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yes, eyes.
yes, zones.
errrr, you can.
yes, farmers workshop.
Sorry for brief reoply. About top head to bed..
* Hunters should be pretty obvious about it. Make sure you have crossbows and several stacks of bolts, so they don't have to do it bare-handed, then just keep an eye on them.
* What DoubleG said: there's a gathering zone. You can also use the zones to get fruit from trees, if you make some stepladders.
* Build a paved road over them. It basically just removes grass and plants.
* Doing anything other than cooking will get seeds from harvested plants: eating them raw, brewing drinks, processing, milling flour at a quern/millstone, etc.
So do you not use a kitchen then for awhile until you have seeds?
The systems in the game don't seem very intuitive.
I thought it would be interesting to try to discover how this stuff works, but the way the dwarfs fly around on screen it's really hard to tell what's going on if anything.
There's a menu that controls what your kitchens are allowed to cook (Labor menu -> Kitchen tab). It's best to disable cooking your seeds, drinks, and harvested crops there. You can enable it later if you have enough seeds around (or you can just buy more from caravans sometimes). If you're brewing or processing crops, you'll usually have some seeds left over to keep planting anyway.
The learning curve is a bit steep, so I usually recommend clicking around the wiki as needed. There's a quick-start guide[dwarffortresswiki.org] with a helpful spreadsheet, though it's kind of info-heavy if you read it all at once. The industry pages[dwarffortresswiki.org] are pretty helpful when you want to figure out how to make something.
Farming underground was nerfed severely unless you do it on cavern's soil (which means discovering a cavern and securing a portion of it first).
You can still use underground farming to sustain your starter dwarves and get things started if needed.
If you set a gathering zone you can harvest plants as well as fruits from trees.
In an area with fruit trees it gives you quite a lot of fruits, usually once a year (most of them during summer/autumn), which can be very helpful early on.
Just remember to disable the first option if you don't want your gatherer to climb on every single tree tile and just collect from the ground, it saves quite a bit of time (and doesn't require tools).
A specialized gatherer (rather than everyone doing it) will also net you a lot more plants since it's based on skill level as well.
The kitchen is primarily to turn meat/fish/egg/cheese into more valuable meals either to trade or to give positive thoughts (especially when made from a skilled cook).
It is usually something you start using when you are settled well enough to have more food than you need and enough dwarves to not delay other things by having one cook.
Of course you can use plants, seeds and even drinks to cook meals but since cooking doesn't give seeds (unlike eating raw plants or brewing them) you usually want to be a bit careful.
Fishing. I HATE fishing, with a passion. Same with hunting. Last thing I want is some random dorf wandering around outside to get eaten by a bear. But.. that being said. Hunting, the bare bones of hunting, is probably the most ludicrous and hilarious thing you can be faced with in the embark/early period. Hunters have Ambush and they sleep outside, or anywhere, don't use a bedroom unless they want to. So what you have, very early game, is an unskilled dorf following a game mechanic that even the highest skilled Hunters also can't do very well. They go off hunting, to places above ground, where no other dorfs go unless they absolutely have to, with their absolutely crappy beginner wooden crossbow and their single stack of absolutely crappy bolts, with no hunting animals with them and then try to comply with the Hunting game mechanic. This is where it gets hilarious. See, a normal animal, you can just have dorfs wander around them. But when a normal animal is "targeted" by a hunter, they swap to a "Hunted" AI. They become Alert, skittish, they randomly sprint at the slightest noise/disturbance. So the hunter also goes into "Ambush" mechanic, which means it moves REALLY slowly and tries to Sneak close to the animal, out in the open, with no cover or camoflage, So the animal, randomly, will patter around and suddenly sprint in whatever direction. And the Hunter will SLOWLY follow,, and repeat over and over again. Until some how, by the gaze of Armok, the hunter actually, finally, after MONTHS of following this animal around the entire map, gets close enough to shoot. Now, the combat mechanics of shooting, they're good. Think of the most complicated RPG you've ever even heard of and quadruple that. That's how good the combat mechanics are, they are hard coded into the game, you don't see any of it in the combat logs. So, a crappy bow, shooting a crappy bolt, by a crappy shooter, on an Alert target that can Dodge the shoot. Most of the times they miss, sometimes they hit. But the end result, especially since you can't CHOOSE the target, is the hunter has just randomly picked the closest animal after going outside. Which might be a bird, might be an elk, might even be that Giant Tortoise who, once they go into "Tucks their head into their shell"mode is well nigh unkillable with slashing piercing weapons, Even blunt piercing weapons it takes a LOT. So the animal takes, what would be the game equivalent of a pin prick on their left nostril, bleeds for a minute in game, the wound stops bleeding and the HUNT continues. And will keep continuing like this for MONTHS in game until the dorf gets hungry enough or runs out of bolts to come back inside. Most of the time it runs out of bolts. But the choice of animals can get people ROLLING.. A turkey hen, for example, which has a HUGE sprint speed and will run from just about anything. So, no, hunting is NOT something you get food from, certainly not enough to feed a fortress.
