40d:Food guide

These are five possible ways to get food: farming, fishing, hunting, livestock, trading. Farming is probably the most useful of the methods, followed by trading, followed by either hunting or fishing, with livestock being the least useful over-all. This is open to speculation and debate, of course, but typically any given example fortress will discover these trends emerging at one point or another.

A lot of the information available on this page is already stated on more appropriate, specific pages. Regurgitation here is merely for comparison and contrast.

Farming

Farming will usually be a fort's primary source of food, and will also be the one that produces the highest yield over the longest period of time. Most crops can be grown year-round as they are harvested, with only some requiring secondary processing such as milling or threashing.

Materials

Few; Cheap

The basis of a farm is seeds. Seeds come in both subterranean and surface (indoors/outdoors) varieties - you can buy either type of seeds from traders, but the embark screen will only have indoor seeds available and Plant Gathering (designations->Gather plants)) will only yield outside plants. Any plant that is eaten or brewed produces seeds. Plant gathering, incidentally, is not a very good substitute for more orderly farming techniques. It is good for gathering local plants for their seeds, but not for build a crop surplus that will be eaten. Incidentally, on the Kitchen menu of the Status (z) menu, you should turn off the cooking of seeds, at least in the beginning. Also, to control dwarven hehavior a bit more, you may want to control who can harvest plants or collect stray seeds from the Set orders and Operations menu. Remember that efficiency for all dwarfs is important.

A subterranean farm will require a digging implement of some sort, unless you are lucky enough to start on a map with a cave, in which case you will possibly need a bucket.

Skills

Few

To keep a demarcation in skills, the only specific farming-related skills will be considered Plant Gathering and Farming. Brewing helps produce both alcohol and seeds, but it falls more in line with cooking-related skills. There is also Food Hauling, unless all dwarfs are set to Harvest Plants.

Acreage

Contained

An outdoors farm plot just needs to be laid (build->Farm plot) on any soil. Indoors plots can be built on any soil floor (including sand) or any sufficiently muddy floor. Muddy stone floors can be produced by using a bucket and the pit/pond activity zone. To make an underground outdoors plot, the area where the plot will be placed must be or have been exposed to the outdoors (e.g., the ceilings have all been channeled down to that room) and the floor, if stone, must be muddied.

Keeping seed-exclusive food stockpiles near farm plots is good practice, as are keeping indoors and outdoors farm plots close. It is entirely possible to contain all food production and some of the cooking facilities in a small, well-managed area.

Priority

High

Farming skills should be devoted to dwarfs who will be farmers or planters only. That includes turning off lesser hauling jobs, and giving them no other skill specialization, as there is a chance they will spend more time doing other things than they will planting seeds or harvesting plants from the fields before they wither. Mixing farming skills with cooking skills is viable, but closer attention to task execution and assignment is necessary, thus that the planters don't spend more time in the kitchen or the still than on the field. Multiple planters - I tend to designate three - produces a bigger stock for less skill, and may even allow some skill rotation, while fewer planters - one - puts a demanding economy at risk if that dwarf should be killed or incapacitated.

Misc.

• Crops have a time to bear period after their planting. Keep in mind that crops that take longer to grow mean that your community will dine much later. Plump helmets, either by divine grace or sheer luck, are really good average crops.
• The size of the farm plot is not as important as it may seem. A well-maintained 6x6 plot can feed a large fortress.
• Potash can be used to fertilize farm plots, yielding +3 to the next crop harvest. Potash is made by burning wood into ash and turning ash into potash at an ashery. The utility of this gain is questionable, even in dire circumstances.
• Developed skill in planting produces better harvest bundles (stacks of food from one plant harvested). Larger bundles of food means more food stored in a single barrel, or more alcohol brewed into a single barrel per bundle.
• If you find that your seeds stock is dropping, this may be either a case of focusing too much on secondary culinary skills that destroy seeds in the process (e.g., cooking) or the inhabitants of your fortress may be consuming other kinds of food and all of your seed-breaing plants are not getting eaten or brewed thus that the seeds get recovered. As mentioned, it is ill-advised to let your kitchen cook seeds directly.

