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40d:Tower-cap
Tower caps are a type of mushroom-like tree which only grow underground (subterranean). Once fully grown (which takes 3 years?[Verify]) they can be designated for wood cutting like other trees, and produce Tower Cap logs.
Tree Farms
It is possible for tower caps to spontaneously grow in muddied subterranean areas only if you have discovered an underground river or underground pond. Such features can be located using the site finder and on the local view during embarkation, if the relevant init and world generation parameters are set.
On the subject of spawning Tower Caps, Toady said:
Right now, you can't plant towercaps or bring spawn along, so you need to find a cave river or cave pool, in which case they will start growing underground if it's all working. It's trickier to find such things, so it's mostly impossible to do. Later, you should be able to plant them. There are no arbitrary vegetation caps now.
The "arbitrary vegetation caps" comment is referring to the old limit of 200 tower caps growing by the cave river in the mud.
Designing a Tree Farm
To create an underground tree farm, you need:
- A large growing room in which the tower-caps will grow.
- The large room can be any size. For this example, we will use a 24 by 24 size room.
- An adjacent smaller filling room that will be filled with exactly the right amount of water.
- To calculate the size of this room, see below.
- A water supply line such as a tube leading to a water source. This does not have to be the same water supply you discovered underground, as the little mushrooms will start to grow on any subterranean muddy ground once the spawn enter the air.
- Lever-controlled doors or floodgates connecting the large room to the smaller one, and the smaller one to the water supply. Doors are preferred as you don't need to link them to levers to open them just so your miner can get out of the water shaft.
There are 576 (24 times 24) floor tiles in the large room. The small room must hold enough water to cover the large room, the small room, and the space occupied by the door in between with 1 unit of water. Each tile of the small room can hold 7 units of water, so:
small = (large + small + 1) / 7
or:
small = (large + 1) / 6
577 divided by 6 is 96 and 1/6; rounding up, this gives 97. This is the number of floor tiles in the smaller room: a 9 by 10 room with 7 extra tiles. Be aware, however, that if you make your "large" room too large, some of the water from the "small" room will evaporate before reaching the other end, and you will not have enough water to coat the floor. This behavior was observed in a room of 42x35 tiles.
Now, get digging. The water supply connects to the smaller filling room by a 1-tile hole where a door or floodgate will go. The filling room connects to the growing room the same way, and the growing room needs a door too. Remember to have the doors in place before breaching the water source and flooding the water supply line!
When you do breach the water source, immediately forbid the first door your miner runs through (see, this is why we use doors), which should be the door closest to the water source. Don't bother forbidding the other two. Link all three doors to three separate levers and test the system. Close the door between the filling chamber and main farm area and open the door that leads to the water source. When the filling chamber is full, close the door to the water source, close the door leading to the farm, and open the door between the farm and filling chamber. The water should spread out and coat the entire farm in a thin layer of water. Then simply wait three or so years and you'll have your tower-caps, ready to cut down!
For reference, to the right is a diagram which displays the tree farm described above. Walls are light gray, floors are dark gray, and doors are white.