v0.31:Stonegears/Farming

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Make sure that the game is paused.

Experience

Each time a dwarf does some type of activity, the more experienced they become at it. With greater experience a dwarf will do the job faster, and for many types of jobs will also do it more skillfully. For farmers, this means:

1. More food is produced per farmed tile.
2. Farmers plant and harvest faster, so a single farmer can handle more farmed tiles all alone.

Farmers gain experience both from planting and from harvesting. However, when a game starts everyone in the fortress helps in harvesting, so the farmer gains only a fraction of the available harvesting experience gain. You can change this via o to select the Set Orders command:

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h will toggle Dwarves All Harvest to Only Farmers Harvest, so your farmer will gain farming experience more quickly. More sure to only use h; modifying other standing orders will result in the game behaving in ways you don't want.

Placing farm plots

First, go one level beneath the surface (> to go down a level), since we'll be growing underground crops (when the plot is viewed via k, it needs to be Inside rather than Outside).

Next, from the main menu use b to enter the Building menu. You can either use + and - to scroll through the list and then Enter to select a particular type of building, or you can just press the key for that building. In this case, you want p. One obvious difference from stockpiles and designations is that you don't place a farm plot by specifying two opposite corners of a rectangle. Instead, you grow and shrink a visible rectangle, move it around with the arrow keys, and then place it with Enter. u grows the rectangle in the north/south direction and m shrinks it, while k grows it in the west/east direction and h shrinks it. Since we want a 2x2 farm plot press u once a k once, then move it to the southwest corner of the farming area with the arrow keys and hit Enter. (Note that if you accidentally position part of the rectangle in the wall the game won't complain, and you'll get a 2x1 plot instead of a 2x2 plot)

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The farm plot will be blinking to indicate that it's not a real plot, but merely a command to your dwarves to build a farm plot. However, even though it has no physical reality yet, you can still interact with it. Use Esc to exit the building menu, then q to interact with it, just like you interact with stockpiles. Since there's a stockpile right next to it you have to move the X cursor so it's closer to the plot than the stockpile. Doing so you'll see:

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Waiting for construction... means that no work has been done to turn the tiles into an actual farm plot. Needs Farming (Fields) indicates the labor which is used to construct the plot, and that at least one dwarf must have the "Farming (Fields)" labor turned on for the construction to happen; your farmer already has this labor on, so no worries about that. Construction inactive merely means that no dwarf has yet claimed the "construct plot" job, since the game is paused, and dwarves don't claim new jobs while the game is paused.

If you've made a mistake in the placement or size of the plot you can use x to remove it. Since it's still just a command to build a plot this will happen instantly.

Besides removing the plot you can also suspend its construction using s. This causes your farmer to ignore the "build plot" command, leaving the blinking plot as a place holder. A s a second time toggles it back to merely inactive.

Okay, we want three more 2x2 farm plots. Put a one tile gap between each of them like this:

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Different farm plots can be put up right next to each other, but having a gap between them makes it easier to visually tell them apart.

Okay, now unpause long enough for your farmer to come down and construct the four plots, then re-pause. The plots will stop blinking when the construction is complete.

Setting up your plots and selecting crops

Now that the plots are constructed, use q to interact with them again (select any one of the four, it doesn't matter). You'll see some different text:

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First of all, ignore Fertilize and Seas Fert (Seasonal Fertilize). Soil in Dwarf Fortress never runs out of nutrients, so fertilization only provides a short term boost that generally isn't worth the effort.

At the bottom are the four seasons. You select a season (with a, b, c, or d) to see and/or change which crop is planted that season for the current farm plot. The currently selected season is spring, indicated by it being white and the other season being light gray. At the top are the four underground crops which can be planted in spring. No crops are selected yet, indicated by all of them being light gray and "fallow" being white. You can scroll through the list of crops with + and -, then choose a crop to be planted for spring with Enter, at which point that crop will be white and "fallow" will be light gray. If you change your mind and wish for no crop to be planted or harvested for that season use z to revert that season back to being fallow. Once the crop for a season has been set it will be planted year after year when the season comes around without you having to intervene.

