Vittles! : A guide to Food and Drink
Author: Fedor Andreev
This guide is designed for placement on the wiki ... after it gets some much-needed feedback and polishing here!
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Each dwarf in your fortress consumes approximately 10 units of food and 20 of drink per year. If you don't provide them, they will work more slowly, become unhappy, desperately search for vermin, go on howling rampages, and shuffle off this mortal coil. This guide assumes you know something about farming (advice on which can be found <<link>> ) and want to optimize how you feed and liquor up your dwarves.
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== Stockpiles and Haulage ==
=== Stockpiles ===
Vittles production requires stockpiles; food rots quickly on the ground. Efficient vittles production requires that you pay attention to setting up carefully-positioned stockpiles for specific item classes. No other part of the game better rewards attention to getting stockpiles right. This guide will therefore talk about exactly what kinds of stockpile a specific process takes from and to.
=== Food Haulage ===
You must shift food quickly. Not only will it rot if you don't, but you'll notice workers walking halfway across the fortress to get that seed or drink if it's not where it should be. A mature fortress should have a small (~ 5% of the total population) number of Food Hauler dwarves dedicated to that job; other haulers should not handle food except when needed (clearing the trade depot, when you notice stuff accumulating, if you're doing a lot of butchering). The Dwarf Foreman utility <<link>> is *extremely helpful* for haulage; no player should be without it!
Efficiency is vital; you can turn a blundering operation into a lean, mean vittles machine with even a little attention to how your little guys eat, drink, and move about. This guide will offer tips on how to become a more efficient provider.
=== Shifting food ===
Most items in stockpiles can be shifted simply by undesignating that stockpile and setting up another place that accepts them. Food may rot if you do this, so it is better to keep the existing stockpile, set it to accept nothing, and tell another stockpile to take from it.
=== Prevent rotting trick ===
There are some awfully messy dwarves out there, dwarves that leave food in the corridors, in their rooms, and on their beds ... no doubt they'd leave oderiferous offerings to the TV if they knew what one was. Set up a temporary stockpile to prevent spoilation.
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== Food: Agriculture ==
Agriculture provides the great majority of food and drink for most fortresses because it provides unlimited quantities of both, using less labor than any other method except trade.
Here we see the food-growing area of a mature fortress. It feeds about 150 dwarves (there are actually more in the fortress but some food is gotten through other means). The room is irrigated by a channel and floodgate system extending east from the cave river. Seeds are immediately adjacent to the growing crops (water can't hurt them), and overflow stockpiles to accept plants are also nearby. Some workers, all of whom are cross-trained (more on this in the labor management section) are planting. Five of the six possible crops - plump helmets, cave wheat, pig tails, sweet pods, and quarry bushes - are being grown.
=== The agricultural cycle ===
Once you have mud to plant crops on, you should set up several farm plots ... several as opposed to one, for flexibility in cropping. A young fortress should set up as much growing space as the farmers can readily handle, but a mature fortress with experienced workers and a stable population can easily provide food and drink for a dwarf from half a grid of land.
The agricultural year goes as follows:
1) First spring planting. Farmers should be planting; don't distract them with other jobs - get the plots filled.
2) Growing. If planting is done quickly, farmers can profitably be assigned to other jobs.
3) First spring harvest/replanting of plump helmets. Plump helmets bloom first and can be cleared and that plot replanted just in time for...
4) Spring harvest/replanting of sweet pods and quarry bushes. If you're short on time before the end of the period these can be grown (end summer for sweet pods, end autumn for quarry bushes) and you have at least a month available, you can change over to faster-growing plump helmets and get in an extra crop.
4) Second spring harvest/replanting of plump helmets. Only with the greatest efficiency can you get in a third crop in a season, but your farmers will try...
5) (follow-up harvests/replantings)
6) Summer. All crops disappear, except if the plot is planting the same thing next season. Always keep the season change in mind!
