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How To Build a Farm And Plant Seeds
Where To Find Or Get More Seeds
Why Can’t I Grow This Plant Here?
How To Make A Farm Plot Anywhere, Including On Stone
How To Automate Farming
The number one rule of any colony management game is to always keep your people fed. Dwarf Fortress makes no exception, even putting an enhanced priority on producing boozy beverages. A fortress full of home-cooked meals and high-alcohol drinks is a happy fortress. But supplying that isn’t the smoothest walk in the garden.
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In classic farm-to-table style, you need to grow the food you eat. But the farming system in the game isn’t always the clearest or most understandable. Fear not, hungry dwarf; this guide will cover everything you could need to know about starting and managing a farm in Dwarf Fortress.
How To Build a Farm And Plant Seeds
To begin, you need to designate some farmland. From the building menu, select Workshops, then Farming, and then Farm Plot. You can then designate a square zone to be converted into a farm. You can only place a farm plot on soil or muddy surfaces (more on that below).
Once ‘built’ by your dwarves, you can select the farm plot and designate what crop you want to grow. The list will contain all available options for that specific plot, noting if you have seeds or not. Some crops cannot grow during certain seasons; others will have location-related requirements.
Once you set the crop types (assuming you have the seeds for it), that’s it! You can more or less ignore the farm plot since the dwarves will automatically harvest the crops and plant the seeds.
Fertilizer
While completely optional, you can increase the total yield of a plot’s crops by fertilizing them. This is done with Potash, produced from ash in an Ashery. A farm plot’s menu will tell you the plot’s current fertilization percentage and offer the option to fertilize once (saying the potash cost) and to automatically do so every new season.
Where To Find Or Get More Seeds
There are four ways to get more seeds for your existing crops or find seeds for new crops: Embark supplies, consumption, foraging, and trading.
The first two will be enough to last you the entire game and happen almost autonomously, but the other two can help expand your food supplies and their diversity.
Embark Supplies
When you start a new game, you can customize your Embark. This includes choosing which seeds to start with. Dwarves will only offer traditional dwarven plants like Plump Helmets and Pig Tails (things that can grow underground).
Seeds don’t go bad over time; even if you don’t intend to grow them, it’s always good to have a few on hand.
Consumption
Whenever your crop is consumed, whether brewing a plump helmet into booze, processing Pig Tail into thread or pressing Dimple Cap into dye, it will leave a seed behind. The only exception is for cooking things into prepared meals. So as long as you’re using the crops you grow, you’ll get more seeds.
If you have too many seeds, you can designate the seeds themselves to be used for cooking via the Kitchen tab of the Labor menu.
Foraging
Using the forage command, you can tell dwarves to gather local plant life. While this doesn’t directly give you seeds, consuming the collected plants will. This method will expand your crop options to whatever is available, both on the surface and within underground caverns.
Trading
Visiting traders will offer seeds as part of their trade goods. This is a great way to stock up on seeds, especially if you need a handful of ‘forage’ seeds without the hassle of foraging.
It’s possible to trade for seeds you cannot grow. More information on that is in the ‘Outsider Seeds’ section of the next entry.
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Why Can’t I Grow This Plant Here?
Troubleshooting farm problems can be difficult, especially since the game doesn’t tell you WHY it isn’t an option. Here are some troubleshooting tips if you have difficulty farming what you want, where you want.
Can’t Select Desired Crops
There will likely be a moment when you want to grow something and have the seeds for it, but the option won’t be available from the Farm Plot menu. There are up to three reasons for this: wrong season, wrong environment, or wrong biome.
Wrong Season | While many crops can grow year-round, some can’t. Check other season tabs and see if it’s available. |
|---|---|
Wrong Environment | There are underground crops and surface crops, but they cannot grow in the opposite environment. Check if the desired crop is available on a surface or subterranean plot and vis versa. |
Wrong Biome | This only happens when you trade for seeds from travelers. But plants belonging to other biomes will not grow locally. So even if you had the seeds, you could not grow pineapple and cranberries in the same location. |
If a Farm Plot ever ‘touches’ sunlight, it permanently becomes a surface plot, even if covered again. This can be used to trick the game into growing surface crops underground.
How To Make A Farm Plot Anywhere, Including On Stone
Farm Plots can only grow on two types of surface: soil and mud. Soil it easy. It's normally on the surface or in patches underground. The other option is more of a manual effort, but by doing so, you can make a farm virtually anywhere.
