Dwarf Fortress Cancel Capture Live Animal Cannot Find Path

Chapter 4. Filling Dwarf Bellies

Producing food is vital in Dwarf Fortress. Without it your dwarves will starve, causing them to work poorly and forcing them to swallow vermin to survive (at to the lowest degree for a while). As y'all would await, starving to decease creates an unhappy idea in a dwarf's caput, and too many unhappy thoughts may plow an otherwise hard-working and industrious dwarf into a homicidal maniac intent on turning his best friend's skull into a macabre totem (this is literally true). To avoid this fate nosotros must farm, harvest, fish, and butcher our way to a healthy nutrient supply. And in one case we take some food, let's get all fancy and effort our hand at cooking information technology.

In this chapter nosotros volition lay the foundations for abundant nutrient production while discussing some alternative and avant-garde strategies you may consider at a later date. If something in this chapter doesn't brand sense, come back to it—there are so many interlocking elements in Dwarf Fortress that learning them sequentially can be nearly incommunicable. Dwarf Fortress is best treated equally a gaming buffet. Take a few bites here and there before returning for seconds.

Chickens and Eggs

Which came beginning? The chicken, of course, because we embarked with chickens. Now let's get them producing. As you may call up, nosotros built some nest boxes at the Craftsdwarf'southward Workshop. Nest boxes will be claimed past our chickens when they become to lay eggs. Unless those eggs are gathered and placed in a food pile they will somewhen hatch into infant chickens and then long as a rooster is on the map. But in order to offset our chicken empire we will need to place the nest boxes somewhere that can be accessed by our chickens. In club to do that we need to specify an area of ground as pasture for the chickens to scratch around on.

Chickens (and all other fowl) don't need to alive outside equally they don't graze on grass. As such, you lot tin can either dig out a large room for them or just utilize some apartment space outside your fortress for their pasture. For at present, a ten×10 room will suffice, but in fourth dimension yous may demand a larger infinite to forbid overcrowding. Creatures that are crowded become aggressive, and are prone to attacking each other and fifty-fifty your dwarves. You will run across alerts forth the bottom of the screen if your chickens get aggressive and seem likely in need of more infinite.

Let'southward get on with specifying a pasture zone and placing all of our chickens in information technology. Nosotros will then place the nest boxes in the middle of the pasture and so that the hens tin claim the boxes and lay eggs in them. Information technology won't exist long until we have many little chicks running around being adorable and consuming CPU cycles with their path-calculation requirements.

Let'southward start by pressing i for Zones . Find either an outside surface area near your entrance or the room you take dug out, and and then mark out an area of at least 10×ten squares. If you make a mistake, find the zone using i , press x , and then press X to remove information technology. Once you lot have created a suitable zone, yous volition encounter the right info panel change its header to Activeness Zone 1 , and it will nowadays you with some options. Set this zone to Pen/Pasture using the north key. You can and then, as you will see from the list of commands at the lesser of the panel, press N to alter the zone's settings.

Y'all should now see a listing of animals. Scroll through the list and as you see an animal that isn't a domestic dog or a cat, press enter to assign information technology to the pasture. If your pasture is inside you should not assign grazers such as cows, yaks, horses, or camels to your rocky pen as they volition starve to death. Create another large xx×xx pasture outside for these creatures. Be ruthless; even if your dwarves are keeping pet lambs who adorably follow your dwarves effectually, assign them to your outside pasture or they will somewhen starve to expiry underground. Animate being fodder isn't normally available deep underground, at to the lowest degree not until y'all breach the caverns and cave moss spreads. Don't feel heartbroken; your dwarves much adopt living pets to dead ones (which, again, can result in unhappy thoughts and the whole skulls-on-poles thing).

When you unpause the game your dwarves will blitz virtually moving animals to the pasture. In that location is usually no need for any fences around your fields—your animals are generally quite obedient and dwarves will return them to their pasture if they do stray. Nevertheless, your livestock can be popular targets for any invaders, and so somewhen you may want to wall in your pasture, build ditches, or move your pasture deep underground.