Fishing is even worse. The main part I HATE about fishing is that a Fisher that catches something, doesn't pick the fish or turtle or mussel up.. No.. they just LEAVE it on the ground for some other dorf to come along and pick it up, take it to the fish cleaning workshop, clean it and put it into the food pile. And that fish will stay there until it rots. And the rot of fish is enhanced compared to other food. So it will rot in a game day. Certainly not enough time for another dorf to come get it. So you have a dorf that stands on the edge of the water, for days on end, catches a fish, then leaves it, stands there for a couple more days, catches a fish, leaves it on top of the previously rotting fish. And repeat. And if, for some unknown reason a dorf isn't busy enough with EVERYTHING else they are also queued up to do, especially in very early game, they have to go ALL the way over to where the Fisher is, pick up the fish, and bring it all the way back, then put it into the cleaning station. And when the fisher is done fishing, does the fisher pick up the fish that are on the ground? No.. of course not.. they just leave them there and go have a beer, that all the other dorfs have been franticly working hard on getting into a barrel, making the mugs, the dining room, the farm plots, planting the seeds, getting a Water source together..
so.. the Gathering zone. Not going to beat around the bush. Don't do this. You can do this but if you don't KNOW how to do it.. don't do it. Even the people that KNOW how to do it don't do it, because it has some built in game mechanics that.. you KNOW the developers put into the game just to.. uh.. mess with your playthrough. It is FAR better to use the Plant Gathering selection next to the Woodcutter selection to gather plants. For OH so many reasons. So.
There is a tool, The Stepladder. The Stepladders ONLY function, the ONLY thing it does.. is interact with the Gathering Zone.. That's the clicky that has the .. well.. stepladder on it. If for ANY reason you feel necessary to use the Gathering zone.. don't click that stepladder and enable it. But if you DON"T know that, it STARTS you off with it enabled. And if you THINK the game will hold your hand, you are SADLY mistaken, the only time they will hold your hand is to keep you stationary long enough to punch you in the face. That stepladder is an evolution of the deliberate process of the developer's deep seated need to bring chaos and disorder to people who play the game.
So.. You have a dorf.. you .. actually even then. Ok so. The gathering zone, with the stepladder disabled is 1 Z level high. BUT, with the stepladder enabled it's actually 2 z levels high. And you can't SEE the next Z layer up. so you have NO clue what you may or may not be selecting. It's there to allow dorfs to gather stuff in trees. Seems pretty innocuous right? NO.. that's a .. it's not.. The developers not only want your dorfs to get stuck in trees and die of dehydration, the gather zone is actually CODED to force it to happen. See, what happens is.. a dorf goes out, with a stepladder, there's a clump of fruit in a tree, so.. the dorf puts the stepladder down and climbs up into the tree. So ANOTHER dorf, that wants to climb into a different tree, comes along and takes the stepladder. Leaving the first dorf in the tree. And you CAN"T place the stepladder, no.. no.. that would be too easy.. no the DORFS are the only one who can place it, it's a tool not a building. And the only time they DO place it is when there is a clump of fruit above the block where they want to place the stepladder. So, what you end up with is a Dorf stuck in a tree, congratulations you fell for it. Because the develops WANT dorfs to get stuck in trees, They WANT to punish you for letting your dorfs get stuck in trees, and you KNOW this is true because there is a whole OTHER game mechanic where the game keeps track of EVERY tree you cut down AND punishes you for cutting down too many. It's bad enough having to try to remember or record EVERY tree you cut down during the course of a game year, but you ALSO want to keep a few in reserve JUST in case stupid dorf trick # 199 occurs. See, a dorf, in fact everything, because it's the first ever Voxel game. A creature has 26 adjacent blocks. 9 below, 9 above and 8 surrounding. A dorf in a fight, either running to or from, will run up into a tree. But once they are up there THEY WON"T COME BACK DOWN. So you have to either A. cut the tree down, which means having other dorfs hang around outside, where the bad things are. B. Cause a cavern collapse UNDER the tree, which is kind of reverse logic because it will more than likely kill the dorf in the tree. OR C. go out and BUILD a damn stairwell under the dorf in the tree. Personally I usually just start building a slab... But there's even an issue with THAT.. see a dorf who is thirsty sends out a secret psychic gestalt message to all the dorf members of the gestalt. "I'm thirsty, bring me water" and so you have pretty soon ALL your dorfs out there with water buckets all over the ground, trying to give the dying dorf water, but they can't, because it's IN the tree. So you have to make mental room to deal with that mess as well, because usually, by the time you've noticed, ALL your buckets are out there.. in the open.. where the bad things are... I've done all three. they all have their plus/minus. But it gets even worse.. you see. because you have selecting things you can't actually see, they STAY selected even after you take the gathering zone away... So you will have a dorf per clump of unreachable fruit that will "bug" out because they can't reach their target. I hope I am presenting the full horror. Welcome (Twilight zone theme music) to The Gathering Zone.
