Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  
Pages: [1] 2 3

Author Topic: Advanced food and booze  (Read 11238 times)

Psilobe

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Advanced food and booze
« on: November 28, 2011, 07:20:15 pm »

Up untill now I've based my forts survival on the basics when it comes to eating. I start a plump helmet farm and just expand when I need, a simple destillery or two for constant booze, nothing fancy. At times I butcher an animal for bones or leather and get some meat also but I wish to give my dwarfs the very best. I usually come to a point thou where I just buy all the meat, fish, cheese and booze merchants bring to complement my own production but I wish to grow my understanding of the food industry completely.

What are the simplest ways to set up the different industries and what does it require to grow differnet crops?  How do you set it up for yourself?
Logged

Loud Whispers

  • Bay Watcher
  • They said we have to aim higher, so we dug deeper.
    • View Profile
    • I APPLAUD YOU SIRRAH
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #1 on: November 28, 2011, 07:36:13 pm »

Well, you have your starting crops? Just grow different ones, and check in your (z) (kitchen) screen, and make sure you're brewing your crops (to get more seeds of course!). Also, turn off cooking unless you want to get rid of seeds.
To get more crops, (d) (p) is the command for you! Your dwarves will then proceed to gather random herbs, fruits and a myriad assortment of crops and once seeds are available, begin farming.
(Different plants can be found above ground, through trade and in caverns.).

Cooking all of your meat into at least easy meals is also a direct necessity for large forts, keeps dwarves happy and keeps food from rotting!

Broseph Stalin

  • Bay Watcher
  • Dabbling Surgeon, Proficient Butcher.
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #2 on: November 28, 2011, 07:43:24 pm »

There are two kinds of farms, above ground and underground you can grow different crops above ground than you can below. If you didn't embark with seeds don't worry just use D->P to gather plants and then begin making booze. After this you'll have seeds that can be used to grow that plant for food and booze production. Different crops grow different seasons and in different climates make sure you plan your harvests so that you don't have a massive pile of one flavor of booze that bores the pants off your dudes.

As for raising animals just get a breeding pair and let them do their thing. Raise their children to adulthood and butcher the males but leave the females to breed (you'll never need more than one male but it's good to have a spare lying around in case you have too much fun.) Large animals have to be given pastures and that leads to overcrowding and mothers kicking their babies to death not to mention the fact that some can't feed themselves and some will step on grass before they can eat it, start with birds. Then you'll just need a breeding pair and a nest box, as soon as you build the nest box the female will run over to lay eggs be ready to use T-> F to forbid them as soon as they drop because your dorfs will take them to the stockpile and they won't hatch. One thing you can't get with birds is cheese, for that you need an empty bucket and a female animal that hasn't recently been milked. Use the farmers workshop to order an animal to be milked and then have that milk made into cheese.

Fishing is easy, assign fishing to a dorf and build a fishery. They'll take care of the rest. One big plus to this industry is that it's the only way to get shells. Shells come from turtles and mussels and can be used to make various crafts and decorations.

The most important thing is to remember to create prepared meals as often as possible. Dwarfs can eat most food raw but they get better thoughts from a meal made in the kitchen and prepared meals can be an excellent commodity.

Muttonhawk

  • Bay Watcher
  • Lord-High everything else
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #3 on: November 28, 2011, 08:55:26 pm »

About five turkey hens and a gobbler pastured in a coop next to your kitchen with some nest boxes is an easy way to make more prepared meals.

When they start to get old, lock the door to the coop until a clutch is hatched and butcher any extra gobblers, starting with the oldest one.

Voila! you have a poultry industry. Where minced eggs are not pointless, but a delicacy!

The best part is, poultry feeds by filtering nutrients out of the air (ergo, they don't graze). And after a while you'll have enough eggs that you don't have to be worried about brewing all the crops.
« Last Edit: November 28, 2011, 08:58:42 pm by Muttonhawk »
Logged
How sad, imagine what they would've come up with... Booze proppelled rocket bayonets
Quote from: Dylan Moran
You know what you are? You're a beard with an idiot hanging off it.

assimilateur

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #4 on: November 29, 2011, 12:25:24 am »

but they get better thoughts from a meal made in the kitchen

It's not quite that simple. Currently, they only get thoughts about food and drink they have a preference for, a high value is not enough.
Logged

