40d:Seed

You may be looking for world generation seeds, listed at Pregenerated worlds.

Dwarves can use seeds to grow crops in farm plots. Almost every plant in the game* produces seeds. 1-2 seeds are created when a plant is processed/milled, brewed, or eaten (but not when cooked!). Seeds are stockpiled with food.

(* The exceptions are bloated tuber, muck root, valley herb, and kobold bulb, which cannot be grown, but can only be acquired by plant gathering or trading.)

The 6 underground ("genuine dwarven") plant seeds can be purchased at the beginning of the game (see Starting Builds).

Fortresses can have a maximum of 200 seeds of each type. If your fortress has 200 seeds of a given type, no more seeds of that type will be produced until the seeds are consumed (either through planting or cooking) or otherwise destroyed (you can however acquire more than 200 seeds by trade, but why would you?). This is good in that all plant related jobs will no longer cause huge hauler bee-lines. It is bad in that a (though marginally) amount of food and value is lost.

All seed types can be cooked, producing one unit of edible food per seed. Cooking seeds has the danger of cooking all seeds, sabotaging your own farming. So better only cook seed types you cannot or want not to plant. Seeds have the further disadvantage that they tend to produce small meals thus using up lots of barrels.

Even though your dwarves will do a decent job of consolidating seeds into as few bags as possible, massive seed stocks will still use up a huge number of bags. This can be controlled somewhat by dumping surplus seeds from inside bags, especially if a single seed sits in a bag. You can also use the stocks screen to dump all of a seed type that you do not intend to plant. You will however hardly ever need more than 40 bags and that is for more than, say, 2000 seeds. So buy some cheap leather soon, get your leatherworker to it and make those bags, so you can forget about one more micromanage thing.

Seeds plantable only indoors

There are six types of seeds that can be used to plant crops underground (in soil or in stone that has been muddied by irrigation):

• Plump Helmet spawn
• Sweet Pod seeds
• Pig Tail seeds
• Cave Wheat seeds
• Dimple Cup spawn
• Rock Nuts (which are used to grow Quarry Bushes)

These are the only plants (aside from Tower Caps) that will grow inside the cave; all other (gatherable) plants can only be found and grown aboveground. Most (but not all) aboveground plants will produce seeds (see List of crops), which in turn can be planted to grow crops. Traders will almost always bring seeds with them (if the biome fits) which can be used for farming if you cannot find any yourself.

Seeds plantable only outdoors

There are several types of seeds that are grown aboveground. They generally work the same way as underground crops: plant them in a farm plot, wait for them to grow, harvest them, and then process/mill, brew, cook, and/or eat them raw. Note that there is an important distinction between "inside" and "aboveground": these crops can be grown in any space marked "Above Ground", regardless of whether it's inside or outside. This means that via the usage of a skylight or greenhouse, they can be grown in a secure location, perhaps even adjacent to your underground crops.

Aboveground crops include:

• Wild strawberry
• Rope reed
• Prickle berry
• Sun berry
• Sliver barb
• Hide root
• Whip vine
• Blade weed
• Fisher berry
• Rat weed
• Longland grass

Cooking with seeds

Cooking seeds can be an effective way of training a new cook.

1) In the z-Kitchen sub-menu, only allow the seeds you want to have cooked (c)

2) Limit a kitchen workshop in the workshop profile so only your new cook will use that kitchen (by limiting the skill level, or assigning it by name, or both.)

3) Set that kitchen on "Easy Meal - Repeat"

Advantage

• The chef will only consume two seeds per meal. This allows them to make an abundance of meals without consuming costly materials.

Disadvantages

• Once 200 seeds for a particular plant have been accumulated, additional seeds will not be produced when eating, brewing, milling, or threshing, saving a considerable amount of work for food haulers. By cooking them, haulers will always be gathering additional seeds.
• For new forts, cooking your seeds can leave your dwarfs without anything to eat.