These videos are really good! Slowly getting myself familiarised with the basics and approaching complex topics as they become relevant, so this is perfect.
This is so useful. I learned a lot more in this 24 minutes than I have been by messing around and referencing the wiki occasionally for the past week or so
tip ive learned, after you get your first wave of migrants, imediately make your planter the only one who does planting youll have a legendary planter in no time do this again with a new planter around 50 or 75 dwarves or earlier if you want to get a head start and again at maby 150 (I dont make my fortresses that large so I dont know for sure) that way you get maximum yield for your crops all the time and make sure not to put them into the military
Love these videos. You, Twisted Logic, and Blind have been so helpful for me getting back into DF after a long hiatus from it. Legit have to find like a life coach or something for this "losing is fun" concept though. Losing is never fun to me, and I really don't understand how people put hours into a fortress, lose it because of something stupid, and manage to have the experience soured in their minds. Guess I'm a sore loser but I'm sure I'm not the only one who has trouble with that whole thing
Thanks for your kind words! Regarding "Losing is fun" - if some events are strongly against your liking, you can always return to your last save file. Just up the rate of autosaves and you can save scum quite decently in this game. Especially sandbox gaming should always be fun for the player - so feel free to tweak it to your own liking!
I just recently got into df when it released on steam and after maybe 7 or 8 forts my last fort was the one that finally got my brain to click with the whole losing is fun mindset. I had just gone into the caverns and begun to establish a guard patrol in the area to keep monsters away. My entire guard squad decided to take a nap right when a blind cave ogre wandered by the one area that hadn't been walled off yet and found his way into the fort. The first room it entered was my barracks with my sleeping guards. All of them were nearly immediately massacred and without their protection the ogre wandered through my fort killing every one except for 2 of my dwarves who promptly went insane from miasma and tried to kill eachother. I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it all.
Food in barrels won't spoil. Anything that's not stored in a barrel will eventually turn rotten and create miasma that dwarfs dislike. A good cook can make high quality meals that make dwarfs happy and can sell for high amounts with caravans
So a thing I have been wondering about. Now we don't have a If x >= too number to allow use of things into example cooking, because cooking destroys the seeds. And other processes also uses up seeds. So my wondering is, if we link a Seed storage with only the seed used for that specific farm. Then we need 1 square, for a bag of 100 seeds. If we then make a Cook/Mill/Press Seed storage with all of the different seeds. The biggest question here becomes then: Will they fill up the Farm's Seed storage first, or start to put them in the processing seed storage. Since we have a limit of 200 seeds of each kind. Having these linked storages could act as a "Do not use unless in the other storage" allowing for up to 100 of them to be used for other things than just farming. Though I can be 100% wrong, since Dwarf Fortress is, well Dwarf Fortress
On the kitchen screen, how are you getting the ingredients to seperate out into different tabs like that? I'm assuming it's a mod, but I can't seem to find anything like that in the workshop.
I've hit a problem with food production that has almost made the game unplayable as I'm spending all my time trying to manage this problem dwarves are leaving food at the kitchen station to rot and when they do store it in a food stockpile do they rarely put the stuff in an a barrel.
I'm quite new in the game. Is all the food and drink shown in stats edible and drinkable? Cause when my colony reached size of 180 or so, they started dying from dehydration like flies. Which is quite problematic as it leads to need of engraving many slabs which is very inconvenient or ghost destroying colony. Also I overproduced food and fish having enough fish to support base for next 20 years likely. But they seemed to have always 100-200 units of dring. But no mugs and maybe not functional tavern. I'm sort of looking for guide how to deal with exponential growth, cause supplying nearly 200 dwarfs with food, drink, items, clothes seems impossible. They were happy when there was 70 of them, but soon it reached some tipping point where everything went wrong. And I don't even know what exactly went wrong and what to fix: dying from dehytration literally 20 tiles from functional well, many fights, many corpses, skeletons, teeth, clothes lying around, ghost apocalypse cause after building 70 graves, engravings are nearly impossible to manage. Also there are guides for many things. But I haven't seen a guide what are priorities after mass producing barrels, thrones/chairs, chest/coffers, tables, door, bins, processing fish and plumb helmets in still. Because next comes tavern, temple (i guess), brooker and manager offfices. I have no idea when i need army, hospital, steel production, kiln, glass/clay production, farmer's shop, bees, ... there are overwhelming possibilities. I guess rimworld is more simple, cause game gives better feedback. Here, I have unhappy people, I dont know what's main cause, there are some like: want to be with family (in dwatf heaven?), want to acquire item (which one?), want to be with friends (???). I dont know how they died (was found dead, no access to history?). Rimworld allows to see mood, sleep deficit, annoyances (unsighty environement, tiny bedroom, outside in rain, cabin fever, major hypothermia, back pain, psychic drone ship,...), but here it's impossible to keep track of whole ant colony. In Rimworld i finished the game with like 10-12 colonists and mostly had 5-7, so i knew everyone.
