v0.31:Stonegears/Farming

Back to the Template:L

Make sure that the game is paused.

Experience

Each time a dwarf does some type of activity, the more Template:L they become at it. With greater experience a dwarf will do the job both faster and 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

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 Template:Ls and Template:Ls 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 Template:L 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 dwarfs 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

Now that the plots are constructed, use q to interact with them again. You'll see a different screen:

SCREENSHOT PLACEHOLDER

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.

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".