This is a beginner's guide to the wonderful world of dwarven agriculture in versions 0.31.x and later (also known as DF2010, DF2012 and DF2014). A few things have changed from the 0.28.x (or "40d") versions of the game, and there are frequent questions. Fear not! You too can be a farmer.
This guide was originally written for 0.31.x, but has been updated for later releases. There were no significant changes to farming in 0.34.x. Many new plants were added in 0.40.x, and it took several releases for all of them to work.
Growable crops in DF are divided into two major groups:
above-ground and
underground plants. When you embark, you can only bring along underground seeds. Above-ground seeds can be acquired by bringing above-ground fruits/leaves (in 0.40 or later) and eating/brewing them, or by gathering plants, or by trading with elven or human caravans.
Underground FarmingUnderground farming is the biggest change in DF2010. In order to farm underground, you need either
mud or underground
soil. (In 0.31.1 through 0.31.18, dry soil won't work, and you need mud. This changed in 0.31.19.)
A tile is considered "underground" if it has never been exposed to sunlight. Any tile that has ever been lit by the sun is considered "above ground" thereafter, even if you build a dozen layers of solid stone over it.
If you need to get some underground crops growing right away, and if you're playing 0.31.19 or later, you can start planting on any underground soil tiles you find. Not all embark locations will have soil (underground or otherwise), so you may not be able to do this -- in which case, you'll need mud.
IrrigationMud is created when a tile has been covered in water. Of course, your dwarves cannot work underwater, so you must either use a very small amount of water, or remove the water after the mud has been created. The process of creating muddy tiles capable of being farmed is called
irrigation.
There are several ways to irrigate underground tiles, with your imagination and resourcefulness being the only true limits. But for the purposes of this beginner's guide, we'll only discuss two of the simplest ways: flooding and bucket brigade.
Flooding is simple to understand, but carries some risks if you are not familiar with how
water works in DF. Always double-check your work before you take any irreversible steps, and have safeguards in place. Simply put, flooding is the act of moving water to wherever you want your farm to be. After that, you either move the water a second time so that it's out of your way, or you wait for it to evaporate (note: evaporation only occurs with shallow water).
One classic way to flood your farm is to dig out a large area near a murky pool, and then breach the side of the pool with a
channel. If you do it properly, the water will move from the pool to the dug-out area, and will eventually cover the entire area (including tunnels) to a uniform depth. If you calculate the amount of water in the murky pool and make an area large enough that the depth of water covering it will be
less than 2/7 then the water will eventually evaporate on its own.
If you don't want such a large area, or if you don't want to wait for slow spreading and evaporation, you could set up
two areas -- one for the farm, and then one to drain the water into after it has muddied the farm. Set up doors or
floodgates to control the flow of water from the pool to the farm to the drainage area, and open/close them as needed.
You may also use
pumps to move the water from one place to another, if you prefer not to rely on simple gravity (or if you need the water to be moved upward).
A bucket brigade is an alternative to flooding an area. It simply involves your dwarves carrying water in buckets to the farm. Unfortunately, there's no way to pour water directly onto a chosen tile, so a bucket brigade relies on tricking your dwarves into thinking they are filling a
pond. Here are the actual steps involved:
- Dig out the area where you want the farm plots to be, and dig a matching area directly above it. Each plot should be no more than 2 tiles wide, but can be as long as you like. (Make sure you're far enough underground that you aren't exposing the farm to sunlight -- that would make it an above-ground farm.)
- On the upper level, channel out the places directly above where you want each farm plot. The channeled-out squares will be designated as pond zones. A dwarf must be able to stand on a floor tile next to each channeled-out square.
- One by one, designate each channeled-out square as a separate pond zone. The exact key sequence is i (movement) Enter Enter p P f Esc (i to begin a zone designation, Enter twice to define the 1x1 rectangular zone, p P f to make it a pond, and Esc to end the designation). Do this for each channeled-out square.
- Make sure your dwarves have either a well or a designated water zone, and some buckets. They'll fill their buckets at the well or water zone, and dump them into one of the ponds.
- As soon as any pond is filled, un-designate it. The exact key sequence for this is i (movement) x X Esc.
- This results in a 1/7 water covering on each square of the lower level (directly beneath the designated well zones). Build your farm plots here.
Farm plotsOnce you have some suitable underground tiles, with no more than 1/7 depth water, you're ready to construct the actual
farm plots. Each plot can only be told to grow a single type of crop per season (and there are 4 seasons per year). So if you want 6 different crops to grow at one time, you'll need at least 6 separate plots. (Note, not all underground
crops will grow in all seasons.)
Use
b p to construct a farm plot (and the
u m h k keys to resize, and finally
Enter to place it). A dwarf with the Farming (Fields) labor enabled will come along and "build" the plot (it acts like a building). This does not require any materials.
Once the plot has been built, you can designate which seeds you want to plant in it for each season. Use
q to bring up the plot's "building" menu. Use
a b c d to switch through the seasons, and
+ - to change the crop choice for that season. If you want the field to remain fallow (unplanted) for a season, use
z. (Don't worry about fertilizer yet -- it's optional.)