To the first question: Food and Drink refers to the "consumable" amount of stuff lying around. The other categories (like Fish, Plant etc.) refer to processable items, which can't be consumed raw. Scaling up to a population of this size (around 200) is the point where you usually end your Fortress at or go for some megalomaniac goals after you managed to balance it out. I can only assume from far diagnosis what could have happened. If your Drink goes out it's always either a lack of brewable stuff (not enough plants) or a lack of containers to store the stuff in. If both things are present and it's still not working it's the logistics to blame. What you experienced there is also a intentional mechanic of the game: You are not supposed to last forever, Fortresses are meant to fall eventually. This kind of spiral can only be prevented if you never hit ground zero so to say. It is possible to last forever and not too hard once you have crashed a few economies, but the game wants you to go for risky and crazy ideas to bring your folk to disaster. Rimworld is much smaller scope, therefore it allows more control via micromanagement. A "normal" DF run has around 200 dwarfes, which is a completely different scenario compared to Rimworld. Don't let this one downfall frustrate you out, check out where you can amp up your productions next time to avoid the death spiral in the first place. And when disaster strikes again, grab some popcorn or abandon the fortress before it annoys you out.
You can fiddle with the settings to keep your fort smaller with smaller invasion limits. Food industry usually fails for new players because they cook plants before they had a chance to get the seeds back and run out of stuff to plant. Cooking should only be done to processed plants (leaves, flours etc). Brewing gives back seeds from whole plants and so does eating them too. If you embark on normal areas you can gather instead of farming for years as gathering fall fruits and summer veggies will provide 1000+ units to brew or cook. DF has a learning curve and if you feel that you failed when your fort collapses that is not helpful with this game. Once you know the mechanics you should be able to last with a fortress indefinately. If that happens you can increase difficulty or embark on funny llocations. Anyways good luck and have fun. Bay12games forum has helpful ppl if you are stuck
@@sza2bom Yeah, I excluded seeds from cooking and I think still and milling return them. Yet somehow farming seemed to have very low yields. And I found extremely difficult just managing base after five years, happiness suddenly dropped (failed to acquire item, failed to meet friends, family, i guess worn clothes, many deaths without obvious reason, engraving slabs and collecting garbage is horror, as it can't be aitomated)
@@pavelperina7629 As I said poor soil quality gives stacks of 1s (maybe sometimes 2). Try cavern floor, try fertilizer, try above ground. I think before steam version you had better yields with no fertilizer and in underground dirt too, this changed a bit to make it more challanging.
The ones on sand/clay don't need irrigation, but are only 25% as effective as the irrigated subsurface ones. But it's a start until you learned how to irrigate. =)
been trying to make soap... but I cant seem to get more than 1 rock nut seed per bush, making it pretty much impossible to get oil. I have no clue what (or if) I'm doing something wrong >.
You're not doing anything wrong. There are a couple ways to acquire more. 1: simply embark with more than you intend to use for growing quarry bushes, although this is a one time thing. 2: trade for them with dwarven merchants (and request more in the import/export agreement) 3: breach the cavern layer that contains subterranean plants and harvest wild quarry bushes and 4: once said cavern is breached, any tile that is considered underground soil will begin to grow wild plants, so you can create large harvest zones in soil layers or make your own with (controlled) flooding or bucket brigades
It is possible, most likely the soil you chose wasn't suitable for Farm Plots. Or at least that's the only thing I could think of, why you shouldn't be able to put up Farm Plots on the Surface.
I just can’t understand why I’m always out of the main two crops. I have them selected as do not cook and yet poof. Farm the lot always saying no seeds.
If there are spawns or seeds on the field while the message is showing, everything is fine. It only means that all the seeds you had are now on the fields.
@@pootisbirb1287 Don't worry! I am always happy to hear what's really problematic for other players. I always wanted to jump back into Lobotomy, cause I really want to see the full story (and not just watch some video about it).