So, which crops should you pick? For this particular farm plot, chose plump helmet for all four seasons. It can be eaten both cooked and raw, can be brewed into booze, and can be grown in all four seasons, making it a very versatile crop.

Now, you could grow nothing but plump helmets on the other three plots, but dwarves get an unhappy thought if there's only one kind of food to eat or if there's only one kind of booze to drink (each type of crop produces a different type of booze when brewed). Further, if a dwarf eats the type of food they prefer or drink the type of booze they prefer they get a happy thought, so that's two reasons to have a variety of crops.

So, in a second plot set sweet pods to grow during spring and summer, in a third set cave wheat to grow during summer and autumn, and in a fourth set to grow pig tails during summer and autumn. This will provide us with four different types of booze to drink. These three crops can be used for things besides booze, but booze is all we'll do with them for now.

Now this setup leaves three out of four plots growing stuff only half the time. You can set these three plots to grow plump helmets during the winter (dimple cups can't be eaten or brewed, so don't choose that), but that leaves a single unproductive season in each of those three plots. You can set those seasons to grow quarry bush. Quarry bush is the least versatile and most involved crop, since it can only be used for food, must be cooked before it can be eaten, and has to go through processing before it can be cooked. On the plus side it gives five times as much food as plump helmet farming does.

Surface farming

Farming on the surface is just as easy as farming underground, but you don't have seeds for any of the surface crops yet. When you've gotten some surface seeds you can use them to grow surface crops if you want more variety in booze.

Managing the food and booze supply

Farming in Dwarf Fortress is currently overpowered, so you'll soon be swimming in excess food. Unfortunately there's no way to tell the game to automatically stop growing crops when there's too much food and start up again when there's not enough, so you'll have to keep track of the supply situation on your own. The lower left-hand corner of the status screen‡ can give you a quick overview of your supplies, and its kitchen‡ and stocks‡ sub-screens can give more detailed information.

How much food is too much? Each dwarf eats eight meals a year, and you should probably have enough food to feed your dwarves for two years (plus any migrants that show up), since your farmer might end up dead of permanently incapacitated. Also, your farm provides the raw material for brewing your booze supply, so make sure you have enough booze to last a while; each dwarf drinks 16 units of booze a year.

When you find yourself with too much food there's several things you can do:

1. Turn off your dwarf's farming labor‡ (v-p-l) and turn it on for another dwarf, to train the second dwarf into a replacement for your main farmer, should your main farmer ever be put out of commission.
2. Sell all the excess food to the caravans.
3. Change your plots to grow pig tails and dimple cups. Turn the pig tails into thread, the dimple cups into dye, and use them to make dyed cloth. Turn the cloth into ropes, bags and clothing.
4. Change some or all of the farm plots to lie fallow and find something else for your farmer to do. Note that if your farmer's skill level is less than "Legendary", they can grow still more experienced if they continue to farm, and even once they're Legendary there's still five more levels (Legendary+1 through Legendary+5) that can only be seen via the Dwarf Therapist utility.
5. Let your farmer keep farming to gain more experience, but destroy all the harvests with an Dwarven atom smasher to prevent the crops from cluttering up your fortress. Alternatively, dump them into magma.

Next tutorial article

Workshops.

Notes

• In Dwarf Fortress "building" means something like "a reversible physical modification to your site which 1) has settings which can be changed and/or 2) is made from items".
• While setting up farm plots, planting them and harvesting them, your farmer uses no tools, not even a pointed stick. Almost all jobs in the game are done without tools, the exceptions being combat/hunting (which uses armor and weapons), cutting trees (which uses axes), and mining (which uses pickaxes). Some players joke that dwarves use their beards in the place of tools
• Growing plants on a farm plot never requires water. However, turning bare stone into something which can be farmed requires the one time use of water. See irrigation.
• Underground crops are presumably fungi. However, in spite of being fungal, they have seeds instead of spores.
• Underground crops, in spite of being underground, are affected by the seasons (except for plump helmets). However, all surface crops are unaffected by seasons.
• When placing a farming plot on the surface the game will say No mud/soil for farm Mud is left by water. This is a bug which you can ignore.