If you practise plan to keep a number of grazing animals for your food supply, continue in mind that even large pasture can easily be grazed bare by only a few animals. If you have more than than a dozen grazing creatures, consider creating several pastures for your animals and spreading them around. The last thing yous want is an enraged yak burdensome a love lamb's skull.

With your chicken pasture established, information technology is fourth dimension to build your nest boxes. Printing b-N , which will allow you to select where to place your first nest box. The middle of the craven pasture makes sense, so place your first nest box at that place and repeat the process until all remaining nest boxes are placed. When you resume the game the boxes will be installed and should the chickens feel in an egg-laying mood, they will be claimed by hens. As eggs have been forbidden from existence kept in your food stockpile the eggs volition sit there until they hatch. You can examine the contents of the nest boxes using t , if you wish.

With each nest box placed you should take 1 box per chicken in the pasture. As y'all heighten hens to maturity you should identify more nest boxes to provide room for your chickens to lay eggs. I box per chicken is ideal; less may result in fewer eggs laid and bachelor to your dwarves.

Tip

Other egg-laying creatures may claim your nest boxes. Alligators, giant eagles, and fifty-fifty dragons have been known to merits nest boxes and lay eggs.

Once your first batch of eggs hatch and you take a dozen or more chicks running almost you may chose to re-enable eggs in your food stockpile past revisiting it, pressing q , then due south , selecting Food , finding Egg , and pressing p for Permit Eggs . Alternately, wait until you have a fifteen to twenty matures hens—more than enough to provide your fortress with a practiced supply of food in addition to what you will be growing in your farms. Annotation that you just need i rooster, and then any surplus roosters can exist butchered for their meat, bones, and skin, a topic nosotros'll cover later in this affiliate.

Harvesting eggs, while relatively like shooting fish in a barrel, is only the outset step in turning them into food for your dwarves. Dwarves adopt their eggs cooked, which requires usa to build a Kitchen. We will examine Kitchens more than closely later in the affiliate.

It is important to annotation that chickens aren't the but egg-laying creatures available to you in Dwarf Fortress. The total list of egg layers is enormous, simply in terms of poultry that Dwarves are able to embark with, ducks, geese, turkeys, guinea fowl, and blue peafowl are too an option for fortress managers. Each has their ain advantages and disadvantages (explained in Table iv-i), but suffice to say the choice of which to farm is up to you. It has been suggested that embarking with two unlike types of poultry can exist useful as it is easy to ban, say, chicken eggs while farming duck eggs, and then once the chicken population has grown, switching it around and farming chicken eggs while hatching more ducks. In this fashion your dwarves can enjoy eating eggs soon after your fortress is founded, reducing the hazard of early starvation.

Tabular array four-1. Poultry pointers

Poultry	Notes
Blue Peafowl	Low number of eggs laid per bird. One year to maturity.
Chickens	Boilerplate number of eggs laid per bird. 2 years to maturity.
Ducks	Large number of eggs laid per bird. 2 years to maturity.
Geese	Low number of eggs laid per bird. 1 year to maturity.
Republic of guinea fowl	Average number of eggs laid per bird. One yr to maturity.
Turkeys	Large number of eggs laid per bird. Two years to maturity.

Growing Crops Above Ground

The staples of a dwarf's nutrition are likely to exist the crops you grow on farms both aboveground and underground. Farming also provides a steady supply of materials to procedure into dye ingredients and materials for the cloth-making industry. Fortunately, we embarked with everything we need to get a few farm plots under way.

Underground farming tin can exist somewhat involved, so let's come to grips with the basics with an aboveground farm first. Detect a squeamish clear, grassy space (hopefully complimentary of trees past now) about your fortress entrance, and press b-p for Farm Plot . You volition go a placement 10 , along with a message complaining about a lack of mud or soil. But so long equally the X is green, we will have no problem building our farm. For the farm footprint to be green, you need to identify it over a patch of grassy or dingy footing. The lesser of the right panel also gives us instructions for increasing the size of our farm plot. If you press u or k , the size of the plot will grow, while h or m will shrink the plot. Create a iv×5 plot footprint and and so place it using enter . Information technology is likely that your farm plot will have holes in it due to rocks or trees, just don't worry, a few gaps won't exist a problem.

