40d Talk:Food guide

As requested from http://www.bay12games.com/cgi-local/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=7&t=003406. 

Do we really need this? For those who don't know how, we can direct them to Your first fortress which should say how to get food, though it probably only talks about farming/boozecooking, trading, hunting, and fishing.
On second thought, that's not really an "only": The other four methods (livestock, gathering, vermin trapping, and spawns) are minor methods. The last two are useless for any real supply, the first one requires years of planning (and isn't great anyway), and the second is only useful for seeds and emergency food.
Lastly, "if you can't think, then you can't play this game. If you can think, then you can figure that out yourself." --Savok 10:16, 28 March 2008 (EDT)

What a big pile of...inaccuracies. Plant gathering is missing and while not exactly working well in the long term its definitely an option and to be mentioned. The writing style is more opinion than fact... --Birthright 00:28, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

I read that this page was organized based on the general difficulty of the task, but I disagree somewhat. I'd say hunting is probably the hardest to do, while farming is blindingly easy. The danger of the job increases the difficulty of managing it, because dead dwarves make unhappy dwarves who make dead dwarves... So you have to exert effort to provide protection for the risk-takers, as well as making preparations for those who are unlucky, which is more difficult, requires more work force and infrastructure, and takes more time.

1. Effective farming requires a farmer, a plot and a plump helmet spawn. Set the farmer to grow them endlessly in the plot, and your dwarves will never starve. Farming is also directly tied to brewing, the other necessary industry for every fortress.
2. Herbalism is more difficult, because predatorial creatures, like wolves, like to chase flower pickers around your map, and you need a fair number of them to get any benefit from having them, whereas with farming, you only need one. Need I further mention that any dwarf wandering the wilderness (In this case, everyone but the farmer) has a chance of stumbling into an ambush?
3. Fishing is even more difficult, because the very thing they're gathering can kill them, you can't defend them from fish with dogs, the process of gathering fish doesn't hurt the fish back, you need many fishers to gain anything real out of it, and you need separate fishery workers to make the fish edible.
4. Hunting is probably the most difficult to do, because your dwarves are just as likely to attack things that want to kill them, as they are to attack actual prey. While you can assign them dogs, that won't do much against a full pack of wolves, or a herd of unicorns. Heck, fish can even still kill them, if they get too close to the water! As far as I know, there's no way to make them hunt in groups, nor do I know a way of assigning soldiers to follow a dwarf around. To have a (moderately) reliable hunter, you need to consciously train them up with their weapon as military dwarves, which takes time that does not involve gaining food. If they do kill something and come back alive, you still need to butcher it before it rots, cook the meat before that rots, and tan the hide before it rots, each requiring three separate workshops and workers to be available at the same time. Usually one of them is otherwise occupied with alcohol or sleeping. Which really means you need two dwarves of each labor. You only get so much meat from all of this, which means you need a bunch of hunters anyways, and because animals move a lot, they may be hunting one animal for SEASONS before they finally bring back a carcass. And there's always a chance that they'll just kill every living thing on the map, leaving you with no further source of meat until more wander in.
5. Breeding tame animals and manually butchering them is WAY easier and WAY more efficient than hunting wild ones. Animals WILL have babies. Have enough animals, and you'll get a LOT of babies. Simply thinning the herd is really easy to do, and nobody risks their own neck to do it. Locking the extras in cages drops the pathfinding lag, and keeps them out of your dwarves' way.
6. I've NEVER thought of trapping as a source of food. Mostly, if I do use it, it's just as a substitute for cats, or I just have a lot of dwarves and need to find things to keep them all occupied. Actually, the fact that they eat vermin kind of annoys the heck out of me, because I was trying to fill a cage in my zoo with birds, and my dwarves kept eating them!
7. I almost never trade for food. Actually, I almost never trade for anything. The traders never bring anything I'm interested in, because I can just make it myself. Mostly I just dump stuff I don't want on them. At the worst of times, I trade for charcoal if I have no magma.

The labors which make them wander around outside require a lot more work, and thus are a lot more difficult to manage, because of the danger of going outside for long periods. If you have a herbalist, fisher or hunter, you need:

1. Dogs assigned to them for general protection, which if you felt cheap on embark may require training. Or possibly even breeding. All of which means time.
2. You need to train them with some form of military skill, so they have a chance of fighting back and crawling to a bed. The training process is micromanagement, and once they're out in the field doing their thing, you need to keep an eye on them, to know when to recruit them again so they'll actually fight back.
3. In regards to fishing, it's generally helpful if you build a walled-off area, or some system of diverting water into a controlled area. The best way, I'd say, is to divert a river into a room with marksdwarves, who can shoot any vengeful fish before anything too serious occurs, and then strain the river with grates or bars, so the fish can't get away, and your dwarves can't be taken too far.
4. In any case, as soon as you make one of these workers, you NEED to make a burial receptical for them, because eventually, they will be horribly killed. (Although I've found brooks in environments where ONLY vermin fish spawn in the pools, so fishing CAN be safe, if you're really observant and lucky)
5. Hunters and fishers REQUIRE external industries to be up and at least somewhat functional, or you wind up with miasma, wasted food, wasted materials, wasted time, wasted animals and wasted dwarven lives.

And, finally, farming is the ONLY reliable, consistent and genuinely profitable of ANY method of gathering food. The only reliable caravan is the Dwarven one, which is only a yearly event, hardly enough to keep your dwarves drunk and fed. Dwarves only sometimes eat vermin and don't really like it. All of the others can quickly run out of raw materials (Shrubs, animals, fish) to work with if you ARE gathering enough to feed a fortress. None of them, aside from farming, produces enough food. What I'm trying to say is, just because some of these may be less complex, that does not make them any easier, because of all the surrounding circumstances, both from within your fortress, and without. --Kydo 05:26, 4 February 2010 (UTC)