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Dwarf Fortress Food and Booze Calculator

Plan your Dwarf Fortress food and booze production. Computes farm tiles, planters, brewers, stills and barrels needed to feed N dwarves year-round, using formulas from dwarffortresswiki.org.

Vanilla DF planning

Tiles, planters, brewers and barrels for N dwarves.

Who and when

dwarves

How many dwarves will live in your fortress at peak. Children and military count the same as civilians for food and booze.
Game version
Modern DF (DF2014/v0.47 free and Steam Premium v50+) consumes 5 drinks per dwarf per season. Legacy DF (v0.31 and earlier, pre-2014) consumed 4. Food is the same in both.
What you farm

Plump helmet (default) is the all-season underground crop. Two-season crops give half the harvests, so you'll need a bigger plot.

How well you farm

Higher skill produces larger stacks per harvest. The wiki publishes only Dabbling and Legendary+5 explicitly; intermediate ranks are interpolated.

Fertilizer (made from potash) increases yield about 60% but requires a wood-burning ash production chain. Off by default since most forts skip it.
Safety margin
Multiplier on top of the bare-minimum tiles. 1.5x is the recommended buffer for migrant waves; 2x is paranoid but bulletproof.

Affects how many brew jobs your brewer completes per year. Does NOT affect alcohol yield (always 5x per plant). Default Skilled = 300 jobs/year.

Dedicated = brewer does only brewing. Part-time = brewer also does cooking/butchering, halving annual brew throughput.
Results
Farm tiles needed
70
8x9 plot (72 tiles)
Smallest near-square plot that covers the required tiles (2 extra tiles as buffer).Bound by: food
Booze per year
2,000
units / yr
Food per year
800
units / yr
Planters needed
4
planters
Brewers needed
2
brewers
Stills needed
2
stills
Barrels in flight
39
barrels
Days of buffer
168
days
Quick reference: tiles, planters and barrels by fortress size

Defaults: modern DF (DF2014/v0.47 + Steam v50+), plump helmet, Skilled planter, no fertilizer, 1.5x safety. Re-run the calc above with your inputs to fine-tune.

DwarvesBooze/yrFood/yrTilesPlotPlantersBrewersBarrels
14(small embark)280112103×41110
30600240215×52115
501,000400356×62122
751,500600537×83130
100(default)2,000800708×94239
1503,0001,20010510×116255
200(large)4,0001,60014012×127372
300(large)6,0002,40021014×15114105
Brewable plants in vanilla Dwarf Fortress

Underground crops are safer; surface crops grow faster but expose your farmers. Pig tail is the only crop on this list with a non-food secondary use (cloth fiber).

PlantLocationSeasonsHarvests/yrBrews toNotes
Plump helmetUndergroundSpring, Summer, Autumn, Winter12Dwarven wineDefault. Best yield/year.
Pig tailUndergroundSummer, Autumn6Dwarven aleAlso yields cloth fiber.
Cave wheatUndergroundSummer, Autumn4Dwarven beerCookable into flour.
Sweet podUndergroundSpring, Summer4Dwarven rumCookable into syrup.
Prickle berrySurfaceSpring, Summer, Autumn, Winter12Prickle berry wineAbove-ground risk.
Longland grassSurfaceSpring, Summer, Autumn, Winter12Longland beerAbove-ground risk.
Sun berrySurfaceSpring, Summer, Autumn, Winter12SunshineHard to obtain seeds.
Strawberry plantSurfaceSpring, Summer, Autumn, Winter12Strawberry wine—
Fisher berrySurfaceSpring, Summer, Autumn, Winter12Fisher berry wine—
End of plan.Updated May 6, 2026

Math sourced from dwarffortresswiki.org. Vanilla Dwarf Fortress only — mods may shift yields.

Dwarf Fortress food and booze calculator. Farm tiles, planters, brewers and barrels for N dwarves.

A Dwarf Fortress food calculator turns the wiki's farm-size formulas into one page that returns farm tiles, planters, brewers and barrels for N dwarves. The 100-dwarf default on plump helmet at Skilled planter (no fertilizer, 1.5x safety) needs 70 farm tiles in an 8x9 plot, 4 planters, 2 brewers, 2 stills and 39 barrels.

