Plump helmets. They’re the workhorse of the crops in Dwarf Fortress, able to grow underground without sunlight and used in a variety of drinks, meals, and crafts. In a pinch, they’re also a great emergency crop, as you can just have your dwarves make use of raw ones. What every new Dwarf Fortress player lives in fear of is running out of food, especially in the winter months. Especially when farming is covered in the documentation but, unusually, left out of the basic tutorial. While the method of properly farming plump helmets is simple, it’s also buried in several submenus. With this handy guide, hopefully you’ll be drowning in huge purple…mushrooms.
Start With Spawn
To get plump helmets in Dwarf Fortress, the simple answer is that you start with them. Each caravan begins with a number of plump helmet spawn, which you can then plant, provided you have the soil. They’re a hardy crop and don’t require much, which makes them almost essential to Dwarf Fortress, a game where literally everything has to be micromanaged. All you need is a plot of soil, and you’re good to go.
Getting a plot of soil will take a little doing, though. It’s not enough just to have the correct type of ground, you also need to water it properly— farming plots require mud, and if you can’t irrigate it (which requires its own separate guide), it won’t matter much if anything grows there. The upside of Plump Helmets is that you can grow them underground, but you’ll still require either mud, sand, or soil. If your start location has neither, get creative with that link to an irrigation guide. Don’t try a screw pump unassisted.
Once you have soil or muddy ground (best found on levels without a whole ton of stone to get in your way), congratulations. You’re well on your way to spawning plump helmets, the favorite mushroom of every newbie fortress builder.
Merchandising
The other way, and one that’s rough in the early game, is to buy seeds. You can trade with caravans and the annual delegation from your home fortress to get a variety of seeds in return for a variety of craft goods. This is usually handled by the fort’s broker at the depot. The caravan delegation appears once every Autumn. The traders usually appear in every season except Winter, when you’re on your own. Just set your dwarves to make a lot of crafts, and hopefully you can trade for plump helmets in a pinch.
Best Served Raw
Second, do not cook your helmets. Make drinks out of them and eat them raw. These will give you “spawn,” the plump helmet version of seeds, which you can easily turn into more plump helmets. It’s also a good way to learn how to grow food in Dwarf Fortress. Cooking meals with a type of vegetable, fruit, or fungus destroys any seeds it would have generated. You can’t replant without seeds, which leaves you stuck with a dwindling stock of plants. Worse, you’re at the mercy of trade caravans who can simply gouge you for all you’re worth. Save cooking for when you can’t eat something raw, or when your plant population skyrockets.
To do this, go into the “Labor” tab and tell your dwarves to exclude plump helmets when making meals. Seeds/spawn are excluded automatically, so don’t worry too much about those. Just make sure that your dwarves won’t boil everything down and exhaust supplies, and you’ll be all right.
Diversify
Third, don’t just make plump helmets, so your dwarves won’t subsist exclusively on a diet of raw mushrooms. Manage your crops carefully and learn to exclude anything that’s dwindling from the kitchens. A lot of Dwarf Fortress is about balancing systems as everything collapses into flames around you. The best way to deal with this is by applying any methods you learn to the game’s systems. If you learn how to plant Plump Helmets, you can learn how to plant just about anything.
If you’re running low on plants, exclude them from the cooked meals, have your dwarves either eat them raw or make drinks with them, and then put the seeds in bags. Set the bags in a stockpile near where you grow your food, and your dwarves will replant. Whenever you have too many seeds, start cooking your crops. Whenever you have too few plants? Just stop cooking them and transfer them to drinks. It’s micromanaging, but once you learn how to do anything in Dwarf Fortress, two things happen:
- You can do whatever it is again, because you learned how
- You can find a better way to do what you did, just by applying what you know to other systems.
That’s the beauty of the core gameplay loop— you learn how to do something, and then you do it again and get better each time. Your dwarves get bored with the same thing over and over again, so will you.
Beware The Barrels
One thing you have to be aware of: Dwarves in Dwarf Fortress are wasteful. This is connected to bugs in the game being decades old and highly conditional, and the way the code is a bit like a cat’s cradle— you pull on one part, you could unravel three others. Storing seeds in barrels seems like a great idea, but every time your dwarf uses a barrel of seeds to plant, they’ll use the entire barrel on a single planting and you’ll lose all your seeds. As annoying as this is, exclude barrels from the seed stockpile. With all this in mind, you should have a bountiful harvest of plump helmets in no time.