7) Summer proceeds similarily to spring, except that you can now plant pig tails and cave wheat. Of the two, pig tails grow more quickly (just as quickly as plump helmets) and so you can get in quite a lot more crops of them on the same amount of soil.
Autumn. All crops disappear, except if the plot is planting the same thing next season.
9) Autumn proceeds similarily to spring and summer, except that you cannot grow sweet pods. There's nothing you can do to stop any left-over sweet pods disappearing at the end of summer.
10) Winter. The plot and every crop in it vanishes. You must wait a minimum of four months (winter, plus the time needed for a first crop of plump helmets) before you'll get anything else from agriculture. Prepare well ... or have a backup plan.
=== Farmers ==
Farming happens in bursts: It's either "All hands to plant or harvest!" or "No work for you, farmer!". Farmers left to idle too long often start parties, which ties them up for something like two weeks, often right when you need them most. For these reasons, it's an excellent idea to:
* Give each farmer a second job in food haulage, brewing, cooking, butchery, or some such,
* Assign each agricultural worker a custom title (such as "Farmer Brewer" or "Farmer Hauler"), and
* Use Dwarf Foreman to quickly shift dwarves between tasks to keep them busy.
This will let you do more work with fewer dwarves than you ever could before.
=== Crops ===
Growing diverse crops gets you diverse food and drink ... and happier dwarves. They also let you keep more seeds (there's a 200-unit limit for each kind) and offer protection from something preventing you from growing enough of a particular crop. Each of the five consumable crops has a valid place in the agriculture of a mature fortress. This section assumes that you've read the wiki on crops.
Plump Helmets are the young fortress's best friend, as they provide abundent food and dwarven wine with little effort. Their short growing time allows you to get in more crops and the fact that you can grow them all year means more harvests and less end-of-season loss. Unlike other crops, plump helmets can be eaten straight from the fields. This is both good and bad: Good because you need to remember to do less to get food quickly on the table, bad both because your dwarves will eat them before you have a chance to multiply them through food processing and because they leave seeds when eaten, which chews up hauler time. Also, if you both produce prepared meals and grow plump helmets, many dwarves will snack on the latter, missing out on opportunities to become happy through eating high-quality food. Plump helmets can always be afforded by poor dwarves (this only applies when the dwarven economy is active) and take up a fair amount of space in your stockpiles.
Pig Tails are primarily grown for cloth, but can also be brewed into dwarven ale. They cannot be planted in spring, but are quick growers (as quick as plump helmets) so you're looking at a lot of booze with no food/seed complications. Some players actually produce liquor from nothing but pig tails for just this reason.
Cave Wheat is (as noted by the wiki) the least productive of the five food crops: it grows slowly, can only be planted in summer and autumn, and cannot be eaten raw. Cave wheat can be turned into dwarven flour at a mill, but this doesn't yield much food value (only one flour for one plant, as opposed to the five-for-one ratio common to other processing). A better use for this crop is to brew it into dwarven beer, a drink some dwarves prefer to any other.
Sweet Pods have a two-seasion growing period and a long growing time, so they're not suitable for a primary crop. Each sweet pod yield five units of dwarven syrup (handy in cooking) when processed to barrel in a farmer's workshop and five units of dwarven rum when brewed at a still.
Quarry Bushes are many well-established fortresses' primary source of food: Although inedible raw, processing to bag in a farmer's workshop yields large bunches of leaves which stack well in barrels and produce enormous meals. In order to start planting quarry bushes, you have to first gather some from inside the cave and then use a farmer's workshop to recover their seeds (known as rock nuts). Of the food crops, quarry bushes and sweet pods get you maximal food and minimal seed hauling troubles.
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== Food : All other sources ==
=== Fishing ===
Fishing is a minor source of food in most fortresses, but it does add variety to the Dwarven diet and is a helpful source of both bones and shells. If you run out and somebody starts screaming for them, your fisherdwarves may be your best resource.