What is the Dwarf Fortress food and booze calculator?

The Dwarf Fortress food and booze calculator is a web tool that, given your dwarf count, your crop choice, and your planter's skill, returns every number you need to size a fortress's food production: farm tiles, near-square plot dimensions, planter count, brewer count, still count, barrels in flight, and how many days of food buffer your safety margin actually buys you. It implements the published formulas from `dwarffortresswiki.org/Farm_size_calculations` and `dwarffortresswiki.org/Brewer` exactly — no hand-waved estimates.
In Dwarf Fortress, each dwarf eats 2 meals and drinks 5 mugs of booze every season. That works out to 8 food units and 20 booze units per dwarf per year on Modern DF — both the DF2014/v0.47 free release AND the Steam Premium v50+ release share that 5-drinks-per-season rate per `dwarffortresswiki.org/DF2014:Alcohol`. The Legacy v0.31 toggle (pre-2014) drops booze to 16 units per dwarf per year (4 drinks per season per `dwarffortresswiki.org/v0.31:Alcohol`); food is identical in both. Brewing is a flat 5x multiplier — one stack of plump helmet [5] becomes one barrel of dwarven wine [25] regardless of the brewer's skill, which is the #1 misconception this calculator surfaces up front. Brewer skill changes brew-job duration, not yield.
The wiki publishes worked examples for round-number plots ("a 3x3 plump helmet plot supports 95 dwarves") but those numbers assume booze-cooking with seeds, which feeds dwarves a second time off the same plant. This calculator does NOT model that loop; it uses the simpler raw plant-to-meal conversion that veterans actually plan with. It covers the six brewable crops players actually grow (plump helmet, pig tail, cave wheat, sweet pod, prickle berry, longland grass), interpolates the planter-skill ladder between the wiki's two published anchors (Dabbling 1.0 unfertilized and Legendary+5 3.17 unfertilized), and labels which constraint binds — food or booze — for the input combination you picked. Above the cheat sheet you will see a near-square plot suggestion (e.g. 70 tiles → 8x9 plot, 72 tiles total), so you can stamp it down in-game without re-doing the geometry.

How to calculate food and booze needs in Dwarf Fortress (and how the calculator does it)

There are three stages: consumption, per-tile yield, and required tiles. The calculator above runs them automatically; the manual version below is the one Bay12 forum veterans use on paper.
Using the tool
1. Enter the dwarf count you want to plan for (default 100).
2. Pick your game version: Modern DF — DF2014/v0.47 free + Steam Premium v50+ (default, 5 drinks per season per dwarf) or Legacy v0.31 (4 per season, the pre-2014 free release for nostalgia or historical accuracy).
3. Pick your crop. Plump helmet is the default and the wiki's recommended starter — it grows in all four seasons, so it harvests 12 times per year.
4. Pick your planter's skill rank. Skilled (rank 4) is the realistic default for most fortresses; Legendary+5 (rank 20) is the wiki's published ceiling.
5. Optionally toggle fertilizer (potash). It raises per-harvest yield by roughly 60% across every rank.
6. Pick a safety margin: 1.0x exact, 1.5x recommended, or 2.0x paranoid.
The results appear above the cheat-sheet table: farm tiles needed, suggested plot dimensions, booze and food per year, planters, brewers, stills, barrels, and the actual days of buffer your safety margin buys you (1.5x = 168 days, half a DF year).
Doing it by hand
1. Annual booze need: $N \times 20$ for Modern DF, $N \times 16$ for Legacy v0.31. Annual food need: $N \times 8$.
2. Per-tile annual plant yield: $H \times Y$, where $H$ is the crop's harvests per year (12 for plump helmet, 6 for pig tail, 4 for cave wheat or sweet pod) and $Y$ is the per-harvest stack size at your planter's rank (Skilled = 1.43 unfertilized, Legendary+5 = 3.17 unfertilized, +60% if fertilized).
3. Per-tile annual booze yield: $H \times Y \times 5$. The brew multiplier is always 5 regardless of brewer skill.
4. Tiles needed for booze: $\frac{N \times B}{H \times Y \times 5}$. Tiles for food: $\frac{N \times 8}{H \times Y}$. The larger of the two is your raw tile count.
5. Multiply by your safety margin and round up. That is the number of farm-plot tiles to lay down.
For 100 Modern DF dwarves with plump helmet and Skilled (no fertilizer): annual yield per tile = 12 x 1.43 = 17.16 plants. Booze tiles = 2000 / 85.8 = 23.31. Food tiles = 800 / 17.16 = 46.62. Food binds (a counter-intuitive result — most players assume booze always wins). 46.62 x 1.5 = 69.93 → ceil to 70 tiles, fitted to 8x9. Planters at Skilled handle 5 x 4 = 20 tiles each, so ceil(70/20) = 4 planters. Brewers at 300 jobs/year per dedicated Skilled brewer: 2000 / 5 / 300 = 1.33 → 2 brewers. Barrels in flight: ceil(2000/12/5) + 5 = 39.

