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[Number4]

Figuring out plots isn't difficult, but anyway:

Meat and cheese should be your food then. Buy out all caravans, disable cooking of caravan brewable goods. Gather plants with your disposable, useless migrants bold rangers venturing outside and brew mead. Clean drinking water is a MUST because you may still lack alcohol sometimes, but you should have a steady trickle to avoid the worst effects of alcohol deprivation.

[Utaelilya]

Figuring out plots isn't difficult, but anyway:

Meat and cheese should be your food then. Buy out all caravans, disable cooking of caravan brewable goods. Gather plants with your disposable, useless migrants bold rangers venturing outside and brew mead. Clean drinking water is a MUST because you may still lack alcohol sometimes, but you should have a steady trickle to avoid the worst effects of alcohol deprivation.

Yes that sounds good , Tried it out now for a while , It went fine but im having trouble keeping my herd guarded from predators :/

[Berserkenstein]

Have your dwarves completely mine out a soil layer and crack open a cavern.  Wall the cavern back up, or not if you like fighting critters and your plant gatherers now have a safe area to work and will provide more than enough produce that your fort will ever need.

[Anathema]

Plant gathering is a truly great thing and I'll tell you why. If you want lots of different kinds of booze and are farming, you have to fiddle around with lots of farm plots, seasonal crop rotations and the like. Bleh. At the moment I have an entire soil layer dug out for my tree farm and as a by-product of keeping it stripped clean of plants I now have over twenty different types of booze in my fort. Nothing keeps dwarfs happy like a vast variety of booze, not to even mention the masterwork roasts, each one with different ingredients. So strip the land bare of plants, strip the caverns, build a tree farm and defoliate that too. Plants don't belong in the earth but in barrels, waiting to make your dwarfs ecstatic with variety. I don't even bother with farm plots anymore (although it is good to have some in place for emergencies).

I just wish there was a way to permanently designate an area for plant gathering and/or tree chopping, so that new plants/trees would automatically get designated for harvesting. If that was possible I'd use this strategy too, but the hassle of redesignating once a season or so for years on end gets to me; the only reason I prefer farming is that you can set it up once and forget about it for the remainder of your fortress' life.

You just build huge farm plots, more than you need for any given crop (and considering the sheer volume of food farms produce, a 'huge' farm plot isn't very big) and assign them to a variety of crops. Your farmers will plant in whichever plot they happen to have the appropriate seeds available for, and just leave any excess plots unused, it's completely micromanagement free. If any other food profession could be set up to support itself like that, I'd be using it.

[Wayward Device]

I just wish there was a way to permanently designate an area for plant gathering and/or tree chopping, so that new plants/trees would automatically get designated for harvesting. If that was possible I'd use this strategy too, but the hassle of redesignating once a season or so for years on end gets to me; the only reason I prefer farming is that you can set it up once and forget about it for the remainder of your fortress' life.

You just build huge farm plots, more than you need for any given crop (and considering the sheer volume of food farms produce, a 'huge' farm plot isn't very big) and assign them to a variety of crops. Your farmers will plant in whichever plot they happen to have the appropriate seeds available for, and just leave any excess plots unused, it's completely micromanagement free. If any other food profession could be set up to support itself like that, I'd be using it.

I used to farm just like this, and yes it is relatively simple and micro-free. And by Armok's mighty magma & blood beard do I wish there was some permanent tree cutting/plant gathering designation, perhaps like an activity zone. I only started doing the whole "just gather" thing because of my obsession with clear glass. For a while now (like since 31.18) I've been alternating between playing "normal" underground forts and trying to build above ground arcologies, complete with glass domes. And if I'm using glass, there's no excuse to not use clear glass. I just can't help myself, it's like someone has somehow implanted extreme psychological conditioning into the depths of my mind when I wasn't looking. So I've gotten used to having a whole soil layer dug out as my tree farm and stripping the plants to max tree growth. Since this gives me more plants than I can shake a ‼stick‼ at, as a by product of an important-to-my-fort industry, its' just become part of my play style. Plus, it makes me stupidly happy to thing of my dwarfs tending their majestic underground fungus caves, stripping nature of its beautiful bounty. It's really paid of in my most recent fort though, I've just completed my meeting hall tower's dome, 37 tiles at its widest point and using slightly under 2k of glass blocks. Three years and the lives of six dwarfs but totally worth it. 

[Gergination]

You guys need to discover Auto Hotkey.  It's a beautiful little program that lets you set up keyboard commands and execute them at the touch of a button.

I have one for mass forbidding every level on a 6x6 embark on a mountain.  It sweeps back and forth across the entire map for ~10 levels and only takes about 20 seconds to run.  Doing it by hand takes me at least 2 minutes.

I also use it for massive trading of mugs/crafts where it just goes down the list and selects every good for trade.

[Sphalerite]

1. mod the raws to make cows give booze when milked

I've tried this.  It doesn't work.  You get buckets of cow booze.  Dwarves don't recognize booze in buckets, so the cow-booze never gets drunk or transferred to barrels.

[Gergination]

1. mod the raws to make cows give booze when milked

I've tried this.  It doesn't work.  You get buckets of cow booze.  Dwarves don't recognize booze in buckets, so the cow-booze never gets drunk or transferred to barrels.

Cow Booze sounds delicious

[Aoi]

Have your dwarves completely mine out a soil layer and crack open a cavern.  Wall the cavern back up...

Wait, so as long as any cavern's been opened at least once, you can get subterranean plants growing in ANY subterranean soil or muddied tile? ...I always thought it had to be within the Z-layers that encompassed the cavern.

[Crustypeanut]

I always have one farm planting, in this order, Sweet Pods - Pig Tails - Cave Wheat - Plump Helmets.

If I need the other two crops, I'll make a secondary plot with those.  One season of plump helmets a year is enough.

Anyways, put up like 30+ hives and let 'em go Lots of mead for ye.  Have maybe 1/3rd of them ONLY for replenishing the others.