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[Girlinhat]

Alright, here's the challenge: Sustain a fort on grazing animals and water alone.  [INVASION:OFF] is permitted (encouraged?) in order to achieve maximum number-crunching.  Bonus points if you can figure out how much grass each dwarf requires.  The idea is, you get one goat and one dwarf.  That goat grazes on ~6 tiles of grass, and produces a thing of milk, which is then made into cheese and eaten by the dwarf.  If that goat cheese is enough to keep that dwarf alive until the next milking, then that means a single dwarf can be supported by ~6 tiles of grass.

So, get grazing and figure out how much grass a dwarf needs!  Utilization of fields is ill-advised, but perhaps permitted if you only grow pigtails/seet-pods/cave-wheat or other things which cannot be eaten but can be brewed.  No plants may be cooked.  Please note if you brew these things or now when posting your results.

Butchering animals for food and cooking the tallow/other junk is allowed.  If you can reasonably sustain a society on butchered grazing animals alone, this should count towards the grass tile ratio.

[Sarudak]

I wonder how much grass density varies by biome though.

[Girlinhat]

Good point.  More details provided in any results is helpful, including biome, cavern access, amount of water on the map (rivers or murky pools) and anything else that might change the outcome.

[agatharchides]

Put in fermented mare's milk and we can have Mongol dwarves.  If I understand correctly, each dwarf needs 8 food a year and a you can milk an animal twice a year. Not so sure what the average yield per milking with a high level milker is, I've never tried it yet. One thing to note, use sheep and goats for this. You can keep 10 of them for the price of a cow or horse so it will make a huge difference.

[Di]

If I add [grazer] tag to dwarves does that count? 

[Girlinhat]

If you make dwarves into grazers, you get an asterisk on your findings.

[NW_Kohaku]

Considering how much more food you get for just slaughtering the cow than you get for milking it, milking a cow is just plain useless unless you mod cows to give milk more frequently, and having goats that eat much less grass, yet produce the same amount of milk as cows or even water buffalo just underlines the whole problem.

[Girlinhat]

Thus, Science.  Time to determine how things balance out!

[Psieye]

Wait, where is everyone getting the "can only milk an animal once every half year" figure from? I just milked each water buffalo twice over a 2 month period - it's been a "milk once per month" for a long time according to my (limited) DF2010 fort experiences.

[Girlinhat]

wiki up "milk" and compare that to the raws for cows, llamas, water-buffalo, and other milkables.  That's your timetable for milking.

[agatharchides]

If the wiki's statement that a day =1200 ticks is accurate, then an animal can be milked every 16 2/3 days.

[Girlinhat]

This is in-line with my observations as well.  BTW, filling a barrel to max with cow's milk takes FOREVER with 100 liquids per barrel.

[Hyndis]

Milk => cheese is a pretty much unlimited supply of food, assuming enough empty buckets and animals. Each animal species has a local population cap of ~50, so if left to their own devices the animals will reproduce until about 50 of each species, then no more babies will be born.

You can milk more than one animal. So if you have horses, goats, and cows then you will have ~75 milkable animals assuming you allow them to get up to max population and don't do any culling of the herds.

Lets say you milk each animal on average once per month and then you turn the milk into cheese. That gets you 900 cheese per year, or enough food for 112 dwarves.

This is completely ignoring the food you will get from butchering animals. Large animals can provide immense amounts of meat, and most likely you will be butchering all but a handful of males which means meat and also more animals to milk as the population ratios of each herd are mostly female.

[Sarudak]

Someone should do a mod to address the different milk producing capacities of different creatures.

[Girlinhat]

so, three species is 150 animals, all grazing.  How much grass is that?