Fisherdwarves will walk to a outside river, outside lake, or cave river location that has not yet been fished out and catch fish - hopefully got getting caught in a flood meantimes. He will then take the fish to a stockpile that accepts raw fish. A Fishery is needed to convert all kinds of water creatures except turtles into edible food. It takes from the raw fish stockpile; food haulers must then shift the product to an edible fish stockpile. All of this is inefficient; don't rely on fishing for your main food supply in a large fortress.
=== Gathering ===
On maps with enough herbs, Gathering makes it possible to build up a stock of food and drink well before you can harvest anything. Once you set up farms its importance drops off, but there are a number of good reasons for keeping some trained herbalists around throughout the game:
* If you ever run low on food, skilled (or numerous) herbalists can sometimes stave off starvation. You can often gather in winter and early spring for a helpful boost to depleted stocks.
* Herbs add variety to the diet and, when brewed, new and interesting intoxicants for that extra boost to happiness.
* You cannot bring quarry bushes with you; you have to gather them from inside the cave.
* If you run low on seeds (which can happen if you cook too many) gathering will get you more plants that contain them.
* Certain salves and elixirs require rare herbs. They have no effect as of version 0.23.130.23a but they will at some point.
A herbalist will walk to a scrub designated as gatherable, attempt to pick it, and if successful bring the resulting plant to a stockpile that accepts it (if no such stockpile exists, the plant is left on the ground). This can involve a lot of walking about but you can set up temporary stockpiles near active gathering areas, then later use the "take from" command to bring them to the central plant stockpile.
=== Hunting ===
Hunting is a good way to get dwarves killed. A hunter will charge for (or not run away from quickly enough from) anything, which means that, if a creature or pack of creatures exists, a hunter is going to get in its way, alone, sooner or later. Only the most well-equipped and skilled hunters can reliably survive a fight with a carnivore or large herbivore.
A hunter will walk outside, wander about until he finds something to kill (a hunting dog makes him find things faster), and fight it. If he wins, he leaves the dead animal on the ground for a Refuse hauler to drag to a stockpile that accepts corpses (assuming you permit outside refuse to be picked up). The corpse will rot quickly if not butchered.
You can make a hunter live longer by first training him up a bit in his chosen weapon (a crossbow is often a good choice because it may stop an animal from getting to grips) and by providing the best possible leather, bone, and shell armor - all of which a hunter will equip.
=== Raising livestock ===
Raising livestock is a much safer way to get meat, skins, and bones; many fortress rely on self-sustaining populations of cows, horses, dogs, cats, and even tame elephants to supplement the dwarven diet (especially during winter) and provide valuable raw materials.
Animals not kept in cages wander the fortress (if you set doors to be tightly closed, you may be able to restrict them to a room). Loose animals add to the obstacles a moving dwarf has to navigate around or crawl under, sometimes make the animal available as a pet, and impose a significant CPU load. Caging animals prevents all of this, but (we're guessing here - other, unknown, factors may instead be responsible) sometimes triggers a game bug - livestock stops reproducing altogether. The so-called "do not breed flag" is (we think...) reset either when the human caravan brings new animals or you remove them from the cages they came in.
Livestock is turned into food only through butchery (except for milkable Purring Maggots). The animal must be released from its cage (if any) and set to be butcherable through either the "animals" section of the overall status screen ('z' command), or if this is unavailable, through the unit list. A butcher will then grab it, haul it to a butcher's shop, and hack it up.
This yields meat, chunks, bones, a skull, and a skin, all of which need to be hauled to stockpiles accepting them. Note that meat is only one item; it is not necessary to place your butchers' shops near the central food processing area. Better to place them near the livestock, a pile of corpses, or a place where skins or bones are used. Because still-innocent dwarves dislike the sight of death, and because a butcher's shop tends to generate miasma, it's a good idea to place them in a separate room behind doors.
