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[Dynastia]

So far every fort I've done has had a massive surfeit of food, despite never embarking with any, and never fishing, hunting, farming (except for plants marked for brewing-only), or breeding livestock specifically for meat, milk or eggs. I've easily gone 5+ years with huge populations living off nothing but the two embark animals, the stray livestock the migrants bring with them, and the badgers and macaques that get killed by caravan guards and my perimeter traps.

So, barring any catastrophe to strike one's food stockpiles, I'm asking if anybody has ever had the slightest problem keeping their fort fed?

[Ninjamestari]

Well I haven't had any problems with that. But meat alone doesn't seem to be enough for my forts. I always grow some plump helmets for cooking too.

[plynxis]

feeding them isnt troublesome if your macromanagement is decent. the issue is happiness sometimes and industry. eating the same stuff all the time can bring their mood down (fixed with a few nice statues and a big meeting/dining hall) and often food manufacturing can yield a significant surplus (even with 200+ dwarves) giving you the capability to use food both as sustenance and an export product, though i prefer a bone industry (and selling goblin shirts) since the items have higher value and are much lighter, so you can easily give away huge amounts to traders, whereas barrels tend to be heavy so you cant trade as much (or you have to buy stuff thats heavy that you might not need).

on the other hand, try embarking on barren/freezing/evil biomes - its much harder to get food there and it becomes important to set up a big surplus.

[Brackev]

I've had dwarves that had so much to do that they skipped lunch and died from hunger.  I had food and farms growing stuff.

[Masta Crouton]

for me, dwarves usually starve after some kind of accident, where they fall into a chasm/off a waterfall, and fall into some random place.

[Malarauko]

I had a fort in a rocky place with no water and no mud. That starved to death. This was one of my pre forts when I still had no idea wtf I was doing.

[crekit]

The kobalds have.

On topic... No, and I usually don't set up farms till I have like 50-80 dorfs. My projects are more important than you having food, dorfs!

Although I ALMOST did when I tried to trade a (wooden) bin of stonecraft to the elves for a crapton of food. (I practiced setting designations for mass dorf drinking from river zones after that.)

[thegoatgod_pan]

I've had dwarves starve early on after starting playing, but usually you see thirst-related deaths (especially in all the construction accidents), feeding is made easier by pets and the "hunting vermin" alert, to let you know when things got dire.

[sirdanilot]

I never really do anything specifically for food. I just farm a lot of plants, and my dwarfs feed mainly off the plants that aren't used to brew booze. Other food sources include eggs (once you have some poultry going, they really produce LOTS of them), meat from badgers/rhesus macaques, and butchered pets. If my embark has a good fishing spot, there'll also be a crapton of fish. All in all, food is hardly ever the problem. This is why I never bother with mills and flour, and only once bothered with beekeeping (just for the novelty).

[KtosoX]

Dwarfs die to starvation all the time. Just check the legends...

But srsly, any embark supplies + 2 wagon animals + plant gathering will easily keep you going for a year at least. Is there anyway of increasing how much food my dwarfs eat, or is it hard coded?

[ohgoditburns]

I've had trouble with food before. I tend to run my food industry only on imports, so when the population starts to get really high, the food supply starts to dip.

When that happens, I need to emergency gather plants, butcher livestock, and hunt.

It's pretty easy to avoid, but a little FUN to do things the hard way.

[Tharwen]

No, I haven't because I always have a decent buffer zone of animals to slaughter.

However, I've lost fortresses to thirst before simply because I forgot to make any farms and I embarked on a desert/evil region with deadly skeletal camels patrolling the lakes.

[FoiledFencer]

I had a fort succumb to starvation (or rather, tantrum spiral caused by famine). It was a glacier-fort. Self-imposed challenge. No running water and no soil. Hence, farming and animal husbandry could only be done in the caves.

[Starver]

So, barring any catastrophe to strike one's food stockpiles, I'm asking if anybody has ever had the slightest problem keeping their fort fed?

I chose my screen-name on these forums for a reason.  I've gotten a whole lot better at the whole process, since then, though.


(It all changed when I embarked upon a particularly water-logged area with a total of three rock tiles that were diggable into without breaching an aquifer[1], but a ton of loam and soil layers above.  With nothing much more to do (yes, I tried punching through, pumping out where I was, etc, but I was also less experienced in all of that!) I tried farming again, and this time I understood it!  Since then, I only really have problems when my megaproject plans and OCD-inspired strict fortress layout cause me to ignore for too long the food and drink needs of my little guys.)


[1] That final count came removing 90% of the bottom layer of 'dry' soil on the various Z-layers I could reach without creating any further water-filled channels.  I recall that I was fairly thorough.  There was some 'topology' to the aquifer's top-layer, so I had been hopeful that I could get in underneath some other layers, but all I ended up doing in the end was flooding various mine-workings when I tentatively dug into soil that I thought might be only damp-by-association.  These days, I'd probably get through without even getting anybody's feet wet.

[Frogwarrior]

I have about ten thousand roasts in my stockpiles.




Yeah.