Urist Da Vinci

  • Bay Watcher
  • [NATURAL_SKILL: ENGINEER:4]
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #5 on: November 29, 2011, 01:44:26 am »

Erase your existing food stockpiles and make them like so:
- Each plant that you grow gets its own stockpile* near the still/farmer's workshop/millstone/etc.
- Alcohol stockpiles are put near the meeting area
- A prepared meals stockpile is put near the dining hall and meeting area
- Every other cookable food item (including plants that you don't grow) is put in a stockpile near the kitchen

*Each plant stockpile is sized so that you can have at most 20-25 barrels of the plant. That is about 200-250 units of plant. If you grow more plants than that, they simply wither in the fields (without producing miasma). This may seem wasteful at first, but it allows you to run farm plots at 100% without running out of barrels/pots for alcohol or other stuff. If you don't use enough plants from the stockpiles, you may run out of seeds, but that can be fixed by brewing a few plants or buying seeds from the caravan.

Your meat/egg/milk/cheese/fishing feeds into the kitchen stockpile, where it can be cooked with a variety of plant products like flour, syrup, or leaves to produce an excellent assortment of meals.

assimilateur

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #6 on: November 29, 2011, 02:10:46 am »

Each plant that you grow gets its own stockpile*

I've been stockpiling all the plants I intended to brew in a single stockpile, those to be milled in one, and those to be processed in one, but your suggestion makes probably even more sense if you want to be very economical, space-wise.

Regarding running out of seeds, perhaps forbidding a handful of seeds of each type would be the most hassle-free thing to do here. Or at least it would be for me, since I generally disable my caravans (by removing the relevant active season tags) when I'm done with migrants.
Logged

Lemunde

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #7 on: November 29, 2011, 03:00:50 am »

Take special note of sweetpods. They can't be eaten raw but they can be processed into rum, syrup or sugar. The syrup and sugar make excellent ingredients for prepared meals.

If you want to be super efficient about food, take a census of what each dwarf likes, or maybe just important dwarves like nobles. Check their thoughts and preferences, bright green area. If you find several dwarves like the same thing you might consider making an industry out of it.
Logged

assimilateur

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #8 on: November 29, 2011, 03:27:29 am »

The syrup and sugar make excellent ingredients for prepared meals.

Syrup not so much, since .31. It used to be excellent in .28 but now dwarves are fussy about using liquid ingredients for cooking, seemingly to the point where they will only use them if nothing else is available. They also can't make meals composed only of liquid ingredients anymore.

This means that in order for your syrup to get used up you'd have to produce only miniscule amounts of solid ingredients or micromanage heavily by forbidding everything solid and only unforbidding it in amounts of 1 to 3 stacks at a time. Otherwise you're going to end up with huge amounts of unused syrup.

Accordingly, I don't produce syrup anymore except for special occasions, and I'd advise anyone to do the same.


Processed quarry bushes yield 5 items per plant, similarly to barrel-processed sweetpods (but at a lower value per item), so those are probably the next best thing when aiming for stack-size and value.
« Last Edit: November 29, 2011, 03:32:12 am by assimilateur »
Logged

thegoatgod_pan

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #9 on: November 29, 2011, 03:51:09 am »

I can't believe a food industry thread hasn't brought up forgotten beasts!  The average forgotten beast (if organic and not covered in necrosis-inducing dust) is hundreds of units of meat, organs, and fat all just waiting to be made into tasty and classy roasts.  2-3 forgotten beasts will have your fort covered for years, knowing all the while you are eating a one-of-a-kind unspeakable creation.
Logged
More ridiculous than reindeer?  Where you think you supercool and is you things the girls where I honestly like I is then why are humans on their as my people or what would you?

dr_random

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #10 on: November 29, 2011, 06:04:00 am »

I can't believe a food industry thread hasn't brought up forgotten beasts!  The average forgotten beast (if organic and not covered in necrosis-inducing dust) is hundreds of units of meat, organs, and fat all just waiting to be made into tasty and classy roasts.  2-3 forgotten beasts will have your fort covered for years, knowing all the while you are eating a one-of-a-kind unspeakable creation.

