A few things I wanted to mention in the video but couldn't due to lack of time: * There's a bug where sometimes your farmers may think you have no seeds because a barrel is reserved by another dwarf. To counter this create two seed stockpiles - one takes seeds from anywhere and does not use barrels, the other takes seeds from the first pile and uses barrels. This way it is only reserved for as long as it takes the dwarf to walk from the first stockpile to the second stockpile. * Animal domestication is a complex topic that needs its own video, however you can buy domesticated wild animals from the elves. You may have noticed the grizzly bear I had in my cloud of guard dogs! * Animals that can be sheared like sheep regrow their fur every 300 days. You can't easily create a non-spammy work order for this, so instead manually add a repeating shear job once a year. This way you'll only get one cancellation message a year! There'll be an indepth video on the farmer's workshop coming soon. * For birds, they need to have a nest box in their pasture to lay eggs. If you want the eggs to hatch rather than be taken by dwarves the easiest way is to lock the door to their coop.
This was super helpful!! My dwarf children are always naked and I guess they end up getting depressed because of that? I didn't realize pigtails were crops for clothing for some reason lol
That's definitely part of it! Kids also tend to be overworked from all the hauling. Putting boxes of toys in taverns, temples, etc for them to play with can help, along with giving very unhappy ones some time off.
I started playing the game today and while I absolutely love the scope, I'm totally overwhelmed by the sheer number of options and factors - and farming/food supply seems to be one of the harder parts to figure out. Guides like this are very helpful, thank you.
Awesome tips! Although the floor giving off sunlight seems a little exploity. The problem I'm having right now is that I can't create a battery nest for my turkeys. I shoved a bunch of hens in a room with nest boxes, but they won't lay. But pasturing them with my other animals, with nest boxes, they do. I want to set it up so that my dwarves don't harvest the eggs, and let the gobblers fertilize them so I can get more turkeys.
@@FurtherReadingTV Initially I had the hens alone with the nest boxes because I didn't want the eggs fertilized. Now I put them with the gobblers but I think nothing is hatching because my dwarves are taking the eggs to eat.
light is a little exploity. once the square becomes "lit" it's forever lit... just how the game engine handles it. doesn't matter if you build and entire tower over the area it'll still be lit. I believe they never removed this feature as there are many worse things that can happen if entities spend too long in the dark... having a little sunlight, even fake, is helpful. you don't even have to pasture them (though that is recommended); they lay when they feel like it and will claim a nestbox on their own in any area they can reach. the males don't have to be anywhere near them, just "on the map" (different z-level is fine), alive, and willing. forbidding the nestboxes allows the birds to roost, it just keeps dwarves from messing with it or the eggs in it. or you can forbit eggs in stockpiles and turn off cooking the specific eggs you want to hatch in the kitchen. or you can lock doors (not recommended, causes issues with vermin)
For kitchen - I prefer to restrict my kitchen to only take from certain stockpiles, especially early on. This is mostly due to the labor menu only allowing you to adjust settings for stuff currently in your fort, which can lead to some annoying situations where your dwarfs cook all of your plants for a specific crop before you set the labor for them. For instance if you bring along sweet pod seeds and plump helmets for booze production, you can set the plump helmets to not be cooked right away after you embark - but you have to wait for the sweet pods until the first crop. And if you forget to do so, there's a fairly good chance your dwarves will use that first crop as food instead of booze, leaving you without seeds until you can buy them from a caravan and/or dig into the cave layer. By restricting to stockpile instead (or in addition to) using the kitchen labor menu you can get more accurate control of what's used right from the start Having multiple single tile stockpiles next to your kitchen can also help increase the variety of food produced by your cook, increasing the chance of producing something with a dwarves favorite food.
I'm a bit confused about above ground plants - specifically which ones actually spawn. My current biome is: Temperate Shrubland, Warm, Woodland, Moderate Veg, Joyous Wilds I've got a bunch of plants that I would expect - Sun Berry (from being in good), Potatos, Fisher Berries, Rat Weed, Rope Reed, etc - but there are a bunch of crops that should grow, according to the wiki, but do not - Whip Vine (from being in savage), Hide Root, Prickle Berries, and so on. IIRC an earlier embark was also fully savage, but Whip Vine could only be found in a small section that was clearly a different region (had different grass colors) - though it's possible I was mistaken about it being fully savage (on that note, is there an easy way on embark to see what regions you're embarking in? With the non-premium UI you could cycle through them along with an outline of where they appeared). Is each region limited to a certain number of all of the possible plants for a given biome? I searched a bit on google, but didn't see anything confirming , so I'm not sure if that's it or if there's something else going on. In the past when I've played I've more or less stuck to underground plants.