Required farm tiles for N dwarves

T=⌈max⁡(N⋅8H⋅Y,N⋅BH⋅Y⋅5)⋅M⌉T = \left\lceil \max\left( \frac{N \cdot 8}{H \cdot Y}, \frac{N \cdot B}{H \cdot Y \cdot 5} \right) \cdot M \right\rceil
  • TT = Farm tiles required (the integer the calculator returns)
  • NN = Number of dwarves
  • BB = Booze per dwarf per year — 20 in Modern DF (DF2014/v0.47 free + Steam Premium v50+), 16 in Legacy v0.31 (pre-2014)
  • HH = Harvests per year for the chosen crop — 12 plump helmet, 6 pig tail, 4 cave wheat / sweet pod
  • YY = Plants per tile per harvest at the chosen planter skill — Skilled unfertilized = 1.43, Legendary+5 unfertilized = 3.17 (wiki anchors)
  • MM = Safety margin multiplier — 1.0 exact, 1.5 recommended, 2.0 paranoid
The booze term divides by an additional factor of 5 because one brewable plant becomes 5 alcohol units regardless of brewer skill (`dwarffortresswiki.org/Brewer`). The formula picks the larger of the two needs (food vs booze) and multiplies by the safety margin, then rounds up to whole tiles. With low planter skill, the food term wins — a result the cheat-sheet panel under the calculator labels explicitly so you do not over-build by chasing booze when food is the real constraint.

Worked examples with the full math

Small embark — 14 dwarves, plump helmet, Skilled, no fertilizer

14 dwarves on Modern DF need 14 x 8 = 112 food units and 14 x 20 = 280 booze units per year. Per-tile yield = 12 x 1.43 = 17.16 plants. Food tiles = 112 / 17.16 = 6.53. Booze tiles = 280 / 85.8 = 3.26. Food binds. With 1.5x safety: 6.53 x 1.5 = 9.79 → 10 farm tiles, in a 4x3 plot (12 tiles total). 1 planter, 1 brewer, 1 still, 10 barrels. The full plot fits inside one underground room near the wagon.

100-dwarf canonical fortress (calculator defaults)

100 Modern DF dwarves, plump helmet, Skilled planter, no fertilizer, 1.5x safety. Annual need: 800 food + 2000 booze. Per-tile yield = 17.16. Food tiles = 800 / 17.16 = 46.62. Booze tiles = 2000 / 85.8 = 23.31. Food binds. 46.62 x 1.5 = 69.93 → 70 farm tiles, in an 8x9 plot (72 tiles total). 4 planters, 2 brewers, 2 stills, 39 barrels in flight, 168 days of food buffer. This is the cheat-sheet's bolded row — a sanity check most fortresses can copy verbatim.

