Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[EnDSchultz]

Have there been any significant changes to how crops produce seeds in the latest builds? I'm trying to hop back in after a years-long hiatus and my first fort (and another fort a friend has started as well) is risking starvation because it is running out of seeds, surface and subterranean. It seems like maybe farming's been nerfed or that the skill of growers/harvesters has a bigger impact than it used to. Can anyone elucidate on this?

[Bradders]

Nothing changed to farming, far as I know.  Which crops in particular?  Seeds get produced from brewing, threshing, and milling, but not from cooking.

[PatrikLundell]

As Bradders said, cooking is the most likely culprit, as you have to manually disable cooking for each crop individually, and that's only possible when the crop is in your stocks (else it won't show up on the cooking screen). Also note that you normally want to do the same with booze, to block booze cooking.
Crops withering in the fields (typically due to the lack of a stockpile space to place harvest in) obviously won't provide any seeds, and in rare cases an unskilled farmer can fail to produce any crops from a seed. Many kinds of seeds can be cooked, but that has to be enabled manually.

[Bradders]

Urgh, yeah, the horror of accidentally cooking all of your plump helmets because of the fuckin' defaults.  Tallow, too, is a nightmare, as I usually have a cook set to repeat, and then the tallow gets used up before I remember to disable it.  Since the tallow is rendered and sitting in the kitchen, it is *always* the closest food 

You can always dig down to the caverns, exposing them causes underground soil tiles to start growing mushroom trees and all the underground crops, which can be gathered, processed and planted.

[Purdurabo]

my first fort (and another fort a friend has started as well) is risking starvation

Are you both in a biome without any trees? Just if you have any appreciable number of trees you can set an activity zone under any fruit trees with "i" set it to gathering fruit, build some stepladers and have more food than you know what to do with.

[PatrikLundell]

Gathering every herb on the surface every season will also result in gigantic amounts of food (provided the biome is suitable, of course).

[Blue_Dwarf]

Are you using any mods? Last time I heard about seed issue it was caused by being plantd out of season and dying.

[EnDSchultz]

No mods, though I was doing some cooking. I thought I was keeping it to a minimum but it's possible my damned dwarves were cooking the seeds as well. In any case, I'll bear in mind the suggestions here. Thanks for the responses, everyone.

[sivistojko]

Another way is:  don't use any farming at all. Produce some weapons and/or trap components such large serrated disks, and buy all the food from merchants. That includes intestines, fruit, cheese... Then mass produce lavish meals and you can literally never run out of food. After that, make some animal breeding programs going on for more lucrative meat and intestines, which will give even better results. There's truly no need for farming since farming produces very low value cooking ingredients. For the optimum meat industry, you would want to go with zombie meat industry but that advanced stage of the game.

[greycat]

There's truly no need for farming since farming produces very low value cooking ingredients.

Only if you stretch the definition of "need" a bit.  Your dwarves technically don't "need" booze, but it is considered essential in most fortresses.  For booze, you need plants.  For plants, you need to farm, gather or trade.

Also, you are forgetting the high value of quarry bush leaves.  Ridiculously high.