the bigger point about cooking plants you farm is that cooking destroys the seeds - brewing (and most other things you do with the plant assuming it's not a type of nut) does not destroy the seed. after a few years you'll find you have too many seeds... then you want to cook the seeds to add variety for your fort (more happy thoughts) note those farm plots you created are far too big even for the largest bases. creating excess farming work tends to mean more barrels needed and more workers - not more food to eat. your people can only eat so much and again variety is a thing. a few 3x3 or 2x4 works for most forts for the first few years without issue. I tend to make blocks of 4x4-1 (tell it to build the plot over an area with one of them being an un-dug area) so it's 15 total blocks. 4 of these can support 200 dwarves. make more if you want to sell meals also. the point of 15 instead of 16 tile area? fertilization. it has the best ratio for cost of potash per square for extra food yield, which means more now that underground "not in cavern" farms produce less than in Classic. ...I've played this for 14 years. good first tips ;)
Also, on seeds: feel free to cook tree seeds (apple, cherry and whatnot) as you're unable to plant those. The exceptions are the few that also can be pressed into oil (which can be used for soap)
@@elpsykoongro5379 in vanilla (unmodded), i believe olives are the only tree product that can be pressed, though it uses the fruit and not seeds directly. There will likely be mods that will have more pressable tree products, both real world plants and fantastical Vanilla seeds that can be pressed into oil are rock nuts (quarry bush), cotton, linseed, hemp and kenaf. These all need a prior step of being turned into paste at a quern or mill, then the paste can be pressed at a screw press, and the other product alongside the oil, a 'cake' can be used for cooking Kinda involved sounding process and multiple workshops required but it is pretty easy to manage once get the 3 buildings up and running and enough dwarfpower I actually used to use a mod that allowed various nuts, such as cashews, to be pressed into oil too and had totally forgotten it was modded in
When pasturing grazers, do you have to do anything different with animals that are Pets? One of my migrants brought his pet Goat and it is of course following him around the Fortress. Will it eventually get hungry? Would your advice about feeding Pets change once the Caverns are breached and moss starts to grow in at least the upper levels of the fort?
I'm not sure about pets tbh. I can't recall seeing a starved to death notification for a pet grazer at least but I've never gone out of my way to test/look that up.
Great video! Question about the war/hunting dogs guarding your stuff: I keep having kobolds steal from my trade depot. Should I create a pasture around it and put the dogs there or simply leave them around my base entrance?
I think it's generally better to keep the dogs at or around entrances, though nothing wrong with putting a few in other key locations, too I generally pasture a few cats (or other verminhunters when mods are up and running. Likely people will release various mountain/cavern themed critters like spiders or badgerdogs that will be designed to fit same roles as default animals) in places like trade depots, taverns and such. Those will often get food in them at least periodically, so vermin killing is good, plus these animals have a decent chance to spot thieves and potentially scare them off early
I've noticed that the trapping light thing doesn't work if there are two layers of floors above the plot, because I tried building it under my roofed surface barracks which has a floor, and it was considered fully underground
So, how this actually works is more like the ground "remembers" that it once had sunlight hitting it. So you gotta channel a hole first and then cover it over.
Hey FurtherReading, whats the deal with caverns sometimes having permanent mud tiles? Is it only soil tiles down there that receive this? Also, when irrigating in the caverns, will any new tiles get the permanent mud boost, or is that an initial setup thing only?
I'm not sure sorry, I've never really played around with irrigating the caverns - I usually find a nice open spot that has dense fungus growing on it and wall around it.
Main issue with underground butcher/kitchen is making sure your dwarves aren't too busy to haul its stuff after cooking. Early game maybe have a dedicated janitor work detail who only hauls food/corpses, but once you have 16+ dwarves and/or some kids running around it shouldn't be a problem.
what do I do with all these rocks around my base from the stone i've mined? even when the stockpile is ready for more rocks my dudes will not move them.
Moving rocks tends to be low priority I believe. You could try getting a bunch of wheelbarrows and your children will run around grabbing them a little faster.
never did need that. once a square is lit, it's always lit. if it has open air (or branches etc) to the top of the sky it's "outdoors", if it's blocked it's "indoors". so channel down, that square you just opened is outdoors, lit; then floor (or grate, hatch, whatever) over it and it's "indoors, lit". :)
Nope! Only grazing animals need to eat. A good rule of thumb is anything that is a herbivore in the world world _probably_ needs to eat but you're best off checking the wiki to confirm.
