration, limiting the number of dwarves to the 16 or so that come during the first year, but I have no doubts that growth in the farming sector could easily be achieved).

Having idle dwarves is a good thing: It means that all hauling tasks are finished, so you never get the situation that you have 5 bars of electrum, but your smithy cancels the "make electrum crafts" simply because the bars are waiting to be hauled to the stockpile. You want hauling jobs to be done quickly as they are among those things that can really frustrate you a lot as they effectively forbid items that are in an active production cycle.

In general, build three or four 2x2 plots right on embark on the surface and send out dwarves to gather plants. Also set up a food stockpile underground. Once you see dwarves carrying ":" to the stockpile, check the farm plots and plant those berries. (Note that there will be a delay as the presence of the plants allows you to designate but only the seed can be planted).

Also make sure that you set the plants to be planted in all four seasons on the farm.

As for why they won't eat the prepared fish, I have no idea. The only possible thing could be that it is stopped by a hauling task (that is, the fish are waiting to be carried to a stockpile), which would make it forbidden for the eating job.

They should eat the prepared fish without any further cooking.

Deathworks

[CognitiveDissonance]

You should look into Plant Processing by either a Farmer's Workshop, or Milling.
For me, the most common above-ground plant is Longland Grass, which has to be milled to be cooked.
For further reading, see here

As far as cooking goes, by default dwarves want different cooking materials. Could that be the problem? Familiarize yourself with the (o)rders menu. There's an option for "dwarves mix food" - you may need that off for awhile.
See Cooking, Milling

Also, you can always butcher animals for food. You should start with a random large animal (donkey, cow, horse, camel) - feel free to butcher that. The dogs if you must.

If you can get your brain around the military system, you can also kill local animals and hope to butcher them. Be sure to check the (o)rders menu for "Dwarves gather (r)efuse outside"

Lastly, aboveground farming is an option. If a plant is eaten, brewed, miller or processed, it creates a seed. Many aboveground plants are edible outright, and can be grown all year long. You CAN sustain your fort on nothing but strawberries and prickle berries.

Hope that helps!

[Psieye]

All right, so its linked to how I distributed my stat points?  I have every initial dwarf have about 1 point in as many areas as possible, to reduce the amount of idle dwarves I have at any given time.  You all say this is wrong, and specialization will give better returns?  Also, diversify my fields so that they plant each field more often and have a variety of stuff growing?

And Darth made me chuckle at least.

It is very much possible to survive without specialisation, but it is also true you get more per seed/shrub with higher skilled growers/plant gatherers. Same with fishing - a high level fisherdwarf will reel in 3~4 fish per catch whereas a Novice may fail to get anything.


I think the hint is more on how your dwarves are never planting more than 1 or 2 squares of farm plots at a time. Your farmers are overloaded with so many other jobs as well, they never get time to do their work properly. Personally I'm a micromanager so I change the labour settings of my indivdiual dwarves frequently to get them to do what I want, but it's still possible to give your farmers enough time to plant without having to micromanage them all the time. For example, switch off most hauling labours on your grower(s) and preferably give them part-time tasks for their other job(s). It's up to you to decide which jobs require full-time commitment vs part-time commitment, but once you've got that sorted you can assign dwarves to be full-time farmers and do part-time in other stuff when the fields are all planted (assuming your plots aren't massively huge).

[Akura]

Fishing works ok, as I keep catching stuff, but even when I remember to build a fishery and prepare the fish, they don't .

Are you cleaning the fish, not dissecting them?
Do you have somebody with Fish Cleaner enabled?
Is that somebody also the Fisherdwarf(reassign to someone else if so)?

[RandomNumberGenerator]

I've never really had problems with food. Usually what I do is have two dwarves, one with 10 points in Harvesting and Woodcutting and another with 7/7/7/7/7 in Planting, Cooking, Brewing, Butchery and Plant Processing. I generally embark with 30 food/60 booze. When I start out, one of the first things I do is set my cutter to chop ~30 trees. That's enough for early beds and barrels, so after that he gathers plants nonstop. This holds me over until I can get farms set up in the caverns, usually a 3x3 plot growing plump helmets, another 3x3 growning sweet pods/cave wheat/quarry bushes, and a third 3x3 plot with dimple cups and pig tails. Last two are more for making money than food, so don't worry about those.

[coinich]

Thanks for all the help.  My newest fortress, with better skill distribution, management of farms and fish, has lived past its 3rd year or so with only a minor bit of "fun" when I had a few dwarves suddenly get strange moods.  Now its just trying to keep 30+ dwarves occupied at all times, or is that really impossible?