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[callisto8413]

Hello folks,

I am making a above ground settlement which has gone from a walled fort and is slowly becoming a wooden tower.  This is because a aquifer is forcing me to go up.  I am thinking about surface farm plots - but instead of having them on the surface I would like to try to make some farm plots above the surface. 

I know clay boulders can be used to make floors and walling and, can in general, but used like building material.  If I wet them will they get muddy like stone and, then, be made into farm plots?  I would hate to waste what stone I import on growing food when I need it for other things.

[thompson]

Wetting anything should cover it in mud. Just designate a pond zone above where your farm will be and start dumping water. Or you could fill a reservoir and flood the area if you need to flood a wider area.

If I am wrong, please let me know.

[Aurum System]

Constructed walls and floors don't seem to take their material in count in most cases, and since you're putting mud on the it should be fine.

[Leonidas]

. . . an aquifer is forcing me to go up.

Don't let that aquifer push you around! You can break it!

[PatrikLundell]

- As mentioned, you can break aquifers.
- Mud on just about anything muddies it which allows for farming. To muddy a floor you need to designate a pond (not pit, which is the default) on a level higher than the floor (you can't just pour it out in front of you). You can also use pumps, of course. To get the "pond" to be "filled" you need stairs to get up there and possibly floors from which to dump the water. I use single tile pond zones, both because it will generate one job per zone, and because the dorfs may keep dropping the water onto the same tile every time, rather than each tile in the zone.
- Don't build too high: DF has a quirk in that the biome changes as you get up high enough (a few levels above ground). At that height the biome is that of the world tile to the NW of the embark's world tile (which is probably a bug stemming from using 0 rather than 4 as the value for these tiles).
  Also there can be anomalies ("shears") in the sky in the form of 16*16 tile patches where the biome is different from the "normal" sky one. These shears can have any of the biomes available in the current world tile and the 8 tiles surrounding it.

[anewaname]

...  Also there can be anomalies ("shears") in the sky in the form of 16*16 tile patches where the biome is different from the "normal" sky one. These shears can have any of the biomes available in the current world tile and the 8 tiles surrounding it.

Would this sort of "farming tower" allow the growth of plants in biomes where there is no vegetation (mountains, most deserts, etc)?

[PatrikLundell]

The sky as well as shears may have biomes that allow various plants to be grown, so yes. To make use of shears you'd need to find them, e.g. with Showbiomes http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=160856.msg7194572#msg7194572.
Note that shears are random, i.e. making a copy of a world and embarking at exactly the same location in both copies does not generate the same set of shears (there might not be any). It's should be possible to hack shears in (at least it's possible to both remove all shears and to convert the sky to the own world tile biome, rather than the NW world tile one).
Also note that it's not known how to determine the biome of shears with any certainty: the method used has been to make a farm plot and see what can be grown there.
Also note that shears (and the sky) can let critters belonging to that biome into the embark, even if that biome isn't present on the ground. This is most notable when those critters are flying undead in an embark that doesn't have any reanimating parts on the ground, but you can also get critters to spawn if you provide "ground" (i.e. bridges) on the embark edges.

[callisto8413]

Thanks folks.  So I can make a farm plot on a wooden floor as long as I wet it?

[Larix]

Yep.
I've done it several times, as well as farming on green glass or steel. Once it gets wet, it muds, once it's muddy, you can construct a farm plot.

The only important consideration is that you get different biomes in the sky, as Patrik mentioned. You can have your local forest/temperate biome at, say 4 z above ground, and un-farmable mountain at 10z up. Apparently, DFHack lets you view biomes, but without it can be a bit of a nuisance when you go to the trouble of muddying your sky platform only to find out it's too high up to grow anything and you have to try again at a lower elevation.