=== Trade ===
Many a fortress has been saved by merchants bringing food. Through trade, especially with the humans, you can supplement your stocks and add variety to your cuisine with food and drink your dwarves cannot produce themselves. And it's all very reasonably priced.
There is only one tricky bit about trading for food: Once bought, it will rot at the depot unless you shift it right away. Use the Dwarf Foreman utility to assign all of your haulers to nothing but food until everything is safely out of the depot. Nothing's more embarrasing than to see a huge miasma cloud around the trading post...
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== Meat and Drink: Preparation and serving ==
=== Layout (specific example, general commentary) ===
Here we see the food processing center and the dining hall of the same fortress shown in the first picture. Just as the crops are near the seeds, so the plant stockpiles are near the crops and also near the food processing workshops, which are near the processed food storage, which is near the main meal depot, which is on a clear path to the Great Hall, which is not too terribly far away from where most dwarves work. Barrels and bags are both stockpiled nearby.
=== Labor management ===
The dwarves who do the planting and harvesting should also do the food preparation. Why? These activities are close together, farmers need to be kept occupied, and redundancy and cross-training means you don't face disaster if you lose a couple of skilled workers. With these methods, and with a reasonably efficient layout, you can expect between 4 and 8 percent of your dwarves to provide all your food and drink other than that gotten through trade.
When you've run out of things for them to do or you want to swap out a couple of dwarves to build up a reserve of skilled workers, training with siege weapons, engraving, helping to haul food, or learning a valuable trade skill in hopes of getting a strange mood will all stop them from going to too many parties.
=== The kitchen screen ===
The kitchen sub-screen of the fortress status window ('z' command) is where you check to make sure that you're not cooking away all your seeds, that you do have enough cookables to keep the meals coming, and lets you keep tabs on the meat and drink.
=== Stockpiles and you ===
Setting up stockpiles correctly makes all the difference to work efficiency. For example, if you want to barrel sweet pods, you'll want to have a plant stockpile (including sweet pods), a barrel stockpile, and a dwarven syrup stockpile nearby. Actually, you don't really need a dwarven syrup stockpile; the stuff doesn't spoil if you just let it sit in the workshop. Watch your dwarves. Are they running from the brewery to Timbuktoo to get a job done? What's far away and needs to be brought closer?
Some stockpiles work better if you disallow containers. If you do this to the prepared meals stockpile, not only do you save all the haulage needed to constantly add and remove barrels, it's much easier to notice when you're running short.
=== Where to eat and drink? ===
Dwarves eat and drink ... and walk an awful lot to do both.
To eat, a dwarf will first claim a preferred meal or edible item, then walk over to pick it up, then take it to a chair within a designated dining hall which he is allowed to use. Hopefully that chair has an empty table beside it, because the dwarf will sit at the first place he finds. You therefore want to place food between the place most dwaves are (the fortress "center of density") and the dining hall, and see them pick up the food on a reasonably straight path to the tables.
To drink, a dwarf walks to a barrel containing a preferred booze, or a non-preferred booze, or a well, or either the cave or outside river, in descending order of preference. Distance is factored in but its importance is unknown. So, the wise Master Tippler will inspire his little chug-a-lugs to place their main liquor stockpile in a wide open space, safe from obvious dangers, with lots of walk space, as near to the fortress center of density as practicable. If drinking from a barrel, the dwarf will grab it, upend it over his mouth, liquor up, and go on his (rather more merry) way. It is wise to have more than enough barrels for all dwarves who want a drink.
Dwarves are mighty picky little guys. They often insist upon eating far away, despite food and a dining hall being available much closer. They have been known to starve rather than eat if what they want is locked away. Therefore, in the current version of the game, setting up more than one dining hall or secondary food stockpiles is often counterproductive. Dwarves are a little less like Rum Tum Tugger cats when it comes to booze, so setting up secondary stockpiles and having them take from the main depot does work. In fact, doing so can work wonders for efficiency.