Tip

As your farmer dwarves increment in skill they will institute faster and their plants volition produce more than food at harvest fourth dimension.

The farm plot will now flash until a dwarf comes along to build it. Edifice the plot will only have a few seconds and in one case complete, it is fourth dimension to specify what gets planted each season. Printing q and motion the cursor over the subcontract plot. It volition and so flash and a new menu will appear in the correct console. At the top, the panel lists what plants can be grown that season, and below, the season can exist selected (among other settings). Start past pressing a for Leap and review your planting options. You are aiming to set a unproblematic nutrient to be produced, then plants such as wild strawberries, fisher berries, bloated tubers, sun berries, and rat weed are platonic. Press enter on a crop of choice; you lot get bonus points for selecting one you lot recognize from your before exploration of the map with the k , central. With Spring's ingather selected, you should cycle through the other seasons using b , c , and d , and set a plant for each. So long equally in that location are available seeds, farmer dwarves will plant and harvest the crops as they grow and mature. If yous are curious virtually what product each plant provides a full list is available on the Dwarf Fortress Wiki.

You should take seeds for some of these plants, and tin sentry dwarves busy themselves planting your kickoff crop (Figure four-1). If you have no planting options you lot may demand to expect a short while for your dwarves to eat some of the gathered plants, which will release their seeds for planting (dwarves are silent on the question of whether the seeds are gathered before or some time after the food is consumed). Revisit your plot regularly—when you do notice planting options available, use the secondary carte keys to select the plant you wish to abound and press enter . If you do non see dwarves moving to institute seeds (and the farm plot tiles irresolute every bit the seeds are planted), try returning to the crop choice menu and choosing a different plant blazon. You should find something that the dwarves will plant relatively speedily. In the future, you will learn how to utilize the z ( Condition ) carte du jour to look at your fortress stocks, which will make selecting plants for which you take seeds much easier.

Three outside farm plots tended by a dwarf

Figure four-one. 3 exterior farm plots tended past a dwarf

It will take some time for each institute to abound simply when information technology is ready for harvesting a dwarf will come collect the ripe constitute and move it to your stockpiles. With outdoor farming firmly in your grasp you may want to build two more small farm plots to ensure that y'all have several food plants growing at all times. Notation that information technology may take fourth dimension to build upward a seed stock that will keep your subcontract plots filled, but it will happen eventually. Each farm foursquare takes one seed just produces several plants, each of which produces a seed when brewed, eaten or processes (but non when cooked!). In this way, you lot tin use the products of a small establish harvesting venture to eventually feed your entire fortress if you wish.

Although outdoor farming is a great way to boot off some early on nutrient production it does come with a few risks and potential problems. Outset of all, your dwarves are exposed to the sun, not snug deep beneath the earth where all good, honest, difficult-working dwarves belong. Second, your dwarves are far too close to wildlife and invading goblins. Finally, as your fortress develops, you will naturally move storage, production, and housing facilities deeper underground, resulting in very long, inefficient hauling routes for your farmers.

There are a few ways we can go effectually these problems while maintaining varied food production. Some of these techniques rely on construction and management skills you lot will larn afterwards, simply it is worth bringing them up now for you to call back about. First, you could take the aboveground farming deep downwards into your fortress by digging a deep shaft, open to the sun, that ends close to your product and storage floors. Farming at the bottom of this shaft will count equally farming exterior. Second, y'all could create a couch (nosotros will look at these later) for your aboveground farmers, and strength them to live their lives close to the nutrient they are tasked with producing and processing, leaving the task of moving the nutrient underground to other dwarves. Third, you lot could simply accept that aboveground farming is a risky endeavor and live life on the border! In all of these scenarios amalgam walls around your farms and individual entrances to your fortress can protect the fields and your dwarves from random encounters with dangerous invaders, and placing a floor over the farms will add protection from flight invaders while, curiously, preserving the farm plot's "outside" status.

