Help a DF noob keep his dwarves fed: what are the best way to guarantee a steady supply of meat/fish and alcohol?

[Mitch McHoover]

Basically title. I don't seem to have much success with animal husbandry or fishing, never getting my supply above double digits post-embark. Likewise. I seems to be producing fal less plump helmet wine than my burgeoning fortress requires,

Any tips on how to maximize production of these essentials so I can fail in more elaborate ways in the future?

[MULCH DLUX]

Food is all about logistical efficiency.

Make sure your fisherdwarf isn't having to walk 8 miles to get to the river. (Yes river, ponds will quickly be depleted of fish.)

Make sure your fisherdwarf then isn't walking another 8 miles from the river to the fish stockpile.

Likewise, with animal husbandry, make sure grazing animals have grass to graze. If you don't assign them to a pasture they will eventually starve.

Farming? Make sure your fields are fertile, or there's a good chance you'll end up out of seeds.

[LunchMouse]

Fishing is OP, make sure in embark you setup carefully to select your dwarfs skills and make sure you have one maxed out fisher dwarf. Make sure you setup the fishery as fast as possible and a quick kitchen to turn the prepared fish into meals. You'll be rolling in fish and shells for crafts.
For plump helmets, make sure your kitchen is set to NOT cook plump helmets as cooked helmets dont produce seeds to regen your farm.
Embark with a breeding pair of turkeys, forbid the first batch of eggs so they grow into more turkeys, from their cull the population of most males for meat and bones and collect all the eggs from the females and you'll never have a dwarf population go hungry.

[whit]

Make sure to go in the labor menu> kitchen and only allow plump helmet to be used for brewing and then cooked as a liquid. They can eat the raw too. But if you cook them straight up you lose the seed. A 5x5 plot (15seeds) with a good planter, should be fine for a long while. I usually bring 30-45 seeds.

You could bring a rooster and however many hens you want, then make nest boxes for the hens to lay eggs. If you want the eggs to be fertilized and to hatch, once they're laid forbid the eggs (not the nestbox)...you can pasture/pen chickens indoors without worrying about grazing. Do note, if you don't lock them in a room or something...dwarves will get there pretty quickly to pick up the eggs and move them to your stockpile.

And interestingly enough, you can make leather out of each chicken skin lol.

edit- lunchmouse beat me to it, but I'll add that turkeys take longer to mature than the chickens.

[McFuzz]

HONESTLY just gathering is enough between farming cycles. If your people start to starve, send out a gathering wave. Boom. Food.

[beetlenaut]

I "prepare carefully" on the embark and put a lot of points into food and alcohol (~100 of each). I put lots of skill points into metalworking so I can make crossbow bolts and goblets to trade for more food. It's not until midway through the second year that I need to start to start doing any work at all on making my own food. By that time, I have breeding pairs of several animals, a number of female egg-layers, and a bunch of dwarves that I can use for farming/cooking/etc.

[Mitch McHoover]

thank you for all your advice so far. further regarding food/drink, will my dwarves automatically store food and drinks in barrels, or do I have to command them to? if so, how?

[whit]

They'll automatically pick up a barrel to use at the still, in-fact they require an empty one...and they'll never fill it to capacity (which pisses me off to no end). And when you make the stockpile zones, there's a barrel icon you can adjust settings for, that allow you tell them how many barrels the stock should use.

[Straitis]

Since it seems everyone has covered fishing, I'll add my 2 cents about cooking.

Farming is a great way to have sustainable crops, however it has some quirks...

The first is that you need mud/clay/soil, can be found in the shallows normally, so near ground level. You can create your own mud, but it's a risky process for new players.

Secondly, not every labour will create seeds/spawn. More so with plump helmets, you'll want to forbid cooking with them directly, and instead make all of them into alcohol, this will produce the seeds needed to replant your Plump helmets. Luckily the resulting Alcohol can be cooked at the kitchen.

Thirdly, crops can wither and rot if not harvested quickly enough, so make sure your harvesters aren't too overloaded.

Bonus; Unlike most animals, chickens can produce their own food, meaning that they can be safely stored underground, add some nest boxes and you've got a self sustaining source of tasty eggs.

[beetlenaut]

They will automatically store food in barrels if you have empty ones, but even better are rock pots (made at a craftdwarf's workshop), which do the same thing. Wood is useful for other things and rocks are abundant.