Dwarf fortress how many farmers

Another option is to dig upwards from inside your fortress to try to find soil on layers above your fortress entrance. Press d-u for Upward Stairway and designate an upward stairway in an un-dug wall of your fortress, perhaps at the end of your first corridor. This, once dug, will provide your miners access to the level above your fortress entrance floor. If you dig around this new level, you may find soil. Keep digging up until you find soil.

If you accidentally breach the top of your hill and worry about invaders, build a floor tile on top of the entrance stair using the construction instructions in Chapter 7. Once you have dug out a suitable location simply place a farm plot as you would with outside farming. In Figure , I have found a corner of my world where there is enough dirt to start two small underground farm plots. The larger is set to only grow plump helmets a delicious mushroom , and the other has a mix of cave wheat, pig tails, and sweet pods, crops which can be processed into further useful goods.

If you lack suitable soil or wish to farm deep underground, you will be forced to make a rocky surface muddy before you can place your farm plots. Surfaces are made muddy by allowing water to wash across them and then leaving the water to evaporate. Using dwarven engineering and machinery, this task can be accomplished relatively painlessly, but it does require some advanced skills which we will tackle in Chapter The alternative to flood gates, levers, and mechanisms is to tell our dwarves to carry buckets of water from a water source to the area we need muddied.

When we equipped and trained our dwarves in Chapter 2 , we gave one some skill in fishing. Chances are that this dwarf has been spending time, when not otherwise engaged, wandering around the water sources on your map fishing. Instead, dwarves simply pull the fish right out of the rivers and ponds. How they do this is a mystery, but I like to imagine that they dip their dirty, food-encrusted beards into the water and simply wait for seafood to get tangled in them.

To process the fish we need to build a Fishery, which is a workshop where fish are cleaned and processed into chopped-up processed raw fish. Find a clear space handy to your food stockpiles dig out more room if you need to and then press b-w-h for Fishery it is on the second page of workshops; use the alternate scroll keys to have a look if you wish.

Place the workshop and wait for it to be built. Fish preparation tasks will be automatically added to your Fishery as required and dwarves with the Fish Cleaning labor enabled will work in the Fishery to prepare fish for cooking.

Unless migrants with the Fish Cleaning labor enabled join your fortress it is possible that your fisher dwarf will spend all their time fishing and no time cleaning and preparing the fish for cooking. The fishing labor seems to take some precedence over the cleaning labor. Fishing adds another useful food type to your fortress stockpiles and is easy if dwarf labor-intensive to gather and process.

It does come with some risk: fishing dwarves will often need to roam well beyond your fortress walls, where danger and strife await. Once you are confident that your other food production systems are running well, you may wish to consider disabling fishing and using fisher dwarves for other tasks.

Simply place a zone adjacent to the pool using i , and then press f to dedicate the zone to fishing. Press o-w-f to switch to zone-only fishing. It is possible to start the game with a dwarf who is equipped to hunt the local wildlife and some hunters are likely to turn up as migrants. Embarking with one or two dwarf hunters, along with a few dogs that can be trained to hunt, can provide not only a source of protection for your fortress but also a supply of meat and other goods to feed your dwarves.

Dwarves you want to embark with as hunters should have Ambusher set as their highest skill. They will then be given free armor and a crossbow, a quiver, and some crossbow bolts. In addition to the Ambusher skill, hunters benefit from skill in Crossbowman , Hammerman , and Wrestler , all of which will aid them on the hunt.

Once you are building your fortress, hunter dwarves will automatically pick an animal on your map and then stalk it before sneaking in for the kill. They will continue hunting as long as the Hunting labor is enabled. Raising animals for the pot is one way of feeding your dwarves, but it can be tricky to establish reliable meat-based food production. First of all, you need a good source of animals, either farm-raised or game your dwarves have hunted down. Next, you need a series of workshops and stockpiles designed to turn a beast first into meat, bones, skin, fat, and other products—and then into food and goods based on these inputs.

Fortunately, as we have seen, there are other ways to feed your fortress. If you have yet to raise numerous chickens or other animals then there is no need to follow along with these instructions at this time. Return to this section when you are ready to chop up some kittens!

Start by pressing z to pull up the Status menu. The Status menu provides a good summary of the current status of your fortress. Press enter the Animals tab is already selected and you should now see a list of creatures, their sex, their name if they are a pet , if they are owned, and their training level.

Dwarves will adopt and name some animals on their own. Except for cats. Cats choose their owners. Indeed, if the pets of an already-depressed dwarf are killed, it may push the doting owner over the edge into axe-wielding mania. Dwarves truly do live on a sanity knife-edge; hard-working one minute albeit, fueled by alcohol and mushrooms , axe murderers the next. With the animal stock tab displayed, scan the list using the cursor keys.

Creatures set to Unavailable are not the sort of critter your dwarves will adopt as a pet. Those marked Uninterested have yet to be made a pet. Any uninterested or unavailable creature can be marked for slaughter by pressing the b key. As a rule, you will want to slaughter males of a species, as you only need one of them to impregnate all the available females on the map. If you have managed to hatch and raise a few chickens, now would be a good time to have a look through all of your chickens and set all but one or two of the roosters for slaughter.

Unless you are desperate for food wait for a creature to be fully grown before slaughtering it—you will gain more resources from a mature animal than from a baby one. If you are concerned about an eventual catsplosion an endless number of pet cats breeding endless more pet cats , then you might wish to break the above rule and regularly cull the kittens filling your fortress halls.

Puppies, on other hand, eventually grow into dogs that can be productively trained to aid your hunters or soldiers, so you may want to keep dogs around. You can either set it outside close to your livestock and prevent the risk of miasma build-up, or put the butcher shop inside, perhaps in its own dedicated room where a door will keep any miasma generated inside. This will result in a Tan a hide task being automatically added once an animal with a tannable skin is butchered.

For the workshop to be built and hides to be tanned, a dwarf will need to have the Tanning labor enabled. Labors and jobs are further explained in Chapter 6. Miasma is a build up of stench and gas from rotting or spoiled plant or animal material.

Dwarves encountering miasma will experience an unhappy thought. There is no risk of miasma outside. Meat, bones, hides, and prepared organs delicious! Seed 'plantability' depends on the site biome s.

In your example save, you don't have any seeds that will grow in the biome at the top of the site. But building a farm in the woods at the bottom of the site allows planting your chicory, kaniwa, and millet seeds.

The resulting lack of mud from rain is fairly realistic, given that rainstorms generally don't convert roadways to mud. Press q and move the cursor over the farm, you will see a list of crops you can select to grow in the current season.

You can change which season is displayed by pressing a,b,c, or d. Sand is one of the many specific types of soil that can be found in Dwarf Fortress. As all sand types are soils, above ground farm plots can be built on them without need for irrigation. Yes, you can in fact grow plants in sand and sandy soil. Given about a year, you have more than enough food, as well as some lavish foodstuff to trade, provided the skill of course.

Martin Bay Watcher. If I can plant sun berries, I always run that as well. With legendary growers, I do produce too much, but I turn most of it to flour where it takes up little space and is always ready in the event I need to crank out some meals. I hate how easy it is to farm in Dwarf Fortress.

I ended up modding it to be less fruitful so you can't feed dwarves on a 5x5 farm. That's kind of ridiculous. I'm Digging Deeper You Should Too! Quote from: DennyTom on May 28, , am. I've never even used fertilizer; I always end up with food coming out my ears without it. Geoduck's graphic set : simple and compact!

Smew Bay Watcher I'll kill you with my bear face. Quote from: geoduck on May 28, , pm. Noble Digger Bay Watcher.