The final option is to ignore aboveground farming entirely and to focus solely on underground farms. You will miss out on a few crops that would add variety to the nutrient and alcohol produced by your fortress, but this won't crusade any bug for y'all other than the occasional dwarf missing out on a chance to drink their favorite exotic alcohol. In the cease, you practise not need vast swathes of country defended to farming in lodge to feed your fortress. Xxx farm squares decorated with food production, a few chickens, and possibly a dwarf or two fishing should provide more enough food for even a large fortress. How you divide your farming between aboveground or underground farms is entirely a matter of personal preference.

Growing Crops Cloak-and-dagger

Over the many years people take been playing Dwarf Fortress ane of the nearly frequent complaints from new players centers around the difficulty of establishing sustainable hush-hush farming. Underground farming can exist a challenge, only if we accept on the task step-by-step, information technology won't exist long until we're knee-deep in plump helmet mushrooms and other delicious treats.

If y'all take built productive aboveground farms and your chickens are laying eggs, there is no need to immediately institute an underground farm. You may wish to wait until you have worked through Chapter 7 before tackling the job of searching for soil or muddying some rock. That being said, it doesn't hurt to try if you lot're feeling brave!

Finding Dirt

Before we can begin, it is of import to empathize that undercover farms must be placed on clay or muddied stone. If the only space yous have for farming is a rock floor you are going to have to muddy the rock by spreading water across information technology or you lot are going to have to dig effectually to look for soil. Muddying the floor can exist achieved through controlled flooding (something we will look at in Chapter 11) or we can instruct our dwarves to haul water in buckets and to dump the water where we want our farm to be built (covered in Chapter seven).

The easiest way to brainstorm surreptitious farming is to identify the farm on soil that you have uncovered through earthworks. Chances are you've already discovered soil as you dug your initial tunnels into the hill. Using k for Await Around encounter if you lot tin find whatever underground terrain marked sand, clay, loam, silt, or peat. All of these terrains will support a farm plot without any fiddly irrigation. If you find a suitable location dig out some space and continued to your fortress so use b-p and place a farm plot or two on the ground. Once placed, apply the techniques you lot take learned earlier to assign crops to your fields, focusing on Plump helmets for all seasons.

If you have dug straight into the lower levels of a large hill it is likely that the showtime couple of squares effectually your fortress archway are a suitable terrain type only that the balance of the basis is rock and not suitable for easy hugger-mugger farming. If you lot don't desire to experiment with irrigation but do want to farm indoors, you at present have two choices. First, you lot could find an expanse of flat grassland, press d-h for Channel , and then press enter over a square of ground nearly your fortress archway. This will effect in your miners channeling a ramp down to the layer just below the grass and copse. This should exist a suitable soil type, and you tin can now use d-d on that lower level to carve out a space for your dwarves to farm on. If y'all do this, be sure not to dig out the ground around your ramp, equally ramps unconnected to neighboring stone, soil or a synthetic wall will collapse or become unusable.

Another pick is to dig upwards from within your fortress to effort to find soil on layers higher up your fortress archway. Press d-u for Upwardly Stairway and designate an up stairway in an un-dug wall of your fortress, perhaps at the terminate of your first corridor. If you lot so motility the view upward one level, y'all can designate an Up/Down Stairway using d-i directly to a higher place where the up stairway is on the level beneath. This, once dug, will provide your miners access to the level above your fortress entrance floor. If y'all dig around this new level, y'all may find soil. If not, designate another up/downward stair above the one you just dug, and try again. Proceed digging up until you find soil. If you accidentally breach the top of your hill and worry about invaders, build a floor tile on peak of the entrance stair using the structure instructions in Chapter 7.

