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[Swi1ch]

Just started a new game due to a huge overflow of seeds because I didn't realise they needed to be bagged prior to barreling.

I've made sure this time to plant pig tails asap with the intention of getting a base textiles industry up. I planted 5 and appear to have harvested 9 pig tails and now i'm out of seeds. My plump helmets seem to have no end of seeds but have no idea how to get more pig tail seeds.

[Urist Imiknorris]

Do something with the pig tails. Process them in any way other than cooking and you'll get seeds, like you do with any other plant.

[psikez]

You need to either brew them into dwarven ale or process them at a farmers workshop into thread to get more seeds

[DevilRanger]

Pig tail seeds can be recovered by building a Farmer's Workshop and processing them, which creates Pig Tail Thread. The thread is then weaved at a loom to make cloth, and then to a clothier's shop for creating bags, clothes, etc.

Or alternatively, brew them as you would a plump helmet for Dwarven Ale and seeds.

[Starver]

[3xNinjed, but posting anyway...]

Just started a new game due to a huge overflow of seeds because I didn't realise they needed to be bagged prior to barreling.

I've made sure this time to plant pig tails asap with the intention of getting a base textiles industry up. I planted 5 and appear to have harvested 9 pig tails and now i'm out of seeds. My plump helmets seem to have no end of seeds but have no idea how to get more pig tail seeds.

Seeds can be obtained (where possible, which includes pig tail) as the product of plants being eaten/brewed/milled/farm-processed, according to whatever their plant can be used for.  Not cooking, although that shouldn't be the issue given you can't cook Pig Tails.

If you're wanting your cloth (and my memory tells me that there's nothing else that can be done with Pig Tails.. apart from brewing, which will also give you seeds), process the plants in the Farmer's Workshop.  You should get at least one seed per plant, which will get grown in the fields (Summer/Autmun only?[1]) to give you more to process, and should build up your stocks.

Just make sure that you don't have the seeds available to cook (by default it shouldn't be, but that would use up seeds to no gain except emergency food), and I think that un-harvested plants can rot in the fields and similarly lose the ability for seeds, so turning off "All Dwarves Harvest" might be a bad idea unless you have enough farmers, and even with that option on you may find everyone too busy to help out if you're like me and trying to keep everyone doing something else.


[1] Strange how above-ground plants can be grown[2] all year round, yet subterranean ones are sensitive to the seasons...

[2] Assuming they can at all.  My glacier embarks refuse to give me above-ground plants, even when I scrape back to soil.

[Swi1ch]

Ah just found out about brewing them, thanks.

Is there anyway I can set a Still to only process a single type of seed? I would like one to process plump helmets and one to process pig tails in order to stockpile seeds of both.

[DevilRanger]

You can put a stockpile that only takes Pig Tails (Custom Stockpile) beside a still (set it to take from your other food stockpiles so that any pig tails that are stored elsewhere will be moved) and then when the still is given an order to produce drinks they brewer will grab the nearest item (the Pig Tail).

[Lezard]

you could set up a still with a stockpile or quantum stockpile of just pigtails very close to it. if this doesn't seem to work then set the brewers burrow to only cover the area of the pigtails, the still and a rock pot or barrel stockpile.

ninja'd

[Starver]

[2x Ninjaed, this time... Getting better!  Also spelled "ninjaed" correctly, probably!]

If you only want to brew certain plants, the Kitchen menu (Z screen, cursor to Kitchen) gives you a "Brew/Not Brew" thing next to the "Cook/Not Cook" column, where these apply to the listed row of food-types) can let you turn off the brewability of all the other plants to just brew these two, and not the others.

But I don't think this is what you mean.

If you want to solely set one brewer's workshop to work on one plant and another to work on another, then judicious stockpile placement might help (but not be completely effective) in dedicating each to each, but setting a burrow surrounding that brewery and its input stockpile would force a brewer restricted to working within that burrow to just the materials within it.


But even this is not what I think you want.

Go to your stockpile menu which you have set as Food and within the customisable settings remove the two seed-types from being stored there.  Set up two other food stockpiles in which you customise them to remove everything but one of those seed-types.  Seeds of each type will (eventually) gravitate to just the food pile set to that seed-type, so that the bags (and barrels) within those stockpiles will only contain that seed-type.


I'm not even sure that this is necessary.  I usually make do with a "seed-only", or possibly "seed&plants-only" food stockpile near/around my farms and various plant processing workshops, like I have a meat-only one associated with my butchers' shop and a booze-only one next to my still (gradually removing those self-same functions from the "generic food" stockpile into which I had originally unloaded my wagon, upon embark, as I give them more specialised stockpiles to go to).

Not sure if this makes any sense, and I hope that at least I haven't made any errors in explaining it.

[Khym Chanur]

Just started a new game due to a huge overflow of seeds because I didn't realise they needed to be bagged prior to barreling.

I've made sure this time to plant pig tails asap with the intention of getting a base textiles industry up. I planted 5 and appear to have harvested 9 pig tails and now i'm out of seeds. My plump helmets seem to have no end of seeds but have no idea how to get more pig tail seeds.

You shouldn't need to make your own cloth to deal with the problem.  Your fortress can have at most 200 seeds of each type of plant, a single bag holds at most 100 seeds, a single bag can only be used to store one type of seed.  Since there's only 18 types of plants with seeds, if you farmed every type of farmable plant you'd need a max of 36 bags.  So you should be able to get enough material for bags just by buying cloth and leather from the caravans

[Urist Imiknorris]

But socks are such good exports!

[Jake]

But socks are such good exports!

So do what I do, and import cloth in bulk. The bins come included in the price and some of it will come ready-dyed, and one bin of well-made clothes is worth three or four bins of the raw material.

[Number4]

Doing it yourself stacks quality modifiers in your favor, which is where the big bucks are.

[Jake]

Doing it yourself stacks quality modifiers in your favor, which is where the big bucks are.

True, but my experience so far has been that farming is so manpower-intensive that a fortress that was completely self-sufficient for cloth would have very little scope for doing anything but farming, weaving and dressmaking. An agrarian-focused fortress could be an interesting experiment, but not perhaps everyone's cup of tea.

[Sutremaine]

True, but my experience so far has been that farming is so manpower-intensive that a fortress that was completely self-sufficient for cloth would have very little scope for doing anything but farming, weaving and dressmaking.

An efficient setup does wonders for farming. Have the seed stockpile right next to the farm, and the seed-producing workshops right next to both of those. Dwarves will still be lazy bastards who wander off between one 'plant seed' job and the next (or at least this was the case in 40d, haven't tested since then), but burrows should help with that. Disable everything but farming on your farmers so they don't spam you with 'item inaccessible' messages, then confine them to farm, food, and bed.

At high skill levels you'll be getting back 4 or 5 plants per tile. At low skill levels potash is worth using to offset low yield and slow planting, so long as you can get seeds in and plants out as quickly as possible. The amount of fertiliser you need is n/4+1 bars per plot, where n is the number of tiles in the plot. So 3, 7, 11, etc. is the best number of tiles for a plot.