100-dwarf fortress with fertilizer ON

Same inputs as above, fertilizer toggled on. Per-harvest yield jumps from 1.43 to 2.30 (+60%). Per-tile annual yield = 12 x 2.30 = 27.60 plants. Food tiles = 800 / 27.60 = 28.99. Booze tiles = 2000 / 138 = 14.49. Food still binds. 28.99 x 1.5 = 43.48 → 44 farm tiles, in a 7x7 plot (49 tiles total). The tile count drops from 70 to 44 — but you now need a wood-burning ash + potash chain to keep the plot fertilized every season. Most fortresses below ~80 dwarves skip fertilizer because the labour cost outweighs the saved tiles.

300-dwarf megafort — same defaults

300 dwarves, Modern DF, plump helmet, Skilled, no fertilizer, 1.5x safety. Annual need: 2400 food + 6000 booze. Per-tile yield = 17.16. Food tiles = 2400 / 17.16 = 139.86. Booze tiles = 6000 / 85.8 = 69.93. Food binds. 139.86 x 1.5 = 209.79 → 210 farm tiles, fitted to a 14x15 plot. 11 planters at Skilled rank, 4 brewers, 4 stills, 105 barrels. At this scale fertilizer pays for itself: turn it on and tiles drop to 131. Upgrading half the planters to Professional (rank 9) cuts the planter count from 11 to 5.

Cave wheat fortress — slow grower, 100 dwarves, Skilled

Cave wheat harvests only 4 times per year (versus plump helmet's 12). Per-tile annual yield = 4 x 1.43 = 5.72 plants. Food tiles = 800 / 5.72 = 139.86. Booze tiles = 2000 / 28.6 = 69.93. Food binds. 139.86 x 1.5 = 209.79 → 210 tiles, 14x15 plot, 11 planters. Cave wheat triples the tile count for the same fortress because of the 42-day grow time and 2-season window — this is exactly the trade-off the wiki's crop table makes you compute by hand. The calculator computes it for you.

Legacy v0.31 vs Modern DF for 100 dwarves

Same defaults but with the version toggle on Legacy v0.31 — the pre-2014 free release that consumed 4 drinks per season instead of 5. Booze drops from 2000 to 1600 per year. Food remains 800. Booze tiles drop from 23.31 to 18.65. Food still binds at 46.62 raw → 70 tiles, identical plot. Brewers stay at 2 (ceil(1600/5/300) = 2 — under the 2-brewer threshold the math is the same). Barrels drop from 39 to 32. Legacy v0.31 is slightly cheaper to feed but has the same farm footprint up to ~80 dwarves. Most players in 2026 will leave the toggle on Modern; flip to Legacy only if you are running v0.31 for nostalgia or a specific historical fortress challenge.

Planning tips for Bay12 veterans and Steam newcomers alike

  • Plump helmet is the default for a reason. It is the only brewable that grows in all four seasons (12 harvests/year), giving you double the annual yield of pig tail (6/year) and triple cave wheat or sweet pod (4/year). The wiki's `Plump_helmet` page calls it the only plant food-item purchasable at embark — start with it.
  • Brewer skill does NOT change alcohol yield. Per `dwarffortresswiki.org/Brewer`: "Regardless of skill, a brewer produces five units of alcohol for each unit of brewable plant." Skill only changes job duration. A single Skilled dedicated brewer (~300 jobs/year) handles a 50-150 dwarf fortress comfortably; promoting them to Legendary doubles brew speed but yields zero extra alcohol.
  • With low planter skill, FOOD binds, not booze. The community rule of thumb is "booze is always the bottleneck" — true at Professional planter and above, false at Skilled and below. The calculator labels the binding constraint explicitly. If you see "Bound by: food" you are over-building if you size purely for booze.
  • Always reserve 5 empty barrels for the brewing queue. The calculator's barrel output already adds that buffer (`ceil(annual_booze / 12 / 5) + 5`). Without it, brewers stall mid-job when the stockpile claims every empty barrel for finished alcohol.
  • Fertilizer (potash) raises yield about 60% across every rank, but it costs labour. The wood-burning ash chain (woodcutter → ash production → potash → fertilize) consumes 1-2 dwarf-seasons of work for a fortress under ~80 dwarves. Above ~150 dwarves it pays for itself in saved tiles and seeds. The 80-dwarf threshold is where most experienced players turn it on.
  • Surface crops (prickle berry, longland grass) match plump helmet on yield per year — both grow in all four seasons in v50 — but expose your farmer to wildlife, weather and gobbo invasions. The trade-off is risk, not throughput. Stick to underground unless you actively want surface crops for variety.
  • Don't cook your plump helmets! The Bay12 wisdom is to disable Cooking on plump helmets and every brewable plant in the kitchen settings, so your idiot dwarves don't turn drinkable booze inputs into one-time meals. The calculator assumes raw eating; cooking neither helps nor hurts the food math, but it kills brewing input.
  • Check the cheat-sheet table below the calculator before you build. Eight pre-computed rows from 14 dwarves up to 300, all using Modern DF + plump helmet + Skilled defaults. If you are within ~10% of one of those dwarf counts, you can stamp the row's plot directly without re-running the calculator.
  • Consider barrels vs pots. The calculator returns barrel count, but stone pots from a Craftsdwarf's Workshop work identically and are unlimited if you have stone. On a treeless embark, switch your reserved-barrels mental model to reserved-pots — the math is the same.