Once you have dug out a suitable location simply place a subcontract plot as you would with outside farming. A unmarried 20-square plot volition probably suffice at this signal, merely if you're able to build several plots and accept a few different crops running at whatever in one case, you volition proceed your farmers busy. In Figure 4-2, I take institute a corner of my world where there is plenty clay to start two small underground farm plots. The larger is gear up to only grow plump helmets (a succulent mushroom), and the other has a mix of cave wheat, pig tails, and sweetness pods, crops which can exist processed into further useful goods.

Underground farming on soil

Figure 4-2. Secret farming on soil

If you lack suitable soil or wish to farm deep hole-and-corner, you volition be forced to make a rocky surface muddy before you can place your farm plots. Surfaces are made muddied by assuasive water to wash across them so leaving the water to evaporate. Using dwarven engineering and mechanism, this job tin be accomplished relatively painlessly, but it does require some advanced skills (which we will tackle in Chapter 11). The culling to flood gates, levers, and mechanisms is to tell our dwarves to deport buckets of water from a h2o source to the area nosotros need dingy. The "bucket brigade" arroyo to irrigation is covered in Chapter vii.

Fishing

When we equipped and trained our dwarves in Chapter ii, nosotros gave i some skill in fishing. Chances are that this dwarf has been spending time, when not otherwise engaged, wandering around the water sources on your map fishing. Fortunately for u.s. our dwarves don't need to mess around with nets, rods, or reels. Instead, dwarves simply pull the fish right out of the rivers and ponds. How they do this is a mystery, but I like to imagine that they dip their dirty, food-encrusted beards into the water and simply wait for seafood to get tangled in them.

Unfortunately, dwarves don't like to eat raw fish. To process the fish we need to build a Fishery, which is a workshop where fish are cleaned and processed into chopped-up processed raw fish. Once we accept processed fish we will need to cook the fish for it to exist palatable to our dwarves and we will also need to ensure that nosotros have plenty barrels (synthetic at the Carpenter'south Workshop) or rock pots (synthetic at a Craftsdwarf'due south Workshop) to store the cooked food.

Let's set up a Fishery. Find a articulate space handy to your nutrient stockpiles (dig out more than room if you need to) and then printing b-w-h for Fishery (it is on the second page of workshops; use the alternating roll keys to accept a await if you wish). Place the workshop and await for it to be built. Fish preparation tasks will be automatically added to your Fishery every bit required and dwarves with the Fish Cleaning labor enabled will work in the Fishery to prepare fish for cooking. If the "fish" are turtles, lobsters, oysters, or other shelled marine-life, shells will also be recovered. These items are often called for by dwarves in "Strange Moods" and and so running a modest fishing industry ensures you always have a few to hand.

Unless migrants with the Fish Cleaning labor enabled join your fortress it is possible that your fisher dwarf will spend all their time fishing and no time cleaning and preparing the fish for cooking. The angling labor seems to take some precedence over the cleaning labor. You can work around this problem by temporarily turning off the angling labor for your line-fishing dwarf (there's more than data on dwarf labors in Affiliate six), or past dedicating an immigrant to the Fish Cleaning labor.

Fishing adds some other useful food type to your fortress stockpiles and is piece of cake (if dwarf labor-intensive) to gather and procedure. It does come up with some adventure: fishing dwarves volition oft demand to roam well beyond your fortress walls, where danger and strife wait. In one case you are confident that your other nutrient production systems are running well, you may wish to consider disabling fishing and using fisher dwarves for other tasks.

If yous become truly enamored with fishing then you can create a secure fishing footing past establishing a zone dedicated to angling in an surreptitious puddle you've created or explored. Simply place a zone adjacent to the puddle using i , and and so press f to dedicate the zone to angling. You lot so need to change your dwarves' standing orders so that they prefer fishing zones over searching out their own angling spots. Press o-w-f to switch to zone-only fishing.

Hunting

It is possible to start the game with a dwarf who is equipped to chase the local wildlife and some hunters are likely to plough upward as migrants. Embarking with 1 or 2 dwarf hunters, along with a few dogs that can be trained to hunt, tin can provide not only a source of protection for your fortress merely likewise a supply of meat and other goods to feed your dwarves.