My stupid dwarves keep eating the plump helmets, so they have none to make drinks. It's been a bit better since I got 30-40 immigrants at once, and a few were hunters.
That's where the Kitchen will help you out. Your dwarves won't touch raw Mushrooms as long as there are tasty meals available. If they still go for Plump Helmets, make sure the Meals aren't somewhere too far away from your dining hall (a little extra stockpile for meals right next to the dining place would fix that). Hope this helps!
@@Ic0nGaming Thanks, I'll try putting meals next to the dining hall. Between that and your tip about the crop yield being determined by the planter(pretty sure I still have that job set to anyone can do), I think I'll have that problem resolved.
As soon as you create your kitchen: Press the labor tab. Go to Kitchen -> Vegetables, fruits and leaves. Make sure the cooking button next to plumt helmets is red (permission turned off) and brewed is green (perm turn on). When you cook plumt helmets you loose the seed, but when you brew them you get an extra seed.
Basically you can directly hop into better qualities as soon as you notice overproduction. Just be careful to not go over the tipping point of consumption vs production without noticing. In general just keeping simple meals up is the safe way. Better quality implies some more risk to drain your food stockpiles too quickly.
These videos are really good! Slowly getting myself familiarised with the basics and approaching complex topics as they become relevant, so this is perfect.
yeah me to this game is so deep
This is so useful. I learned a lot more in this 24 minutes than I have been by messing around and referencing the wiki occasionally for the past week or so
tip ive learned, after you get your first wave of migrants, imediately make your planter the only one who does planting
youll have a legendary planter in no time
do this again with a new planter around 50 or 75 dwarves or earlier if you want to get a head start
and again at maby 150 (I dont make my fortresses that large so I dont know for sure)
that way you get maximum yield for your crops all the time
and make sure not to put them into the military
Love these videos. You, Twisted Logic, and Blind have been so helpful for me getting back into DF after a long hiatus from it.
Legit have to find like a life coach or something for this "losing is fun" concept though. Losing is never fun to me, and I really don't understand how people put hours into a fortress, lose it because of something stupid, and manage to have the experience soured in their minds. Guess I'm a sore loser but I'm sure I'm not the only one who has trouble with that whole thing
Thanks for your kind words!
Regarding "Losing is fun" - if some events are strongly against your liking, you can always return to your last save file. Just up the rate of autosaves and you can save scum quite decently in this game.
Especially sandbox gaming should always be fun for the player - so feel free to tweak it to your own liking!
I just recently got into df when it released on steam and after maybe 7 or 8 forts my last fort was the one that finally got my brain to click with the whole losing is fun mindset. I had just gone into the caverns and begun to establish a guard patrol in the area to keep monsters away. My entire guard squad decided to take a nap right when a blind cave ogre wandered by the one area that hadn't been walled off yet and found his way into the fort. The first room it entered was my barracks with my sleeping guards. All of them were nearly immediately massacred and without their protection the ogre wandered through my fort killing every one except for 2 of my dwarves who promptly went insane from miasma and tried to kill eachother. I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it all.
How is food spoilage handled?
Food in barrels won't spoil. Anything that's not stored in a barrel will eventually turn rotten and create miasma that dwarfs dislike. A good cook can make high quality meals that make dwarfs happy and can sell for high amounts with caravans
Any food in a stockpile won't spoil. It doesn't *need* to be in a barrel specifically. Barrels are just convenient for storing more food per tile.
Thanks for your videos. Very helpful to get started.
This game could be a PhD University course all in itself
This is a huge help, the tutorial covers nothing about making food.
Another excellent tutorial!
So a thing I have been wondering about.
Now we don't have a If x >= too number to allow use of things into example cooking, because cooking destroys the seeds.
And other processes also uses up seeds.
So my wondering is, if we link a Seed storage with only the seed used for that specific farm. Then we need 1 square, for a bag of 100 seeds.
If we then make a Cook/Mill/Press Seed storage with all of the different seeds.
The biggest question here becomes then: Will they fill up the Farm's Seed storage first, or start to put them in the processing seed storage.
Since we have a limit of 200 seeds of each kind. Having these linked storages could act as a "Do not use unless in the other storage" allowing for up to 100 of them to be used for other things than just farming.
Though I can be 100% wrong, since Dwarf Fortress is, well Dwarf Fortress
Thank you!
