how do I get my dwarves to plant mushrooms?

[PsychoWedge]

I have two 10 field long rows of soil and planted mushrooms, I had 200 mushrooms lying around from harvesting. But suddenly my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dwarves stopped planting new mushrooms. There were literally hundreds lying next to the soil and they didn't plant them.

Now I don't have any anymore because they got all used up for health paste after I ran out of slime. So I went a bit spelunking and found a couple. No dwarf is picking them up. At all.

And now three of my dwarves a dying because I am constantly attacked by demons and can't heal them up. How the ♥♥♥♥ do I get the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to plant shrooms? I don't understand this new system...

[archangel_war]

I had the same issue. Game breaking bug for sure. All other crops working fine except toncap mushrooms.

[Kahri]

Also, if you do get them planted, but they're in 1 tile high square (eg by the side of the elevator shaft) they'll occasionally turn red, ie indicating no dwarf can access it, when they clearly can. Some tiles will turn red, others will stay blue. I haven't been able to identify the logic behind it - well, other than that the elevator shaft has to be constructed of rail station, not simple elevator shaft.

There really needs to be a way to get the dwarves to maintain a specific stock amount of farmed items in storage for efficiencies sake, and the tooltip needs to better describe the growing and harvesting conditions.

[Da' Vane]

At the moment, you need to make sure that your Toncap Mushrooms planting jobs are of higher priority than your crafting jobs using Toncap Mushrooms, to ensure that they get replanted before being consumed.

Plants that are grown from seeds, rather than being directly planted themselves, don't have these issues, and this seems to be the way the farming will go in post-release patching according to the devs, alongside other optimisations for farming.

Also, dwarfs need a space of two tiles high to be able to reach anything, even if it looks like they could just grab something from the side that is one tile high. In addition to this, note that dwarfs only exit mine carts from stations, and thus you need a station in the route for pathfinding via elevator shafts to work successfully. The only times dwarfs interact with something not on their space is when digging/mining and building.

There are going to be several improvements to game systems, including farming, post release according to the devs, where many of these issues are going to be addressed.

Further information can be found in this thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/760650/discussions/0/3162084075875010071/

[PsychoWedge]

What do you mean planted from seeds instead of themselves?

And as I said, it worked for hours. I had hundreds of shrooms harvested and replanted. I didn't change anything with the farm. It was literally the same for all that time.


But to be honest, the AI is so bad its driving me crazy. Dwarves will literally run to the soil, harvest half the shrooms, run away and over the next 5 minutes periodically come back to harvest the rest, before they run away for 10 minutes only to come back occasionally to replant one single shroom. That is, before they completely stop...

[Da' Vane]

Many plants can be planted from seeds or spores that aren't used for anything else, so as long as you maintain a stock of seeds/spores, you will always be able to replant them. Currently, Toncap Mushrooms do not follow this model, but instead you plant Toncap Mushrooms into soil rather than using them for crafting, but because they can be planted AND used for crafting in many recipes, there's a lot of competition for Toncaps.

The process of planting and harvesting has nothing to do with the Cave Farm. These are actual jobs in the cave, like building or rummaging. It's these jobs that you need to set to a higher priority, to make sure you have a surplus for crafting, and don't end up using them up in recipes instead.

As you say, they all got used up in Mushroom Paste, so it seems that demand for Toncaps became higher than supply, and therefore your stock was depleted. This can happen when you have sudden spikes in demand - like when you suddenly need Mushroom Paste or Mushroom Stew.

The AI behaves as you describe because the harvesting and replanting are actual jobs in the cave, and therefor act like you are giving a general move or rummage order - it's goes into a list, and the dwarfs choose which job to do next in between restoring their own needs. Dwarfs tend to carry out jobs in priority, but if you aren't prioritising any jobs, then the Dwarves tend to favour the closest jobs that appear (and the oldest jobs in the list), and thus run back and forth from the soil as the crops become harvestable, and then need replanting.

From the sounds of it, the issues where the dwarves slow down and then stop planting Toncap Mushrooms seems to be that you simply started running out after a spike in usage, probably from the Mushroom Paste, particularly if you had a maintain order and lots of dwarves started needing healing.

As such, it's not a problem with the AI. Whilst you could argue that dwarfs should prioritise replanting crops over crafting, the game seems to have been running as expected for the rules that it has, and this is more down to mismanagement on your part as a player, because that's part of the game. Of course, you may have been unaware of this aspect of the game, and it could be communicated better, but none of that is really down to the AI...

That said, the devs are improving the AI and other aspects of the game all the time, getting ready for release day, and have a good post-release support plan so they can continue making improvements to the game. That means something like switching from planting Toncap Mushrooms to planting Toncap Spores is likely to end up in a future patch, which would prevent the gameplay issue you experienced, at the expense of needing a store of the seeds or spores for replanting alongside the crops themselves...

[Srekel]

Hi,

We have implemented an important change to fix the problem of using all the crops for crafting instead of for re-sowing. Now, when a dwarf harvests a crop, they will automatically resow it "for free", ensuring that you will never lose a type of crop. (Unless you remove the field, I guess.. :) ).

We are also changing it so that the cave farming is a proper job, in the same system as other jobs (like crafting or hauling). Currently it's a separate type of action, which is probably why you're seeing them abort farming jobs halfway through.

We are also adding a Maintain Amount mechanic for cave farming.

These improvements will unfortunately not make it for the release update.

Kind regards,

Anders

[PsychoWedge]

Cool, this'll make things so much better. Great work and thanks!

[Dimossa]

so how do you get spores now?