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[Siiig]

Sup everyone!

I was hoping someone could shed some light on this for me. It's pretty standard (it seems like to me) to start off with planting as your primary food source, and that's usually how I roll in my fortresses. One thing that confuses me though is how many seeds I have. Some times I'll look and have something like 150 seeds, but others my farmers will just run out.

What tasks give you the best seed output for your plants? (in my case plump helmets). Do you get more from brewing? Non from cooking? Less from eating? Brewing seems to give seeds back, but does it only ever give one?

Thanks in advance!

[Tcei]

You get seeds only from brewing/eating. Cooking destroys the seeds. From what I saw on the wiki there's no difference in the number of seeds gotten from brewing vs eating. There is, however, a cap on the number of seeds gotten from this method. Which is 200. To get more than 200 seeds you have to buy them from caravans.

[Siiig]

Ok, so you max out at having 200 stocked seeds then? What if they're planted--will they accumulate in your stock piles? I know the z status screen shows planted seeds in a red number (at least I think that's what that is).

Also, do you happen to know how many you get from eating/brewing? Is it more than 1?

[JmzLost]

1 seed per plant from brewing/eating/processing/anything that isn't cooking.  A stack of plump helmet [5] will produce 5 plump helmet spawn whether you brew it into dwarven wine [25] or let 5 dwarfs eat the plumps for dinner.  Process pig tail to thread and you get just as many seeds as brewing it into ale.

Planted seeds count towards your 200 seed cap, and show as red in the stocks menu.  Seeds traders have also show as red.  If you expand the list with <tab>, planted seed show as light blue.  The cap is 200 seeds per type, so you can have 200 plump helmet spawn and 200 pig tail seeds and 200 rock nuts and ... you get the idea.  The seeds go in bags, then the bags are put in barrels, so keep a few extra of both around when doing a lot of farming.

There are a few plants that do not produce seeds at all.  Muck root, bloated tuber, and valley herb are the ones I can think of off-hand.

JMZ

[ferok]

Milling and threshing (processing) are fine too (will produce a seed).  I disable cooking on all plants, right up until I hit the seed cap. Only if I have a large backlog of plump helmets (which happens when all my plots go to helmets over the winter) do I enable cooking on them, and only then if I've got plenty of seeds.

[celem]

1 good farmer is better than a bunch of no-skills in a young fort too.  A good farmer can plant 1 seed and get multiple plants thereby creating seeds, best argument for solid grower dwarf on embark

[Siiig]

Wow really? I didn't realize one seed could produce multiple plants...how does that work out visually? Does one seed just populate multiple sections of a farm plot--or do the plants grow into a sort of "stack" on top of each other?

[Darkmere]

They grow into a stack of plump helmets/quarry bushes/whatever. You'll harvest more than 1 plant per planted tile.

[Quietust]

Wow really? I didn't realize one seed could produce multiple plants...how does that work out visually? Does one seed just populate multiple sections of a farm plot--or do the plants grow into a sort of "stack" on top of each other?

They form stacks - when you see something like "plump helmets [5]", that means it's a stack of five plump helmets. Large stack sizes are better for brewing alcohol since it allows you to store more drinks using fewer barrels.

[greycat]

1 seed per plant from brewing/eating/processing/anything that isn't cooking

1-2 per plant, actually.  Probably 1d2, but I haven't gathered data for statistical analysis.

When you have 200 of a given type of seed, no more seeds of that type will be produced.  If you plant (or cook or press) some, making the inventory dip below 200, then you'll start getting more from your brewing/eating to bring it back up to 200.