Whenever flowing water runs over a surface, it generates mud. The more it flows, the more mud it makes. You can build a Farm Plot on mud, with thicker mud yielding higher quality plots. By manually flooding and draining an area, you can make a farm plot there, whether it’s stone, wood, or even metal.
If you dig deep enough, you can find underground caverns full of muddy floors. These make for great farmland but run the risk of exposure to dangerous creatures.
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How To Automate Farming
Food (and alcohol) are the most important staples to any fortress’ survival. Fortunately, it doesn’t take a massive farm to sustain your dwarves. Even better, the process of converting your crops into meals and alcohol automatically is equally easy; you just need a Manager.
You can have multiple administration jobs handled by one dwarf. Consider making your manager and bookkeeper the same one, saving you from building a second office room.
For reference: Whenever we use (X), we mean how many orders to complete at a time. We generally do two to five, depending on colony size.
Kitchen Automated Task Settings
For kitchens, you need at least two food items, one of them being a solid. Dwarves will cook the food items into prepared food, yielding no seeds in the process. To automate the kitchen, we suggest creating a repeating task under the following settings.
Prepare Easy/Fine/Lavish Meal: (X) | ||
|---|---|---|
Restarts if completed, conditions checked daily | ||
Item | Condition | Quantity |
Amount of Unrotten Prepared Meals | Less Than | Total Population, plus a small buffer |
Amount of Unrotten Cookable Solid Items | At Least | (X) |
Amount of Unrotten Cookable Items | At Least | (X * 1) for Easy (X * 2) for Fine (X * 3) for Lavish |
Still Automated Task Settings
Still operate much like the kitchen, but with the added inconvenience of having separate tasks for fruits and non-fruit plants. If you’re a fruitless fortress, this isn’t an issue, but diverse farms may require two automated tasks, one for each food type.
Stills produce five drink objects for every one food object you distill. So a single Plump Helmet will produce five Dwarven Wines. The resulting booze is most commonly kept in barrels.
Brew Drink From Fruits/Plants: (X) | ||
|---|---|---|
Restarts if completed, conditions checked daily | ||
Item | Condition | Quantity |
Amount of Drinks Available | Less Than | Total Population, plus a bit more for visitors |
Amount of Unrotten Fermentable Leaves And Fruit | At Least | (X) |
Amount of Empty Food Storage Items | At Least | (X) |
Quirn, Millstone, And Screw Press Automated Task Settings
Some crops, like nuts and grains, need to be processed further before they can be used. This can be done at Quirns and Millstones, followed by a Screw Press. The inconvenient part about these is that you cannot designate specific crops for these tasks.
To limit their tasks to specific items, connect them to a stockpile set to only contain the items you want to be ground up. Then allow that pile to pull from other piles. This way, you can grind wheat into flour without worrying about grinding Dimple Cups into dye.
For grains, you need the grain and a bag to hold the flower. For nuts and seeds, you need the nut and a jug to contain the slurry oil. Grains will yield flour, which can be used for cooking. Nuts and seeds will yield a slurry, which can be pressed into a container of oil (usually) and a press cake. The cake can be used for cooking, while the oil can be used in both cooking and soap making.
Making Flour from Quirns or Millstones
Mill Plants: (X) | ||
|---|---|---|
Restarts if completed, conditions checked daily | ||
Item | Condition | Quantity |
Amount of Millable Unrotten Plants | At Least | (X) |
Amount of Empty Bags | At Least | (X) |
If you want an upper limit, you can include “Amount of Y Flour available is less than Z,” where Y is the grain plant you’re milling, and Z is the upper limit you want.
Making Slurry From Nuts and Seeds Using A Quirn or Millstone
Mill Seeds/Nuts To Slurry: (X) | ||
|---|---|---|
Restarts if completed, conditions checked daily | ||
Item | Condition | Quantity |
Amount of Glob | At Least | (X) |
Amount of Unrotten Oil Bearing Seeds | At Least | (X) |
Making Food Cakes And Oil From Slurry Using A Scew Press
Press Liquid From Paste: (X) | ||
|---|---|---|
Restarts if completed, conditions checked daily | ||
Item | Condition | Quantity |
Amount of non-pressed- oil-bearing Glob | At Least | (X) |
Amount of liquid containers | At Least | (X) |
One thing to keep in mind: quirns cannot automate milling plants; the option is only available manually. Millstones have the option, but it requires a power source. The simplest answer to this is to have the millstone on the surface, directly attached to a windmill, but this may leave your dwarves at risk of outside attacks.
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