Trading

Trading for food is a compromise over control of accumulation (you have little) and control of surplus (random). As it relies on trade caravans delivering a fortress food that the other communities have produced, you have to carefully control the amount of food dwarfs eat. The amount of food that a caravan delivers is usually impossible to control, but only influence, as with dwarf caravans. At the same time, you need to maintain good relationships with other civilizations as they are literally your bread and butter in this case.

Note that there is no bread or butter in Dwarf Fortress.

Materials

Cheap, then expensive

The only physical requirement to initiate trading with some other civilization is a trade depot. This is the cheap part.

The expensive part is actually accumulating trinkets to sell. This is an expansive situation that ties into whatever kind of economy you establish - wood (Armok forbid), stone, glass, metal, cloth, leather, etc.. This involves the accumulation of a chain of workshops, accumulation of production materials (stone will usually be the most plentiful), and the assortment of skills needed to produce the goods. With the fortress having foregone food production, it has integrated food accumulation into the end result of the fortress's normal activity. The good news is that the cost of food purchasing may become transparent if the dwarves become good at material and trinket production. More good news is that food is typically rather cheap, even if specifically requested.

Then you need more barrels ...

Skills

None, then normal

None, you say!? Believe it or not, this is important - there is an actual GAIN from not having any kind of food production except through trade. Unless you are doing the hermit or outcast challenges, most of the skills needed to perform trading for food will already exist as a requirement for a normal fortress. Very rarely will you not build a trade depot. Very rarely will you not have a trade representative. You will never not produce something that can be sold to merchants. In short, all the basic skill requirements and all secondary skill requirements will already be built into a normal fortress (hopefully). You free up one or more dwarves who would have otherwise spent their time making food and put them to work with more useful tasks such as building furniture or trinkets.

Acreage

None, then normal

Same as with skills and and materials, most of the things necessary for trading for food are already built into a typical fortress. Ignoring the workshops that will produce what you sell, as well as what your fortress uses to live, you need a depot and a food stockpile. Done. Now build infrastructure as normal.

Priority

Low, then variable

The major benefit of purchasing food rather than growing it is that you integrate the supply of food as an end-product of the rest of a fortress's activity. Forgo the plow and hoe for more stone crafts or more furniture, and all that.

Trading for food can easily fill your piles with edible delights each time your fortress gets visited by merchants, but at the cost of choice on more than one occasion. Your human and dwarven liaison will allow you to set a priority for the food the merchants haul with them next year. Goblins and elves don't seem to trade much food, and the amount of food the humans bring can be sometimes great, sometimes minor. Even setting the priority for food for the dwarves, there is a chance they'll just bring some expensive food, not a lot of cheap food (actually, this is a fallacy: the food itself is not expensive, usually, but its barrel or bag can be of absurd quality). There is also the part where you have to keep good relations with the other races, including your own; this another part of "normal fortress behavior." Trading for food is a fubar'd idea if everyone hates you. Since sieges keep merchant caravans away in the later-game periods, a fortress would do well to build an early, healthy surplus too.

Misc.

• A stack of really well prepared food can be incredibly expensive to merchants and can be produced from food bought at cheap prices from merchants.
• Trading for food is open to all the normal problems and bugs that are associated with trading, including slow unpacking, the random really slow wagon problem, selling wood to the elves, and so forth.
• Although fortresses may only rarely find themselves low on food stocks, an extra-cautious eye should always be kept on the supply and how fast it is being consumed, such as in quickly growing fortresses and those with large populations. Especially as far as alcohol stock is concerned, since dwarves burn through alcohol faster than they do through food.
• Solid food - plant or meat - is not purchased in barrels; exposure to rot and wither, make sure it is hauled to a stockpile in time.

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.
• 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).

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