Bay 12 Games Forum

According to the stock screen I have 13 plump helmets, but the miller says there are no millable unrotten plants. Also, I can't find the plump helmets on my plants stockpile (and all other piles should have plants disabled).

Are plants "in the field" counted as plants in the stock screen? If not, where are my plump helmets and why can't they be milled?

If so, is there any way to know how many plants are ready to be processed without counting barrel contents?

Plump helmets cannot be milled. You can: eat them raw, cook them into meals, or brew them into dwarven wine. (Note that eating raw and brewing produce a spawn/seed, while cooking into a meal destroys the spawn.)

Each plant has its own uses as detailed in the wiki: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Farming

For milling edible flour, your choices are: sweet pod, cave wheat, longland grass, whip vine. Of these; whip vine flour is the most valuable, and sweet pod sugar is inefficient compared with processing plant (barrel) at a farmers workshop into dwarven syrup (5 times the yield). Your quern/millstone workshop can also be used to produce a variety of plant-based dyes and/or rock nut paste for pressing into rock nut oil.

As mentioned above, a dormitory's primary benefit is not the good thoughts it creates, but the bad thoughts it prevents!

^--- definitely true, it is not necessary at all! It is just something fun that I kind of enjoy. Masterwork serrated disks are fun too, I went through that phase myself.

Just sitting down for another play session on the challenge fort. Rock nut soap production has begun, and the plan is to build a sleeping dormitory completely out of soap that hangs from the roof of the first cavern like a yellowjacket's nest.

Quote from: FuzzyZergling on October 22, 2012, 08:51:29 pm

Quote from: vanatteveldt on October 22, 2012, 08:31:52 pm

Seeds --[Plant]-> (Plot) --[Harvest]-> Plant --[Mill/Distill/Process]-> seeds + (flour/drinks/...)
If I set to repeat, and at some point they can't find a X to process, the job will cancel, no?

That's all correct.

So... if that is all correct, how do you avoid using the manager to set 30 jobs and get tons of cancellation messages? Or do you just assume that some stock will build up and give an [R] job to work away the stock, and check every so often? Or is a good farming operation flooded with plants so all will go alright? (and how do I achieve this?)

I'll try again tonight hopefully and post a save if I still can't get it to work, I'm probably missing something silly..

Correct, you let the plants build up and then use the manager (at least this is how I do it). For example 1 lavish meal needs 4 ingredients, so you can cue up 120 process plant (bag) jobs and 30 prepare lavish meal jobs.

It is much easier (in my opinion) to store food in plant form, and then process it as-needed, rather than to store food in processed form in case you need it.

Yeah I never mess with individual bedrooms any more (except for nobles), just too much micro-management.

I get much better happiness results, for less effort, simply by putting a single quern, hatch, grate, cabinet, etc. in the dining room entrance. Then dwarfs who like those things get a happy thought every time the walk past, easy peasy!

^--- I love that you call 4,410 tiles (21*21*10) "minimalist"!

Make sure you have only the 1 beekeeper, I haven't experienced that bug myself but I read about it somewhere.

Beekeeping actually isn't bugged at all. Did you know you can press 'g' on a hive to toggle "gather hive products" on/off? If you set a certain percentage (you'll have to experiment, I think it's about 1/3) of your hives to not gather products, then your beekeeper will split these into new hives instead of wandering the map to collect wild hives.

But you're crazy if you think you can base your fortress economy around beekeeping. You will struggle to produce enough booze for even 20 dwarfs using this method. Growing plants is at least 10x more efficient!