Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Gunnarr]

Hello, I will cut to the chase for things I am currently having problems with:

1. Food and farms. I am having trouble feeding all of the Dwarves, I don't quite understand how farming works the wiki did not really help. I know you irrigate the ground with water which I can do, but how do I get enough seeds to make a farm that will sustain a fortress? I have plants constantly being picked, yet I only have about 3 blocks actually being put to use in the farm.

I just would like an explaination as to how to get a working farm to help me Dwarves!

2. Drink. I don't quite understand how alchohol works as in how is it made? At the still there is brew drink and extract from seeds, what seeds are extracted from? What is extracted? I have trouble making enough alchohol for the Dwarves.

3. Burial. I want to give all my dwarves memorials, but I can't figure quite how to get them to put the dead dwarf in the memorial! I had a dead dwarf, I created a rock slab at the masons workshop, then engraved a memorial at the craftsman workshop, but then how do I set down the memorial and designate it for the dead dwarf? I read on the wiki if you only put them in coffins they still might become ghosts, so that is why I want to put them in memorials and plus i just like to do it because its just who i am.

that is all my questions that i can think of!

I am very sorry for writing them down, but I have been having such trouble with it all!

I hope some of these may be answered, thank you all!

[NecroRebel]

1. You get seeds by using the plants in ways that are not cooking. If you brew a plant, it produces 2 seeds. Same with eating raw, milling, and processing. The problem might be more a result of your farmer's low planting skill and what else they may be busy with. Disable planting on all dwarves but one, and disable all labors but planting on that one, and as he skills up he should plant more and get more per tile.

Depending on what plants you're planting, they might actually need processing to eat, as well. In fact, of the subterranean plants, only plump helmets may be eaten raw. Sweet pods need to be milled or processed to a barrel, then cooked, quarry bushes need to be processed to a bag then cooked, cave wheat needs to be milled then cooked, and pig tails and dimple cups aren't edible (pig tails are brewable, though, and the ale is cookable).

For the most part, you just want to turn off cooking of every raw plant so you don't waste seeds. Also, one good farmer produces more food than a dozen dabblers, especially since dabblers can and often will plant a seed and produce no plants off of it.

2. Just brewing drinks at the still is the only really relevant thing you need to worry about. If you have a good farmer, they'll produce larger stacks of plants which in turn get brewed into larger stacks of drink, and in a single barrel. Some plants have extracts (like valley herbs), but they're not really worth doing anything with. Basically, again, one good farmer will help you produce more plant products, including booze, than many low-skill farmers.

3. Dead dwarves don't go in memorials. Once the slab is engraved at a craftsdwarf's shop (which it seems you've figured out), you just place it with b - alt-s and the dwarf is memorialized. This is mostly useful if you cannot recover the corpse. A dwarf who has at least one of their body parts in a coffin is laid to rest just as effectively as a dwarf who has a memorial slab built, will not become a ghost, and if their ghost is currently active both strategies eliminates it.

[Funk]

the wiki is the best help i can give
http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Quickstart_guide#
dont panic if your farms dont make a lot of food,iyou dont need a lot and you can trade for more later.
each dwarf require 2 units of food and 4 units of drink each season.

to brew drink you need:1 available empty barrel
2 a brewable plant (check the Status menu under Kitchen)
3 a dwarf with the brewer labor activated.

seeds are for makeing Gnomeblight an anti-gnome poison from Kobold bulbs.

[Ghills]

Farming Quickstart/Recovery guide:

Make a small field - fields that are too large slow down farming a lot. 3x3 or 4x4 is just fine. Set that to plump helmets all year round.

Follow NecroRebel's guide for setting labors.  Use 1 full-time farmer and 1 part-time farmer if your fort is <15 dwarves, use 2 full-time farmers if >15 dwarves.

After a year or so, whenever your farmer has stabilized the food situation, add another field. Have it grow 2 different things.  Also, add another farmer. 

Keep adding fields/farmers whenever they seem to be needed until you get to 5 4x4 fields (80 tiles total).  You shouldn't need to go above that.