Dwarves you want to commence with as hunters should have Ambusher fix as their highest skill. They will so be given free armor and a crossbow, a quiver, and some crossbow bolts. In improver to the Ambusher skill, hunters benefit from skill in Crossbowman , Hammerman , and Wrestler , all of which will aid them on the hunt. One time you are building your fortress, hunter dwarves will automatically pick an creature on your map and then stalk it earlier sneaking in for the kill. They will continue hunting every bit long equally the Hunting labor is enabled. Animals killed by hunters will be carried by the hunter to a Butcher'southward Shop, where a dwarf with the Butcher labor enabled will procedure the carcass into meat, bones, skin, and other products.

Butchering Livestock

Raising animals for the pot is one manner of feeding your dwarves, simply information technology tin can be tricky to establish reliable meat-based food production. First of all, yous need a expert source of animals, either farm-raised or game your dwarves take hunted down. Next, yous need a series of workshops and stockpiles designed to plough a beast offset into meat, bones, skin, fat, and other products—and then into food and goods based on these inputs. As if this isn't circuitous enough, the various jobs required to accomplish these tasks need to be completed relatively quickly or the animal material will start to rot.

Fortunately, as we have seen, at that place are other ways to feed your fortress. If yous have still to raise numerous chickens or other animals then there is no need to follow forth with these instructions at this time. Return to this section when you are ready to chop up some kittens!

Start by pressing z to pull upward the Condition menu. The Status menu provides a good summary of the current condition of your fortress. Press enter (the Animals tab is already selected) and you should at present run into a listing of creatures, their sexual activity, their name (if they are a pet), if they are owned, and their training level.

Tip

Dwarves will adopt and proper name some animals on their ain. Except for cats. Cats cull their owners.

Creatures with a name are tame and cannot exist sent to the butcher'southward block. Indeed, if the pets of an already-depressed dwarf are killed, it may push the doting possessor over the edge into axe-wielding mania. Dwarves truly do live on a sanity knife-edge; hard-working i minute (albeit, fueled by alcohol and mushrooms), axe murderers the side by side. A dwarven fortress is much like "Called-for Human being" meets "Psycho".

With the animal stock tab displayed, scan the list using the cursor keys. Creatures set to Unavailable are not the sort of critter your dwarves volition adopt as a pet. Those marked Uninterested have yet to be made a pet. Whatever uninterested or unavailable animal can be marked for slaughter by pressing the b key. Every bit a rule, y'all will desire to slaughter males of a species, as you lot only demand one of them to impregnate all the available females on the map. If you have managed to hatch and raise a few chickens, now would be a good fourth dimension to have a expect through all of your chickens and gear up all just one or ii of the roosters for slaughter. Unless you are drastic for food wait for a creature to exist fully grown before slaughtering it—you volition gain more resources from a mature brute than from a babe one.

If you lot are concerned about an eventual catsplosion (an endless number of pet cats breeding endless more pet cats), then y'all might wish to break the higher up rule and regularly choose the kittens filling your fortress halls. Puppies, on other manus, somewhen abound into dogs that can be productively trained to aid your hunters or soldiers, so you lot may want to keep dogs around.

With a few creatures selected for slaughter nosotros should gear up up our Butcher's Shop. You tin either fix it outside (close to your livestock) and foreclose the risk of miasma build-upward, or put the butcher shop inside, perhaps in its ain dedicated room where a door will go on any miasma generated inside. Whichever y'all chose, b-w-u for Butcher's Store will permit you place the edifice. Once congenital, a Slaughter Animal task volition be added automatically to the Butcher's Shop task list and will remain there until all the set animals are butchered. You should also build a Tanner's Store using b-w-n . This will issue in a Tan a hibernate chore being automatically added one time an animal with a tannable skin is butchered. For the workshop to exist built and hides to be tanned, a dwarf will need to have the Tanning labor enabled. Labors and jobs are further explained in Chapter 6.

