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[greycat]

Depends on the animal.  Some of them have to eat continuously just to be able to survive.  Some can't even eat fast enough, and will always starve no matter what.

For the smaller ones that can actually survive, roaming may be OK if you have a lot of cave moss in the places they are likely to wander.  You can set up meeting zones or sculpture gardens in big mossy areas, which will tend to attract idle dwarves and other animals.

[Garath]

not a good idea. Dwarves trample all the grass and the animals may starve

[Mushroo]

Don't make your dining hall a meeting area, and you should be fine.

[bourgeo]

Great!  Thanks 

[Pinstar]

The wiki entry for Reindeers mentions that they require less grass for an animal of their size. That and their above average bone yields (antlers) makes me curious about raising them . Does anyone know the approximate grazing area needed per reindeer (or any other grazing animal for that matter) to keep them well fed, assuming the area in question isn't one being trampled by traffic (aside from the occasional dwarf coming to milk them). Do babies eat as much grass as a full grown animal?

[greycat]

List of grazing animals may be helpful.

[Snaake]

Although I've read several claims (not sure if it was by one person or several though) that sheep can survive fine on 1x7 or 1x10 pastures, so even a bit smaller than those might be enough. Note that ibexes/mountain goats both give horns too (can't be milked though, I think), as do goats (milkable) and male sheep (both milkable and shearable!), and all those have smaller pasture requirements. Wiki claims mountain goats don't give hooves, though. Reindeer are actually listed as requiring the same amount of grass as llamas, which are larger. Gazelles are listed with only 3x3 pastures, and give hooves&horn.

Out of the above, gazelles/ibex/mountain goats can only be obtained by capturing from the wild, or buying from the elves. I just realized what the wikis sentence "unclaimed tame <grazers> require a pasture to survive" might enable: if the GRAZER tag indeed only kicks in on tame animals, you could just capture wild animals with cage traps, then pit them into pens and keep them wild. Or can wild animals be chained from cages? If so, chain up your breeding pair, and set up cage traps to catch any children, and slaughter them out of the cages once they're full-grown.

[Garath]

don't know if this topic is right for questions about grazers, but in any case:

Yes, you can capture wild grazers and give them their own enclosure (pit them to make sure they don't spook anyone, they usually survive the drop) where they won't need to graze, since they're not tame and owned by you (tame elven or human owned creatures don't need to graze). They may even breed, though previously that required the removal of the _EXOTIC part from their [PET] tag. They usually don't breed because they don't stay on the map long enough. You could even use this to increase the number of wild animals in the region by doing a 'capture, breed and release' program

[callisto8413]

One of my older upper levels is starting to grow cave moss and stuff.  I decided to dig out some of the walls and let it grow to make an inside pasture to move in my small herd of sheep - about four adults and as many lambs.  Is that doable?   I know some animals are so big they eat and eat and still die.  But the sheep seem to work just fine outside in small pastures - and their milk and wool is great.  Working better than my hives, to be honest.

[Imp]

Underground 'grasses' are just like aboveground grasses for grazing purposes.

Your grazers will need the same amount of pasture to survive below as they did above.

[Zarnium]

How do I tell exactly whether my farm plots are producing food or not? My dwarves are all hungry even though I've set the plot to produce plump helmets every season. The farms show wavy lines, which means nothing is planted, right?

(Though I think they may also be starving because I turned all their food into booze. Oops.)

EDIT: Woops, I meant to put this in the "DF 2012v0.34 question and answer thread." Oh well, it's probably still ok here.

[JAFANZ]

If you have a bookkeeper set to sufficient precision (& with enough office assigned), you can track your seeds, plants drinks & meals.

If you have too much booze, & need food, enable cooking  of plump helmet seeds (if you've been growing & brewing you should have plenty) & Dwarven Wine, but disable all other solid foods. ensure your plump helmet seed bag(/s) is(/are) further away from your kitchen than your booze stockpile (or just create a temporary food stockpile that only accepts from links it does have, put a garbage zone over it, then dump a bunch of plum helmet seeds on it).

Then instruct you cook to make Easy Meals, you want lots of stacks rather than large ones (probably a few more than you have dwarves).

IME seeds are never stacked, so each seed in a meal is a stack of 1 (so if they don't use booze, you'll get 2 biscuits), add booze & you might turn a given stack into 26 (as such I have been known to identify & forbid the barrels/pots with larger booze stacks until I can use them in roasts), just be sure you specify how many biscuits you want.

A stack of Seed/Wine biscuits is unlikely to ever be valuable enough to impress a dwarf who doesn't have a preference for wine (IMO), but you should have plenty of food stacks of sufficient size to be going on with for a couple of seasons, by which time you'll hopefully have set yourself up to make huge roast stacks of valuable materials intended to give happy thoughts, & buy out entire merchant caravans. (as a bonus, biscuits means your chef trains a bit faster).

[greycat]

How do I tell exactly whether my farm plots are producing food or not?

A farm plot tile that has a seed planted in it changes its appearance (straight horizontal lines, if you're in the ASCII tileset).  You can also t the plot to see its "contents", which will show you all the seeds currently planted there.

[Nikita]

Here's a question: I'm not really a fan of 200 seed cap coupled with seeds always going into 100-seed bags, as it means I can have at most two such bags. Is there a way to stockpile seeds individually / make them not use bags / change bag size / change seed cap?

[greycat]

Here's a question: I'm not really a fan of 200 seed cap coupled with seeds always going into 100-seed bags, as it means I can have at most two such bags. Is there a way to stockpile seeds individually / make them not use bags / change bag size / change seed cap?

The seed caps can be changed in d_init.txt in 0.40.* (but not in earlier versions, as far as I know).

There is no way to prevent bags being used, if bags exist.  Dwarves will happily stockpile 1 seed per tile if your fortress has no bags, but that will restrict some of the things you can make (no dye, flour, quarry bush leaves, sugar, sand, glass, etc.).