Explanations and Detailed Info:

In the latest version you don't need to flood soil. Farms can be made in regular soil.  Stone still needs to be flooded. 

Too many fields will overwhelm your farmers, so if you have few farmers/low-skill farmers you should only use a few fields.  You really don't need that much space planted to feed your fort.

Farming works by:
1) Assigning a dedicated farmer, possibly 2.
2) Building a farm plot in soil or on flooded stone (the soil can be under or above ground).
3) Picking the seeds to be planted. A couple of tricks here:
       a. You want to have the same plant in a field for 2+ seasons.  Why? When the season changes, plants that aren't harvest and are of a different type than is assigned to a field for the new season disappear.  Example:  Pig tail is assigned to a field for Season A.  Dimple cups are assigned for Season B. When Seasons switch from A to B, all the unharvested pig tail plants will disappear.  If both Seasons A and B are pig tails, the unharvested plants will not disappear. 
      b. Some plants are edible raw. Some plants are edible after processing. Some plants can be brewed, and some cannot. Some are only good for the cloth industry.  The wiki is pretty clear on which one is which.  #1 plant is plump helmets, good for cooking, eating raw and brewing.
      c.  Plants only give up seeds after processing - eating, brewing or processing in a farmer's workshop. You may have more seeds than you think, and more food than you think.  Cooking does not return seeds.

Brewing:
Labors are probably the biggest obstacle here too. Make sure you have a full-time brewer, and possibly a part-time brewer also.  The other big obstacle is having enough plants - a more structured farm will help with that.

Keep in mind that the first year or two is not the time to embark on grand adventures.  The priorities are food, drink, bedrooms and trading material so you can get the other things you need in Autumn. 

We've all been new, don't worry about asking questions.  We're happy to help!

[Delta Foxtrot]

to brew drink you need:1 available empty barrel
2 a brewable plant (check the Status menu under Kitchen)
3 a dwarf with the brewer labor activated.

I'm just going to add that you can use rock pots made at craftdwarf's shop instead of barrels. They're both functionally identical as booze containers. This can be a lifesaver as stone is in most cases much more plentiful than wood which you need for beds and bins. If you give one stonecrafter a rock pot/Repeat order, you shouldn't have any problems with running out of booze containers.

[kardwill]

Important stuff : Overground plants won't grow in some biomes (like mountains). So if your 20-tiles field has 3 tiles in a forest zone, and 17 tiles in the mountain zone, only 3 tiles will be used.
Other important stuff : Undeground crops will grow underground, and never on a tile that has been exposed to light even once. Overland crops will grow overground.

[Reudh]

1. A farm's plot needs to not be in water, be on a muddy floor, and you need to set the plants to grow for ALL the seasons. I suggest plump helmets as they're brewable and also edible, and when eaten produce two more spawn.
This must be underground. Above ground crops are better and tastier, but the farmers there are prone to attack.

2. To brew alcohol, you need: brewable crops (plump helmet is best, as it is plentiful), a rock pot or a wooden barrel and a food stockpile with space in it. Then you need to build a still, and activate it with Q, then brew drinks with B. You can ignore extracting things for now. Your dwarves WILL work sober, as long as there's water, but they won't like it.

3. Use memorials ONLY to honor dwarves whose corpses are irretrievable (eaten, burned in magma, stuck in water/ice). Build them with B, then ALT+S. Use coffins instead.

[Garath]

you dont need to set plots for year round production if you dont want to. Want only pig tails because your food stores are full, but you're low on cloth? No problem, your planter will just have to wait untill summer/autumn to get to work. When i just started i used 3x3 plots, but now i'm using 2x4, 2x3 or even smaller so i'll be able to regulate production better.

With just a little bit of work, you can negate the need for having a farm for food. Animals breed like crazy. Having a turkey and hatching some eggs will supply your fort for years to come, also in terms of not letting eggs hatch. Dont hesitate to butcher dogs, or you'll drown in puppies. put any young animal that doent eat grass in a cage untill it matures a bit, or prepare for FPS death. Also, too many animals in a small space will start fighting eachother

Checking where animals most often come from, you can buildcage traps in combination with walls to capture them - or weapon traps to kill them outright. Capture and release in a trapped room or as target practice for your militia, so the body is closer to your butcher. You could also tame some at a kennel and either just keep it as breeding stock from then on or butcher it without troubles

[Gunnarr]

Thank you! Each and every one of you! All of your advice is a great help!