If it helps, there is a skill in the game called observer, which allows critters to spot hidden/sneaking things easier. Animals trained for hunting get a bonus to that skill
A few things I wanted to mention in the video but couldn't due to lack of time:
* There's a bug where sometimes your farmers may think you have no seeds because a barrel is reserved by another dwarf. To counter this create two seed stockpiles - one takes seeds from anywhere and does not use barrels, the other takes seeds from the first pile and uses barrels. This way it is only reserved for as long as it takes the dwarf to walk from the first stockpile to the second stockpile.
* Animal domestication is a complex topic that needs its own video, however you can buy domesticated wild animals from the elves. You may have noticed the grizzly bear I had in my cloud of guard dogs!
* Animals that can be sheared like sheep regrow their fur every 300 days. You can't easily create a non-spammy work order for this, so instead manually add a repeating shear job once a year. This way you'll only get one cancellation message a year! There'll be an indepth video on the farmer's workshop coming soon.
* For birds, they need to have a nest box in their pasture to lay eggs. If you want the eggs to hatch rather than be taken by dwarves the easiest way is to lock the door to their coop.
Forbidding the nest boxes is a great option too! That way you can still get eggs while hatching some chicks.
Your video had more information in 6 minutes, than most 60 minutes videos ppl do. Really like the no BS style!
This was super helpful!! My dwarf children are always naked and I guess they end up getting depressed because of that? I didn't realize pigtails were crops for clothing for some reason lol
That's definitely part of it! Kids also tend to be overworked from all the hauling. Putting boxes of toys in taverns, temples, etc for them to play with can help, along with giving very unhappy ones some time off.
as someone who never played the original DF and finding this game extremely overwhelming, these guides are very helpful :) thank you
I started playing the game today and while I absolutely love the scope, I'm totally overwhelmed by the sheer number of options and factors - and farming/food supply seems to be one of the harder parts to figure out. Guides like this are very helpful, thank you.
It's overwhelming at first, but you get better at the systems over time.
Very nice tutorials, mate - for those of among us, who never played Dwarf Fortress, these are very useful tips.
thanks for putting out these tutorial videos dude. very easy to follow and understand. keep up the great work!
Awesome tips! Although the floor giving off sunlight seems a little exploity. The problem I'm having right now is that I can't create a battery nest for my turkeys. I shoved a bunch of hens in a room with nest boxes, but they won't lay. But pasturing them with my other animals, with nest boxes, they do. I want to set it up so that my dwarves don't harvest the eggs, and let the gobblers fertilize them so I can get more turkeys.
Do you have any males in the room with them?
@@FurtherReadingTV Initially I had the hens alone with the nest boxes because I didn't want the eggs fertilized. Now I put them with the gobblers but I think nothing is hatching because my dwarves are taking the eggs to eat.
I'd imagine the floor works because light passes between the boards.
light is a little exploity. once the square becomes "lit" it's forever lit... just how the game engine handles it. doesn't matter if you build and entire tower over the area it'll still be lit. I believe they never removed this feature as there are many worse things that can happen if entities spend too long in the dark... having a little sunlight, even fake, is helpful.
you don't even have to pasture them (though that is recommended); they lay when they feel like it and will claim a nestbox on their own in any area they can reach. the males don't have to be anywhere near them, just "on the map" (different z-level is fine), alive, and willing.
forbidding the nestboxes allows the birds to roost, it just keeps dwarves from messing with it or the eggs in it. or you can forbit eggs in stockpiles and turn off cooking the specific eggs you want to hatch in the kitchen. or you can lock doors (not recommended, causes issues with vermin)
@@TheLurker1647 I do it with chickens the best way I've found is go to your stockpiles and don't allow eggs and the dwarves won't grab the eggs
that first tip..
like slabs in minecraft, lets in light, keeps out zombies :D
didn't know about floors doing this
thank you for sharing :D
This is great stuff. Played for years off and on and never knew the trick with the floors.
For kitchen - I prefer to restrict my kitchen to only take from certain stockpiles, especially early on. This is mostly due to the labor menu only allowing you to adjust settings for stuff currently in your fort, which can lead to some annoying situations where your dwarfs cook all of your plants for a specific crop before you set the labor for them. For instance if you bring along sweet pod seeds and plump helmets for booze production, you can set the plump helmets to not be cooked right away after you embark - but you have to wait for the sweet pods until the first crop. And if you forget to do so, there's a fairly good chance your dwarves will use that first crop as food instead of booze, leaving you without seeds until you can buy them from a caravan and/or dig into the cave layer.