Caution

Miasma is a build up of stench and gas from rotting or spoiled found or beast fabric. Dwarves encountering miasma will feel an unhappy thought. At that place is no chance of miasma outside.

Even if you lot're not relying on meat to feed your dwarves you will still find use in keeping a few animals for the pot, or simply butchering stray ones. Meat, bones, hides, and prepared organs (delicious!) are all useful to you, from providing resources for bone ammunition product through to materials for backpacks, waterskins, strange moods, and fine meals.

Which Animals Should I Farm?

Nutrient animals tin exist placed into three broad categories. There are egg-laying fowl, grazing livestock, and non-grazing livestock. Unless y'all are willing to spend time managing pastures, you will want to heighten animals that don't graze. Grazing animals need big areas of grassland (or mossland) to survive and providing enough secure pasture for them can be a challenge.

Which animals graze and which do not? Well, the list of possible animals you will be able to buy, commence with, or capture is simply besides huge to reproduce here. Suffice to say that what applies in the existent world is probable to apply in Dwarf Fortress. For case, cows, sheep, and horses graze, whereas pigs, fowl, bears, cats, and dogs do not.

If y'all are looking to add creatures in addition to egg layers at your commence then pigs make an excellent improver to any fortress. They tin exist milked (salary-flavored milk, yum!), pastured anywhere as they do not graze, and provide substantial goods when butchered. At the commence screen female person pigs are called sows and males, boars. As they are expensive yous volition demand to cut downwards on embark points spent elsewhere. One option is to reduce the points spent on raising the mining and wood cutting skills. These skills will rise quite rapidly on their ain through constant use and a somewhat slower outset due to slower mining and tree feeling is usually not a problem.

Cooking and the Kitchen

Cooking is a slap-up style to plough piles of inedible foodstuffs into meals your dwarves can relish. However, cooking can likewise very easily destroy your seed stocks as cooking plants destroys seeds (brewing, conversely, does not). To forbid this, showtime by heading back to the Status menu using z , and then use the cursor keys to move the highlight to Kitchen , then press enter to review the options.

Against each food type, you will see a number and the available permissions. Cerise means that cooking or brewing that food is forbidden, while blue signals that information technology is permitted. If there is no option, then brewing or cooking that item isn't possible. You volition also see a number, often with a question mark adjacent to it. The question mark indicates the all-time gauge of your dwarves as to the number of that ingredient in the fortress stores. Once you lot gear up a bookkeeper dwarf (run across the section Nobles in Affiliate half-dozen), more accurate stock counts should be common.

Scroll through the ingredients using the cursor keys, and when you get to Plump Helmets , press c to turn off cooking for this plant. The discussion Cook will modify colour to indicate that this plant will no longer exist considered a potential ingredient in the Kitchen. Ensure that the kitchen settings forbid cooking all other available plants, seeds, and alcohol. We do non want to accidentally plough all of our seed and booze stockpiles into fine meals; dehydration is a terrible expletive! One time you have a bookkeeper providing accurate counts of your food and drink stocks, you may wish to re-enable alcohol and plant cooking to assist provide a wider variety of meals for your dwarves. At present that y'all have adapted the Kitchen settings, let's build our Kitchen!

Find a likely spot, preferably close to your food stockpiles, and press b-w-z for Kitchen . Place the Kitchen, and in one case it has been constructed, bank check the options bachelor to work with using q and then a for Add new chore . At a Kitchen, you can social club the Kitchen to prepare easy, fine, or lavish meals, and to render any available fat (from butchered animals) to tallow (a useful soap-making ingredient). You can safely ignore the Return Fat choice for at present, as this job is automatically added to the production queue by your dwarves when fat becomes available.

The meal-cooking options decide how many ingredients your dwarves will apply in the product of a repast. Piece of cake meals have two ingredients and are referred to in-game as biscuits. Fine meals are fabricated of 3 ingredients and are named stews. Lavish meals are made of four ingredients and are called roasts. Each meal generates a number of meal portions equal to the number of ingredients—cooking does not waste food.