Ugh, but they are big hulking things, oozing with poison and noxious materials. who would want to eat this?
Logged

Sphalerite

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
    • Drew's Robots and stuff
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #11 on: November 29, 2011, 08:44:38 am »

Syrup not so much, since .31. It used to be excellent in .28 but now dwarves are fussy about using liquid ingredients for cooking, seemingly to the point where they will only use them if nothing else is available. They also can't make meals composed only of liquid ingredients anymore.

This means that in order for your syrup to get used up you'd have to produce only miniscule amounts of solid ingredients or micromanage heavily by forbidding everything solid and only unforbidding it in amounts of 1 to 3 stacks at a time. Otherwise you're going to end up with huge amounts of unused syrup.

I keep hearing people say this, yet my dwarves are continuing to churn out syrup roasts without needing any micromanagement on my part.  I have yet to ever see piles of unusable syrup barrels either - whenever I get the message that my cooks are out of ingredients, the syrup stockpile has been emptied.
Logged
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius --- and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

zilpin

  • Bay Watcher
  • 437 forever!
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #12 on: November 29, 2011, 08:55:56 am »

I keep hearing people say this, yet my dwarves are continuing to churn out syrup roasts without needing any micromanagement on my part.  I have yet to ever see piles of unusable syrup barrels either - whenever I get the message that my cooks are out of ingredients, the syrup stockpile has been emptied.

Same here.
I've never had a problem.

Once you have a decent stockpile of food, forbid a couple barrels as a safety margin, and cook Lavish Meals.
I only ever cook Lavish.  Keeps everyone real happy.
After year 2, you should have dog meat coming out of your ears.  With a little bit of optimized farming (hint: farm plots 7 tiles big, fertilize), a single farmer, cook, and potash maker can keep even large fortresses happy & fat.

Logged

assimilateur

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #13 on: November 29, 2011, 09:32:15 am »

my dwarves are continuing to churn out syrup roasts without needing any micromanagement on my part.

I guess I'm going to have to test that again, this time more thoroughly.


I only ever cook Lavish.  Keeps everyone real happy.

If you imply that meal value results in happy thoughts directly then that is a common misconception. It used to work this way, or at least appeared to, but currently they only get thoughts about food and drink they have a preference for. I'm repeating myself now, since I said the same in this very thread.

Of course I don't expect you to take my word for it, especially after being possibly wrong about that other thing, but this is easy to test. Look for "had a fine/wonderful/legendary/whatever meal/drink" thoughts in your dwarves' profiles and compare their preferences vs what you provide. If my recent forts have been any indication, you should notice no such thoughts unless they're accompanied by a preference for something produced locally.
Logged

Psilobe

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced food and booze
« Reply #14 on: November 29, 2011, 10:06:20 am »

About five turkey hens and a gobbler pastured in a coop next to your kitchen with some nest boxes is an easy way to make more prepared meals.

When they start to get old, lock the door to the coop until a clutch is hatched and butcher any extra gobblers, starting with the oldest one.

Voila! you have a poultry industry. Where minced eggs are not pointless, but a delicacy!

The best part is, poultry feeds by filtering nutrients out of the air (ergo, they don't graze). And after a while you'll have enough eggs that you don't have to be worried about brewing all the crops.

I think I will start with this idea as this seems a good compliment to my puppy kebab special I serve to my dwarfs.
Are there any non grazing animals that gives leather?


Erase your existing food stockpiles and make them like so:
- Each plant that you grow gets its own stockpile* near the still/farmer's workshop/millstone/etc.
- Alcohol stockpiles are put near the meeting area
- A prepared meals stockpile is put near the dining hall and meeting area
- Every other cookable food item (including plants that you don't grow) is put in a stockpile near the kitchen

*Each plant stockpile is sized so that you can have at most 20-25 barrels of the plant. That is about 200-250 units of plant. If you grow more plants than that, they simply wither in the fields (without producing miasma). This may seem wasteful at first, but it allows you to run farm plots at 100% without running out of barrels/pots for alcohol or other stuff. If you don't use enough plants from the stockpiles, you may run out of seeds, but that can be fixed by brewing a few plants or buying seeds from the caravan.

Your meat/egg/milk/cheese/fishing feeds into the kitchen stockpile, where it can be cooked with a variety of plant products like flour, syrup, or leaves to produce an excellent assortment of meals.

Seems like some nice organisation ideas here that I will have to try out. Any recomendations as to what crops I should start growing for something other than dwaren wine?
Logged
Pages: [1] 2 3