By restricting to stockpile instead (or in addition to) using the kitchen labor menu you can get more accurate control of what's used right from the start
Having multiple single tile stockpiles next to your kitchen can also help increase the variety of food produced by your cook, increasing the chance of producing something with a dwarves favorite food.
Thanks for the great video, really appreciated! Trying to get used to the new graphics, and your videos definitely help!
These are great for refreshers, I haven't played in years
I'm a bit confused about above ground plants - specifically which ones actually spawn. My current biome is: Temperate Shrubland, Warm, Woodland, Moderate Veg, Joyous Wilds
I've got a bunch of plants that I would expect - Sun Berry (from being in good), Potatos, Fisher Berries, Rat Weed, Rope Reed, etc - but there are a bunch of crops that should grow, according to the wiki, but do not - Whip Vine (from being in savage), Hide Root, Prickle Berries, and so on. IIRC an earlier embark was also fully savage, but Whip Vine could only be found in a small section that was clearly a different region (had different grass colors) - though it's possible I was mistaken about it being fully savage (on that note, is there an easy way on embark to see what regions you're embarking in? With the non-premium UI you could cycle through them along with an outline of where they appeared).
Is each region limited to a certain number of all of the possible plants for a given biome? I searched a bit on google, but didn't see anything confirming , so I'm not sure if that's it or if there's something else going on. In the past when I've played I've more or less stuck to underground plants.
keep these tutorials up man great content! subbed :)
Thank you for this video, some great tips in here, I learned a lot!
the bigger point about cooking plants you farm is that cooking destroys the seeds - brewing (and most other things you do with the plant assuming it's not a type of nut) does not destroy the seed. after a few years you'll find you have too many seeds... then you want to cook the seeds to add variety for your fort (more happy thoughts)
note those farm plots you created are far too big even for the largest bases. creating excess farming work tends to mean more barrels needed and more workers - not more food to eat. your people can only eat so much and again variety is a thing. a few 3x3 or 2x4 works for most forts for the first few years without issue. I tend to make blocks of 4x4-1 (tell it to build the plot over an area with one of them being an un-dug area) so it's 15 total blocks. 4 of these can support 200 dwarves. make more if you want to sell meals also. the point of 15 instead of 16 tile area? fertilization. it has the best ratio for cost of potash per square for extra food yield, which means more now that underground "not in cavern" farms produce less than in Classic.
...I've played this for 14 years. good first tips ;)
Also, on seeds: feel free to cook tree seeds (apple, cherry and whatnot) as you're unable to plant those. The exceptions are the few that also can be pressed into oil (which can be used for soap)
@@kalaksed what are the ones that can be pressed?
@@elpsykoongro5379 in vanilla (unmodded), i believe olives are the only tree product that can be pressed, though it uses the fruit and not seeds directly. There will likely be mods that will have more pressable tree products, both real world plants and fantastical
Vanilla seeds that can be pressed into oil are rock nuts (quarry bush), cotton, linseed, hemp and kenaf. These all need a prior step of being turned into paste at a quern or mill, then the paste can be pressed at a screw press, and the other product alongside the oil, a 'cake' can be used for cooking
Kinda involved sounding process and multiple workshops required but it is pretty easy to manage once get the 3 buildings up and running and enough dwarfpower
I actually used to use a mod that allowed various nuts, such as cashews, to be pressed into oil too and had totally forgotten it was modded in
@@kalaksed good point; i didn't highlight that when i said "plants you farm" that you can't "farm" trees. they are naturally occurring.
Thank you for all these tutorials.
Another brilliant video. My fortress will be the best around!
Your fortress will be a fivetress!
Thanks man really good tips probably the best on yt
When pasturing grazers, do you have to do anything different with animals that are Pets? One of my migrants brought his pet Goat and it is of course following him around the Fortress. Will it eventually get hungry? Would your advice about feeding Pets change once the Caverns are breached and moss starts to grow in at least the upper levels of the fort?
I'm not sure about pets tbh. I can't recall seeing a starved to death notification for a pet grazer at least but I've never gone out of my way to test/look that up.
Great video! Question about the war/hunting dogs guarding your stuff: I keep having kobolds steal from my trade depot. Should I create a pasture around it and put the dogs there or simply leave them around my base entrance?