You have to plant on dirt. the normal grass isn't dirt. to make it dirt you either have to pre-irrigate it by spreading water over it or channel out a section to cut the grass away and get to the dirt underneath. personally, it takes a LOT of work to keep plants going above ground. Above ground is where the bad things are.
Once you get a farm plot down, the rest of it is.. for the most part, automatic. You select what seeds you want to plant, and when. Then the dorfs do the work. The most drastic thing that will happen to you with a Farm plot is having a dorf have a temper tantrum and deconstruct the Farm Plot.
Things you will need.
1. Seed Bags. Seeds don't rot, but they will spread out everywhere. you don't need a lot but some.
2. Seeds to go into the Seed Bags.
that's it really. The seeds go into a seed bag, the seed bag goes into a seed barrel, the seed barrel goes into a food stockpile.
One key note. You get more seeds when you turn something into Drink (And Process Plants, which is the task for turning Pig Tails into Pig Tail Thread, And Mill Plants, which is the process of turning Dimple Cups into Dimple Cup dye). you don't get more seeds when you turn something into Food. If a dorf eats something raw, like Plump Helmet or Apple, they will drop the seeds where they ate the thing.
in the VAST majority of situations it's better to enable all your drinks that you have farm plotted to be used to make food. But only the ones you have farm plotted for. the rest you don't want to be cooked into food. The making into drink gives you seeds, dorfs like the drink, the drink goes into the food, you get more food that the dorfs like to eat and you still get seeds out of it. If you start running out of drink, THAT'S when you want to do a SINGLE isolated plant gathering selection burst of plant gatherings to bring in stuff to make into food and drink. Thanks for reading.
I have to try it and see if it works (I know you can make farms that way but I thought it would be the same "poor soil" as the soil layers) because caves can be a bit too much "fun" for an early fort depending on what happens to live there.
Making an underground farm in the soil layers results in a "poor soil" that divides the amount you get by 4, meaning that even a legendary planter will have troubles getting you more than 1 or 2 per tile.
https://i.imgur.com/fr9ek4B.png
..."Unlike many who have written on Gibbon, [redacted] views him as "an example of someone whose literary skills contest his scholarly method," to quote an essay [redacted] published in 1991. This vision of Gibbon's achievement--this intellectual predisposition--is the source of both the stimulating play of ideas in [redacted] new book as well as what some may see as its disconcerting trendiness. [redacted] is obviously fascinated, even "actuated" (to use Gibbon's language), by intellectual contradiction. He is naturally drawn to arguments challenging historians' supposed collective claim of "objectivity." Understandably, then, [redacted] book concentrates at least as much on the idea of truth in historical writing as it does on Gibbon and his writing. In fact, although [redacted] is an English professor who claims to examine the narrator in Gibbon's Decline and Fall, [redacted] true emphasis is clear: "We believe in the facts, we believe in the past, yet we distrust the books; we accept that there is something out there to be known, but we can only see it through constructions" (p. 20). As the last word of that sentence hints, this book should be shelved not alongside other books on Gibbon's art, but alongside contemporary works on the philosophy of history....
heh. And my mother, bless her, one summer I had to write out by hand the entire encyclopedia. One article a day for the whole summer. And take 2 years of typing in high school with another year of typing in college. When I finally escaped and joined the Army when I was 17 I could type 200 wpm, the first thing they gave me was a weapon capable of firing 800 RPM.. never looked back.