Dwarf Fortress food calculator — frequently asked questions

How much food and booze do I need for N dwarves in Dwarf Fortress?

Each dwarf eats 8 units of food per year (2 meals per season x 4 seasons) and drinks 20 units of booze per year on Modern DF (DF2014/v0.47 free release and Steam Premium v50+ both share this rate per `dwarffortresswiki.org/DF2014:Alcohol`), or 16 units on Legacy v0.31 (pre-2014, 4 drinks per season per `dwarffortresswiki.org/v0.31:Alcohol`). For 100 dwarves: 800 food + 2000 booze on Modern DF, or 800 food + 1600 booze on Legacy v0.31. Multiply by your dwarf count to get your annual production target.

How many farm tiles do I need for 100 dwarves?

With the calculator's defaults (Modern DF, plump helmet, Skilled planter, no fertilizer, 1.5x safety) you need 70 farm tiles in an 8x9 plot. Toggle fertilizer on and it drops to 44 tiles. Switch to a 2-season crop like pig tail and it doubles to roughly 140 tiles. Note: the wiki's `Farm_size_calculations` page cites a 3x3 plump helmet plot "supporting 95 dwarves" but that figure assumes booze-cooking and seed recovery — feeding the same plant twice (once as drink, once as the seed cooked into a meal). This calculator uses the simpler raw plant-to-meal accounting most veterans plan with, so a 3x3 plot at Legendary+5 fertilized covers booze for 139 dwarves but food for only ~70. The two methods diverge by exactly the cooking/seed loop the wiki includes and we don't.

How many planters does my fortress need?

The calculator uses a linear model anchored at the wiki's published Legendary+5 cap of 100 tiles per planter, which works out to 5 x skill_rank tiles per planter. For 70 tiles at Skilled (rank 4) you need 4 planters; at Professional (rank 9) one planter handles 45 tiles, so two cover the same plot. At Legendary (rank 15) a single dwarf manages the whole 100-tile farm. Most steady fortresses keep 2-3 dedicated planters even when one would suffice, as insurance against death or migration.

How many brewers do I need?

The calculator uses 300 brew jobs per year per dedicated Skilled brewer as its baseline. This figure is NOT a wiki-published constant — the wiki only states that brewer skill affects brew-job duration without quoting jobs/year. The 300 number is an internal estimate calibrated against bay12forums.com discussion threads and Steam community guides, where typical Skilled-brewer throughput is reported in the 250-400 jobs/year range (variance comes from interruptions, hauling, and stockpile distance). Treat it as a planning baseline, not a measured constant. At 100 Modern DF dwarves you have 2000 booze/year, divided by the 5x brew multiplier = 400 jobs needed = 2 brewers. Most fortresses up to 150 dwarves get by with a single dedicated Skilled brewer. Above 200 dwarves you need 3, above 400 dwarves 6+.

How many barrels should I produce?

The calculator returns ceil(annual_booze / 12 / 5) + 5. For 100 Modern DF dwarves that's ceil(2000/60) + 5 = 39 barrels in flight. The +5 is the empty-barrel buffer for the brewing queue (configurable in-game as the global Reserved Barrels setting). Without that buffer your brewers stall mid-job when stockpiles claim every empty barrel.