On the kitchen screen, how are you getting the ingredients to seperate out into different tabs like that? I'm assuming it's a mod, but I can't seem to find anything like that in the workshop.
thx dude
Yes I will now make a siege fortress to rival the gods
Strike The Earth!
And don't forget to pay the Clown Circus deep down below a visit =)
I've hit a problem with food production that has almost made the game unplayable as I'm spending all my time trying to manage this problem dwarves are leaving food at the kitchen station to rot and when they do store it in a food stockpile do they rarely put the stuff in an a barrel.
Thank you
I'm quite new in the game. Is all the food and drink shown in stats edible and drinkable? Cause when my colony reached size of 180 or so, they started dying from dehydration like flies. Which is quite problematic as it leads to need of engraving many slabs which is very inconvenient or ghost destroying colony. Also I overproduced food and fish having enough fish to support base for next 20 years likely. But they seemed to have always 100-200 units of dring. But no mugs and maybe not functional tavern.
I'm sort of looking for guide how to deal with exponential growth, cause supplying nearly 200 dwarfs with food, drink, items, clothes seems impossible. They were happy when there was 70 of them, but soon it reached some tipping point where everything went wrong. And I don't even know what exactly went wrong and what to fix: dying from dehytration literally 20 tiles from functional well, many fights, many corpses, skeletons, teeth, clothes lying around, ghost apocalypse cause after building 70 graves, engravings are nearly impossible to manage.
Also there are guides for many things. But I haven't seen a guide what are priorities after mass producing barrels, thrones/chairs, chest/coffers, tables, door, bins, processing fish and plumb helmets in still. Because next comes tavern, temple (i guess), brooker and manager offfices. I have no idea when i need army, hospital, steel production, kiln, glass/clay production, farmer's shop, bees, ... there are overwhelming possibilities.
I guess rimworld is more simple, cause game gives better feedback. Here, I have unhappy people, I dont know what's main cause, there are some like: want to be with family (in dwatf heaven?), want to acquire item (which one?), want to be with friends (???). I dont know how they died (was found dead, no access to history?). Rimworld allows to see mood, sleep deficit, annoyances (unsighty environement, tiny bedroom, outside in rain, cabin fever, major hypothermia, back pain, psychic drone ship,...), but here it's impossible to keep track of whole ant colony. In Rimworld i finished the game with like 10-12 colonists and mostly had 5-7, so i knew everyone.
To the first question: Food and Drink refers to the "consumable" amount of stuff lying around. The other categories (like Fish, Plant etc.) refer to processable items, which can't be consumed raw.
Scaling up to a population of this size (around 200) is the point where you usually end your Fortress at or go for some megalomaniac goals after you managed to balance it out.
I can only assume from far diagnosis what could have happened. If your Drink goes out it's always either a lack of brewable stuff (not enough plants) or a lack of containers to store the stuff in. If both things are present and it's still not working it's the logistics to blame.
What you experienced there is also a intentional mechanic of the game: You are not supposed to last forever, Fortresses are meant to fall eventually. This kind of spiral can only be prevented if you never hit ground zero so to say. It is possible to last forever and not too hard once you have crashed a few economies, but the game wants you to go for risky and crazy ideas to bring your folk to disaster.
Rimworld is much smaller scope, therefore it allows more control via micromanagement. A "normal" DF run has around 200 dwarfes, which is a completely different scenario compared to Rimworld.
Don't let this one downfall frustrate you out, check out where you can amp up your productions next time to avoid the death spiral in the first place. And when disaster strikes again, grab some popcorn or abandon the fortress before it annoys you out.
You can fiddle with the settings to keep your fort smaller with smaller invasion limits.
Food industry usually fails for new players because they cook plants before they had a chance to get the seeds back and run out of stuff to plant. Cooking should only be done to processed plants (leaves, flours etc). Brewing gives back seeds from whole plants and so does eating them too. If you embark on normal areas you can gather instead of farming for years as gathering fall fruits and summer veggies will provide 1000+ units to brew or cook.