Above-ground farmingTiles that have been exposed to sunlight are considered "above ground". This remains true even if you build solid constructions above them later.
Above-ground farming requires a compatible
biome. See below for details; the short version is if your surface layer has soil with bushes/trees on it, you can grow crops there. If there are no bushes/trees, you can't farm above-ground crops there.
The mechanics of creating a plot and designating crops to grow in it are largely the same as they are for underground farming. There are two key differences:
- Crops will not appear on the season list until you have some plants or seeds of that type.
- All above-ground crops can be grown in any season.
Because you cannot embark with above-ground seeds, you will need to acquire them yourself post-embark. There are at least 3 ways to do this.
The easiest way is to bring some above-ground plants at embark (in version 0.40 and later). These are considered "fruits/leaves", and will be brought in bags. Once these plants are eaten or processed (see below), you should have their seeds. This choice is not available in 0.31 or 0.34.
The second way is by gathering plants with an
herbalist (that is, a dwarf with the Plant Gathering labor enabled). Use
d p to designate an area for plant gathering. There must be visible, non-dead shrubs in the area. Higher Herbalist skill levels give you a better chance of finding plants, and of getting a larger stack of plants, from each shrub.
In 0.40 and later, there is a second type of plant gathering that involves setting up a
fruit-picking zone, rather than a one-time designation. If you do things this way, your herbalists will continually return to the zone to gather new plants as they ripen. (They will also gather fallen fruits/nuts, or pick them from trees if you provide
stepladders, but you can't use those for farming.)
Once you have plants, you need to process them in some way to produce seeds.
Cooking a plant destroys the seeds, but everything else you do to it will produce seeds. Depending on the plant, you can brew it (in a Still), or thresh it (in a Farmer's Workshop), or mill it (in a Millstone or Quern), or eat it raw. You'll get one or two seeds from each plant that is processed or eaten.
Some of the above-ground plants in 0.40 and later, when gathered by an herbalist, give you an intermediate stage product like a "strawberry plant" instead of the berries. These can be eaten, but may not produce seeds. There is an
open bug (#6940) on this issue.
Finally, you may purchase (or steal) above-ground plants and/or their seeds from elven and human caravans. This is generally far less labor-intensive than gathering them yourself, and mature plants are purchased in stacks of 5 (far better than your herbalists are likely to produce). Of course, you have to wait for traders to show up; your herbalists can usually start work immediately.
How big should I make the plots?There are many factors that determine how much food your plots will produce:
- Your Growers' skill level (when planting, not when harvesting)
- Which types of plant you use
- How efficiently you do the planting (seeds stockpiled near the plots, planters available)
- Whether you use fertilizer
A farm plot can produce 2-3 crops per season (depending on which kind of plant). Each tile that is planted will produce a stack of 1 or more plants (planter skill level and fertilizer determine the stack size). With no skill, a single tile of farm plot growing plump helmets will produce 3 plump helmets per season, which is enough to feed (and booze) 1 dwarf. With higher skill levels, that same tile can support 3 or more dwarves.
Quarry bushes (rock nuts) are 5 times as effective at producing food, since each quarry bush gets
processed into 5 meals' worth of leaves. (These have to be cooked before they can be eaten.) However, quarry bushes cannot be brewed into booze, and they can't be planted in winter. Similarly, sweet pods can be processed into dwarven syrup (instead of dwarven sugar) for a five-fold increase.
Most players don't bother with fertilizer. Fertilizer is
potash, which is created from wood, and must be reapplied each season. It takes a considerable number of trees (and dwarven labor - the trees have to be chopped down, hauled, charred into ash, then leached into potash) to continually fertilize a plot. Most fortresses overproduce food after their first year, so increasing farm plot yield per tile is rarely a huge concern. It is generally easier simply to build another plot if necessary.
A note on biomesYour embark location may encompass multiple
biomes. The only way to know this for sure is to check before embarking, during the part with the three maps. If your screen has something like
F1F2: View Biome in the lower right, then you can press those function keys to cycle through the biomes.
The important thing to note here is that above-ground farming does not work in Mountain (or Glacier) biomes. At all. Neither on muddied stone tiles, nor on naturally ocurring soil (clay) tiles. (Also, only 3 kinds of berries can grow in Tundra biomes, and those were only added in 0.40.)
Prior to version 0.31.19, this was less intrusive, because there was no soil in Mountain biomes. Now, however, you can get clay in Mountain biomes, and the clay can even have grass growing on it, which makes it difficult to tell what the underlying terrain is. The best clue you get that this clay won't support crops is the fact that
only grass appears on it -- no trees, and no shrubs. And if your animals eat that grass, it doesn't grow back.
The only kind of farming you can do in a Mountain/Glacier biome is underground farming, which will work as described above. In Tundra biomes, your above-ground plants are severely limited. In all other biomes, above-ground farming should work on soil as well as on muddied stone tiles.
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Topic: How To Farm (versions 0.31.x through 0.42.x) (Read 314793 times)