I think it's generally better to keep the dogs at or around entrances, though nothing wrong with putting a few in other key locations, too
I generally pasture a few cats (or other verminhunters when mods are up and running. Likely people will release various mountain/cavern themed critters like spiders or badgerdogs that will be designed to fit same roles as default animals) in places like trade depots, taverns and such. Those will often get food in them at least periodically, so vermin killing is good, plus these animals have a decent chance to spot thieves and potentially scare them off early
Those floors don‘t need to be made of glass? Even wood or stone floors are see-through and let light through?
Yup!
What's happening on the game side ie ground "remembers" if it was ever open, so whatever you put on top will always count as illuminated.
I've noticed that the trapping light thing doesn't work if there are two layers of floors above the plot, because I tried building it under my roofed surface barracks which has a floor, and it was considered fully underground
So, how this actually works is more like the ground "remembers" that it once had sunlight hitting it. So you gotta channel a hole first and then cover it over.
Thanks for the content! Really helpful stuff.
Hey FurtherReading, whats the deal with caverns sometimes having permanent mud tiles? Is it only soil tiles down there that receive this? Also, when irrigating in the caverns, will any new tiles get the permanent mud boost, or is that an initial setup thing only?
I'm not sure sorry, I've never really played around with irrigating the caverns - I usually find a nice open spot that has dense fungus growing on it and wall around it.
As an update, I just found this in the third cavarn layer in my current fort. I looked it up and it's a rare quirk with world gen apparantly.
this is good stuff, thanks man.
"Goats dont eat chicken legs... they eat grass." lmao nice
and thanks so much for these tips! very very useful
any tip on how to setup an underground butchery?
Main issue with underground butcher/kitchen is making sure your dwarves aren't too busy to haul its stuff after cooking. Early game maybe have a dedicated janitor work detail who only hauls food/corpses, but once you have 16+ dwarves and/or some kids running around it shouldn't be a problem.
another great video man, keep it up
Big help thanks. :)
I believe it's not that the floor tiles are transparent but instead the ground is only remembering if it ever had contact with sun light.
This is the correct answer from memory.
what do I do with all these rocks around my base from the stone i've mined? even when the stockpile is ready for more rocks my dudes will not move them.
Moving rocks tends to be low priority I believe. You could try getting a bunch of wheelbarrows and your children will run around grabbing them a little faster.
Grab a peasant, stick him in a craft shop and watch him transform into a legendary stone crafter.
Oh wait, you don't need glass floor blocks to have Indoor+Light anymore?
never did need that. once a square is lit, it's always lit. if it has open air (or branches etc) to the top of the sky it's "outdoors", if it's blocked it's "indoors". so channel down, that square you just opened is outdoors, lit; then floor (or grate, hatch, whatever) over it and it's "indoors, lit". :)
@@Daonitre Holy crap, for years I was mass producing glass blocks for nothing lmao
@@combeechan You mean for flavor, not for nothing.
@@masaufuku1735 👌👌👌
Can war dogs, hunting dogs, and regular dogs breed together?
I have no idea! They always have a normal dog offspring so I imagine that hunter and war animals will breed.
“To shreds you say” 😂
Where do I make nests for turkeys?
You can make them out of wood/stone at a craftdwarf's workshop; metal at a metalforge and glass at a glassmakers.
@@FurtherReadingTV thnks 😀
thanks dude preesh
will dogs and cats starve?
Nope! Only grazing animals need to eat. A good rule of thumb is anything that is a herbivore in the world world _probably_ needs to eat but you're best off checking the wiki to confirm.
How do you build a roof? You can't just dig a hole, only stairs. Can you break a ceiling somehow? Explosives? We need more details :)
You make a hole using the channel option when digging. Then you build floor tiles over the hole you made.
Sick
5:47 What did you say here? "A hunting animal is better at seeing... ???"
…better at seeing stealthy folks.
Or …stealthed folk (I know it’s not a real word)
If it helps, there is a skill in the game called observer, which allows critters to spot hidden/sneaking things easier. Animals trained for hunting get a bonus to that skill
I wondered why my animals were hungry, I was trying to feed them chicken legs
/j
Some of these tips seem more like bug exploits.
Good stuff.
how do you harvest pigtail seeds?
When they're processed for thread at a Farmer's Workshop, they give seeds.
@@eli3762 thanks, i though the only way was brew them
@@eli3762 thanks, i though the only way was brew them