Caution

If you are doing a lot of cooking but besides wish to brand soap be certain to turn off cooking tallow in the stocks bill of fare in one case tallow is bachelor.

If you have engaged in a spot of animate being slaughtering make sure to keep some easy meals queued up in the Kitchen to ensure that the raw meat and organs are quickly converted into more than easily stored and valuable cooked goods (easy meals are made a lot more than quickly than the other meals). Poorly stored fauna products volition rot.

Beekeeping

Raising bees for their honey, wax, and royal jelly can be a nice supplement to your nutrient and alcohol production. Beekeeping is relatively easy and so let'south get right into information technology! For starters, caput to the Craftsdwarf's Workshop and a add a g , Rock , task; and then use the secondary whorl keys to find Brand Rock Hive . Add together four to the job list.

Once the hives are built, find a serenity, outside area away from your animals and dwarves and printing b for Building and so alt and h for Hive . Place your hives in a group. One time they are congenital, press q and review the options each hive presents you with. There are two settings you lot can adjust: showtime, c toggles whether or not a bee colony can exist installed in a hive or non. Get out that one be: we want colonies to exist placed in these hives. The next option is g ( Assemble whatsoever products ). This we should toggle off on each hive so they are all set to Practise not gather products .

Tip

Bees will sting. Bee stings don't cause whatsoever real harm (although a single bee dies in the procedure), and generate no unhappy thoughts (except maybe in the bee!).

What volition happen next is that if a dwarf has the Beekeeping labor turned on it will try to detect a wild beehive on your map and split it, placing half of the swarm in i of your hives. In time the swarm will grow, and it will once more be bachelor for splitting or harvesting. Due to our setting choices, the swarm volition be split instead of harvested, and one-half of the swarm will be placed into an empty hive. One time your four hives are filled, you have a choice: you can either toggle two of the hives to Gather whatsoever products with one thousand —so long as y'all have made some rock jugs, ii hives will take their bee colonies destroyed, and honeycomb and royal jelly volition exist placed into 2 jugs. Alternatively, build four more than hives and exit these new hives toggled to Gather whatsoever products , and in this way your four original hives will produce colonies that will somewhen exist dissever, placed in the new hives, and then harvested.

In one case you take jugs (easiest built at a Craftsdwarf's Workshop out of rock) filled with honeycomb and regal jelly, you tin either cook or merchandise the royal jelly and you can process the honeycomb at a Spiral Press. Build one near your food stockpile using b-west-p for Screw Printing . A Screw Press needs two mechanisms that tin be congenital at a Mechanic'due south Workshop if required. Once built the Screw Press will present yous with 2 options when you q over it. The Press liquid from paste option refers to turning stone nut paste (fabricated at a Mill Stone or Quern) into rock nut paste oil and stone nut printing cake. The Press honey from honeycomb task is the chore we're interested in, and it will be red until some honeycomb is available. Once the task is available, you are able to prepare a task to turn honeycomb into honey (which can be cooked, eaten raw, or brewed into mead at the Notwithstanding) with wax every bit a byproduct (used to make wax crafts). You will, again, need jugs for the pressing process, so ensure that your Craftsdwarf'south Workshop has produced a surplus.

Milking

It is possible to milk livestock that you ain and then process the milk into cheese. Although you are unlikely to e'er feed a fortress with only milk or cheese, they provide yet more ingredients that can be cooked into meals or used as raw nutrient. If you lot have likely female person livestock (cows, camels, donkeys, goats, sheep, reindeer, yaks, pigs, llamas, etc.), the Milk Creature task can exist set from a Farmer'south Workshop ( b-west-w ).

Your dwarves will need spare buckets, barrels, or pots for the milking task and for milk storage. In one case all is in place your dwarf will become fetch the beast and and so milk information technology at the workshop. In one case you have a supply of milk, you tin set up a Make Cheese task at the same workshop and your milk will be processed into delicious cheese. Farmer's Workshops are important for all manner of food- and establish-processing jobs. You are probable to need three or 4 in a busy fortress to keep up with milking, cheese-making, and found-processing tasks.