I have farming in the "understandable" mindset now

Thank you all again, a thousand times!

[Nan]

Something else well worth playing around with is herbalism / plant gathering. If you want to spend bucketloads of embark points on things like ore, then 5 points in Herbalism is an extremely good investment (if the biome has plants!), because it means you don't need to bring any booze. A proficient herbalist will gather decent-sized plant stacks (usually 2-5, seems to be bigger than what a proficient farmer produces) which can be immediately brewed into decent-sized barrels of booze (the problem with dabbling herbalism, and farming for that matter, is that the plant stacks are size 1 which has flow-on effects on all industries down the line, requiring more time spent brewing and producing barrels/pots).

There is an advantage to Herbalism as a plant source, in that you have unlimited seeds. Because I also bring no food (more points to ore ) I sometimes cook the seeds of the gathered plants (you need to turn on 'Cook' for them in the stocks->kitchen menu and should turn off 'Cook' for the plants themselves - better to brew them), the seeds will often be cooked with booze, and the resulting size ~20 prepared meal will feed the early fort for quite a while. Usually I transition into farming as the fort grows larger, but sometimes I only grow a few plants I particularly like (for example whip vines and longland grass) and continue to use the herbalist to gather other plants to round out the booze variety (later in the game this gathering often takes place in an underground tree farm, once the caverns have been pierced, even a relatively small patch of dirt will produce ample plants for gathering, even gathering the plants which manage to grow in dirt rooms and corridors will be enough for booze).

The final thing to say is herbalism is no way to feed a fort. My primary food source is usually butchering animals and buying food from the caravans. Plants are used mainly for brewing, though I also like to mill flour and sugar for cooking (but this is more for high value food, than feeding the masses). Herbalism is one of those things which probably either fit your style or not, and it can be friendly both to total noobs and to extreme power-gamers.

[Reudh]

Definitely. Having a dedicated hunter, dedicated herbalist and one to two dedicated farmers will supply a fort of nearly 200 with all it needs.

[Iton Ibrukrithzam]

In addition to the great advice here, if you need to get your farmers skilled up quickly, take one or two, make them the only farmers, make sure they have no other time-consuming jobs and then open the (o)rders menu and set it to have only farmers harvest plants as opposed the default "all dwarves".  Harvesting a crop gives a small amount of grower experience, which can be focused on your farmers.  If your farmers have too much to do, though, they might leave crops to wither on the vine, so be careful to clear up non-farming parts of their schedule if you take this approach.

Alternately, you can do what I usually do if I run low on food:  Order a military squad armed with melee weapons to chase a wild animal in circles for awhile.

[Garath]

Alternately, you can do what I usually do if I run low on food:  Order a military squad armed with melee weapons to chase a wild animal in circles for awhile.

when doing this, do not forget to check if they killed something yet, since they'll happily stand near the place where the corpse is/was gloating untill they nearly die of thirst or hunger. You'll have to cancel the orders manually

[Iton Ibrukrithzam]

Alternately, you can do what I usually do if I run low on food:  Order a military squad armed with melee weapons to chase a wild animal in circles for awhile.

when doing this, do not forget to check if they killed something yet, since they'll happily stand near the place where the corpse is/was gloating untill they nearly die of thirst or hunger. You'll have to cancel the orders manually

I know, though it's important to note that when I do this, I am generally watching them the whole time.

More important if one decides to adopt this (poor)strategy is to set orders to have dwarves collect refuse from outside, so they'll actually gather the corpses. 

[Gunnarr]

I haven't even tried butchering or cages yet, anyone care to explain how I can get it to work? XD

I mean, how do you get the animals to get to a place, then well i see you can tell animals they are ready to slaughter, but after that then what?