DF has a learning curve and if you feel that you failed when your fort collapses that is not helpful with this game. Once you know the mechanics you should be able to last with a fortress indefinately. If that happens you can increase difficulty or embark on funny llocations. Anyways good luck and have fun. Bay12games forum has helpful ppl if you are stuck
@@sza2bom Yeah, I excluded seeds from cooking and I think still and milling return them. Yet somehow farming seemed to have very low yields. And I found extremely difficult just managing base after five years, happiness suddenly dropped (failed to acquire item, failed to meet friends, family, i guess worn clothes, many deaths without obvious reason, engraving slabs and collecting garbage is horror, as it can't be aitomated)
@@pavelperina7629 As I said poor soil quality gives stacks of 1s (maybe sometimes 2). Try cavern floor, try fertilizer, try above ground. I think before steam version you had better yields with no fertilizer and in underground dirt too, this changed a bit to make it more challanging.
Thanks for this! Is there no need to irrigate this field/farm?
The ones on sand/clay don't need irrigation, but are only 25% as effective as the irrigated subsurface ones. But it's a start until you learned how to irrigate. =)
@@Ic0nGaming Got this! Many thanks!
been trying to make soap... but I cant seem to get more than 1 rock nut seed per bush, making it pretty much impossible to get oil. I have no clue what (or if) I'm doing something wrong >.
You can just use tallow from butchering animals
You're not doing anything wrong. There are a couple ways to acquire more. 1: simply embark with more than you intend to use for growing quarry bushes, although this is a one time thing. 2: trade for them with dwarven merchants (and request more in the import/export agreement) 3: breach the cavern layer that contains subterranean plants and harvest wild quarry bushes and 4: once said cavern is breached, any tile that is considered underground soil will begin to grow wild plants, so you can create large harvest zones in soil layers or make your own with (controlled) flooding or bucket brigades
Poor soil quality in underground soils. Use cavern soil or above ground soil for larger stack sizes. And/or make fertilizer and use it
I can't find any soil? No matter how low I dig?
The window says cavern soil is the best. Are the caverns the open area you dig down to?
Yes, the tooltip refers to underground caverns which have to be found. And then you let the fun find you =)
I can’t seem to surface farm on the steam edition. Will that be added later or am I doing something wrong?
It is possible, most likely the soil you chose wasn't suitable for Farm Plots. Or at least that's the only thing I could think of, why you shouldn't be able to put up Farm Plots on the Surface.
You need surface farm seeds which you can buy from the traders.
Milk > booze for food, especially if you trade it.
I just can’t understand why I’m always out of the main two crops. I have them selected as do not cook and yet poof. Farm the lot always saying no seeds.
If there are spawns or seeds on the field while the message is showing, everything is fine. It only means that all the seeds you had are now on the fields.
Maybe I’ve tied them all up in uncooked stored mushrooms. Will have to check my stockpile and start cooking
are you going to make another tutorial on lobotomy corporation
I didn't specifically plan to yet. Any particular topic that you are interested in? I gotta admit I never got very far in Lobotomy.
@@Ic0nGaming I would like to see a tutorial of like how to deal with events or some entities which would be nice
@@Ic0nGaming I'm sorry if I'm asking too much ,it's totally fine if you don't do it
@@pootisbirb1287 Don't worry! I am always happy to hear what's really problematic for other players. I always wanted to jump back into Lobotomy, cause I really want to see the full story (and not just watch some video about it).
There's no option for plump helmets for me.
How do you max out efficiency
My stupid dwarves keep eating the plump helmets, so they have none to make drinks.
It's been a bit better since I got 30-40 immigrants at once, and a few were hunters.
That's where the Kitchen will help you out. Your dwarves won't touch raw Mushrooms as long as there are tasty meals available. If they still go for Plump Helmets, make sure the Meals aren't somewhere too far away from your dining hall (a little extra stockpile for meals right next to the dining place would fix that).
Hope this helps!
@@Ic0nGaming Thanks, I'll try putting meals next to the dining hall. Between that and your tip about the crop yield being determined by the planter(pretty sure I still have that job set to anyone can do), I think I'll have that problem resolved.
As soon as you create your kitchen: Press the labor tab. Go to Kitchen -> Vegetables, fruits and leaves. Make sure the cooking button next to plumt helmets is red (permission turned off) and brewed is green (perm turn on). When you cook plumt helmets you loose the seed, but when you brew them you get an extra seed.
Why don't make high quality meals if it sounds so simple?
Basically you can directly hop into better qualities as soon as you notice overproduction. Just be careful to not go over the tipping point of consumption vs production without noticing.
In general just keeping simple meals up is the safe way. Better quality implies some more risk to drain your food stockpiles too quickly.
damn man... no guide on deeper farming (where crops are supposed to grow best) and a mod that changes how crops work... oof.