40d:Food guide

These are all possible ways you can get food:

Farming

In financial terms, farming will be your zero-coupon bonds, your fixed deposit account, your high yield, high duration account. This will normally be your main source of dwarven nourishment, and unless your map has a craptonne of animals or you have 200 or so fisherdwarves, this is how you will feed your dwarven economy.

It is important to remember that when you invest in farming, you are sacrificing a minor amount of resources (seeds, labor, and land) for large future gain. So if your fortress is in crisis where every single breadcrumb can save a life... you might not really want to go into farming, at that moment.

But normally, you can afford to sacrifice a minor amount of seeds (15 should be enough to get started) and minor amount of labor (1dedicated planter) to reap large benefits.

Farming Techniques

• If you are relatively in a crisis and need food urgently, plant low cost, high yield crops that don't need additional talent to bring to bear. So avoid those pigtails and quarry leaves and get that plump helmet farm operational.
• It doesn't take a large field to feed an army. In DF, a 6x6 field and two planters should be enough for... forever.
• It's not really necessary to use an aqueduct to water an underground field. A bucket brigade and a designated pond (which you convert to a field later) can create tillable land in no time.
• It's better to train one legendary planter than allow 5 unskilled ones to do the job. Higher planter skill means that plants will grow in bigger stacks (harvesting dwarf's skill doesn't count) which means that more booze will fit in barrel and stockpiles won't fill as quick

Trading

Trading for food will produce a large yield with relatively high cost. It's possible to have a fortress that imports all of its food without producing any of its own. To do this embark with enough food to last until a Caravan arrives and then produce enough trade goods to trade for the food the Caravans bring. If you need more then prioritize food and drink with the Caravan Liaison.

Tips

• There's lots of stuff that can get sold well. I personally favour the "kill all merchants and take their stuff" approach, but people like trading prepared food (contradictory?), crafts, weapons, caged animals, and various other stuff that you really can't be bothered to use in your own fortress.
• Watch your food supplies carefully though, it's possible you don't have enough. Not likely, but possible with really, really large forts.

Fishing

This is just a dedicated stream of low yield income. It's practically guaranteed, but the return to cost is quite low. It's nice to supplement the dwarven diet with it, and turtle and lobster shells are important for moods.

The thing about fishing though is that the catch is not immediately edible. You need to process it at the fishery first, which marginally increases the time taken to get from rod to plate.

Tips

• Actually, unless you love to roleplay, the only reason you ever want to fish is to get shells. But sometimes, you realize that you're not getting any shells, just lots of shads and trout and cave fish. Here's a tip: dig out a channel some distance away from a main water source and channel a water source into that. Then designate that for fishing. You should only get turtles from that.
• I find that a good combo is that for every three dedicated fisherdwarves, one dedicated fish cleaner is needed for the highest efficiency and every fish cleaner should get his/her own fishery.
• "there is no fish left in X body of warter" can be safely ignored. Your dwarves will either use another fishing spot until the fish respawn or idle about until said fish respawn, which is when the season changes.
• If you don't have a river on your map but only murky pools, they may dry up in summer and never refill, leaving your map with no water at all. So there is a (low and avoidable) risk of fishing being a dead end.
• You still need a farm or trade for booze.

Hunting

This is almost like fishing, except the returns are usually higher but the risk is higher as well. With hunting, you will also get bones, tallow, and leather. fishing just gets you bones and shells.

Basically, it's like this; if you are on any map where you yourself are afraid of the animals roaming about, hunting is out of the question. If you're on any evil or savage map, hunting is a good way to get rid of dwarves.

So the only time you would use hunters is when the game are rabbits, bunnies, groundhogs, gnomes, or the like.

Tips

• Try to train your hunters with marksdwarvenship first. It helps A LOT. Hammerdwarf is good too. But if you're going to do all that, ask yourself if it would be more viable to just make him a marksdwarf and station him outside?
• Hunters sleep outside. They can sometimes be slaughtered by wandering wolf packs while snoozing away.
• Hunters that have no bolts will chase their prey and club them with their crossbow, which is about as effective as it sounds.
• Make sure you have a leatherworker, tanner, and butcher before you get a hunting job. If not, it's a total waste and you're better off fishing.
• You can also make an axe-hunter by putting wood cutting and hunting on the same dwarf - won't be catching the fast creatures, but has a better chance against a predator, and doesn't need ammo.
• You still need a farm or trade for booze.
• Lastly, hunters are usually the first to die in a siege or ambush.

Livestock

Using livestock as a sole food source may be an non-viable and stupid way to survive. Animals don't reproduce fast enough to feed everyone and their only useful byproducts are bone, fat, leather and for intruder detection.

If you really want to try this, learn to micromanage caging so that baby animals are kept in cages. There exists no more than one male of each species, and female animals are slaughtered after they reproduce once or twice.

Alternatively: If you bring pairs of animals right from the start, happen to be on a map where you can catch (lots) more with cage traps and buy all animals traders bring, you will get a substantial return after, say, 3 years at the latest. But the cost in starting points, time, work and micromanagement make this really uneconomic. Try it as an experiment perhaps? For the first years you will need a different food source anyway, so why not stick with that? You could however limit the number of dwarves until everything's set up. Advantages of animals is that they are a meat reserve that will not rot.

Tame female animals that are left to roam can apparently become impregnated by wild male animals of the same type. The new animals produced will be tame.

Details

• Some animals are reproducing faster and more consistently than others. You will have to try out. But really, you will take what you can get.
• Mules are sterile.
• You still need a farm or trade for booze.

Cooking

An important way to hugely increase your food output without really doing anything. All you need is one dedicated cook and a kitchen as well as cookable food. Basically, it turns a few stacks of food into a lot bigger stacks of food that give a happiness bonus depending on cook skill. It also turns inedible food into edible food (tallow, flour, lots more) If you're in a crisis, you can cook seeds too (after some time you will be happy to get rid of some, especially ones that you gathered with herbalists and do not plan to plant. Hide roots are perfect example.

Remember that cooking, other than brewing or eating raw plants, destroys the seeds, so you might want to be careful about that.

Tips

• To train chefs, have them only make easy meals in the beginning because it's the fastest to prepare.
• Make sure there's enough storage space because if masterpiece meals rot... you're in trouble (tantrums).
• Prepared food sells for obscenely high prices. Makes for a brilliant trade good in a pinch, even to the elves (as long as they aren't in wooden barrels).

Gathering

This is the best you can do when you have a food shortage. It has the best returns to time value of all. Just, you won't get that much and you better invest in another method before you run out of bushes to harvest. Not much to say about it other than you can also farm most plants you gather. The higher your gatherer skill, the more and faster you get. Unskilled gatherers will find frustratingly little. Gathering also allows to start farming above ground plants you can't buy on embark screen.

Vermin trapping

Free food in dire circumstances. You get an unhappiness bonus, and it's usually a sign your fortress is doomed. You can also manually catch vermin, which your dwarves can snack on by using animal traps with bait. I don't know why you would want to do that since the bait is usually worth more than the catch... but, it's up to you.

Tips

Heck, you don't even need bait as far as I can tell. Just make a bunch of animal traps, make sure someone has trapping enabled, then set up a Kennel with a repeating "Capture Live Land animal" task. The trapper should pick up a trap and run around chasing vermin, sticking them in the trap. Just make sure there's an animal stockpile to put them on.

Even if there's plenty of normal food available, dwarves will occasionally come by and eat the vermin raw, live, and wriggling! - Nesoo

Spawns

After you discover certain map features spawns, like tower caps and bushes, will pop up in your fortress. These are an additional way of getting food (and seeds).