No soil, only clay D:

[Frission]

The place I embarked turns out the entire surface level is nothing but fire clay, there's no soil in sight, not even at the river. What should I do about farming? D:

[Draythix]

You'll want to dig down into the ground until you reach a cavern, and farm down there. At least, that's the only solution I know of.

[SpicyMeatball]

if you flood a room with water it creates piles of mud you can build farm plots on aka stone irrigation

[Sir Darles Charwin]

You can grow crops in any kind of clay or sand.

[Fel]

Fire clay is soil.
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Soil

[Frission]

It turns out there's a lot of white sand here too (whee) so half the time I dug plots hoping for clay and nope, sand xD I got kind of a bad zone for planting I guess!

Anyways the game itself doesn't do well about letting you know clay is valid to build plots on, it throws up a warning when you do, which is very confusing. Only once you actually just say 'fuggit, build it anyways' (and someone finally gets off their butt and builds it) do you even see you *can* grow in it. D:

[Empath demon]

or you could just read the wiki

[Fel]

Sand, clay, all non-rock stuff like that are soil, as said in the wiki page I linked earlier.

The warning for "poor soil" is because underground farm plots (not ones on the surface which don't have that warning) produce a lot less than on muddied "cavern floor" (which is rough stone floor left after digging in rock layers).
It's still enough for a budding fortress, until you can spare some dwarves to muddy a room for more proper farming.

[Frission]

Yeah, thanks, this is all well after the fact now, I already got things growing before anyone ever replied. xD Just saying what I saw at the time and why I posted this in the first place -- the game itself is confusing to people. At least most of the replies were people trying to be helpful. :3

But there's always that dismissive 'read the wiki' jerk that shows up and adds nothing to the conversation. :P That's just saying "I don't want to help and you should feel bad for asking/saying anything."

[Fel]

For complex games that have a good wiki, it is relatively common to link the related page(s) because those pages have way more informations than you would post in an answer.
You said it yourself, the game can be confusing (especially when learning the basics), the wiki happens to be one of the places that explain nearly anything you might want to know about, usually in great details and without having to wait for someone to answer.

Of course you will still get answers when posting on the forums, there are a decent amount of people that have at least decent knowledge about the game to answer.
But you will usually only get partial answers, sometimes even contradicting answers.
The best is usually to do a mix of both, wiki and forum.

[Empath demon]

Originally posted by Frission:

..., I already got things growing before anyone ever replied.
...

It sounds like you're saying it would have taken you less effort for the same result if you hadn't created this thread. Anyway, sorry for wasting your time.

[TTV.Scrumpetsheep]

Originally posted by Empath demon:

or you could just read the wiki

you could be nicer, urst.