Does fertilizer matter for booze production?

Yes — fertilizer raises planter yield by roughly 60% across every skill rank. For 100 dwarves at Skilled it drops the tile count from 70 to 44. The trade-off is the wood-burning ash chain (woodcutter -> ashery -> potash) you need to make potash, plus re-fertilizing every season. Below ~80 dwarves the tile savings rarely justify the labour. Above 150 dwarves fertilizer is almost always worth it. Note: the wiki warns that poor soil cuts yield to about 1/4, so fertilizer on poor soil is a waste.

Does brewer skill affect alcohol output?

No. The wiki is explicit: a brewer produces five units of alcohol for each unit of brewable plant regardless of skill. Skill only changes how fast a brew job finishes — yield is always 5x.

What is the best crop for booze in Dwarf Fortress?

Plump helmet wins on yield-per-year for every legal embark. It is the only brewable that grows in winter, giving 12 harvests per year vs 6 for pig tail or 4 for cave wheat / sweet pod. Surface 3-season crops (prickle berry, longland grass) hit the same 12 harvests per year in v50, but expose farmers to wildlife and weather. For a single-crop monoculture, plump helmet is the optimum. For variety (drinks of different types make dwarves happier), rotate in pig tail and sweet pod even though they need more tiles.

Will dwarves die of thirst if they run out of booze?

Not from booze alone — they will switch to drinking water from wells, rivers or murky pools. But water-only dwarves work slowly and accumulate negative thoughts ("I had to drink water like an animal"). Over a year of dehydration the bad thoughts compound into tantrums and mental breaks. Dwarves only die of thirst when both booze AND accessible water run out. Always have at least one well plumbed to a clean cavern lake or a reservoir.

Why does the calculator say food binds when the wiki keeps saying booze is the bottleneck?

Both can be true depending on planter skill. The wiki's "booze is the bottleneck" wisdom assumes Professional+ planters and the booze-cooking loop (cook the seeds left over from brewing into meals). The calculator deliberately strips that loop and uses a raw plant-to-meal accounting: 1 plant = 1 food, 1 plant = 5 booze. With that purer model, food binds at every planter rank below Professional (9) because each dwarf needs 8 food per year vs the equivalent of 4 plants per year for booze. Once a planter hits Professional or higher, per-tile yield grows enough that booze becomes the bottleneck again. The "Bound by" label tells you which side of that line you're on for your inputs.

How accurate are intermediate planter ranks like Proficient and Professional?

The wiki publishes only two anchor points explicitly: Dabbling (rank 0, yield 1.0 unfertilized) and Legendary+5 (rank 20, yield 3.17 unfertilized). Skilled (rank 4) is also commonly cited at 1.43. Everything in between — Novice, Proficient, Professional, Legendary — is linearly interpolated by this calculator on the rank axis. That is consistent with how the wiki itself describes the ladder ("yield scales with skill") but the wiki does not publish the exact intermediate stack sizes. Treat Skilled and Legendary+5 as exact, and the others as ±0.05 plants per tile per harvest. The interpolation never affects the binding-constraint logic; it only shifts tile counts by a few units.

Does it work for the Steam version of Dwarf Fortress?

Yes. Modern DF — which covers BOTH the DF2014/v0.47 free release AND the Steam Premium v50+ release — is the default. The two share the same 5-drinks-per-season alcohol rate per `dwarffortresswiki.org/DF2014:Alcohol` (the wiki's main namespace was migrated to v50 in 2023, but the per-season constants did not change). The Game version toggle switches to Legacy v0.31 if you are playing the pre-2014 free release, which uses 4 drinks per season instead of 5 per `dwarffortresswiki.org/v0.31:Alcohol`. Food consumption is identical in both versions (2 meals per season).

Does the calculator account for migrants and population growth?

Indirectly — through the safety margin. Enter your TARGET peak headcount (the largest fortress size you expect during the playthrough) and pick a 1.5x or 2x safety margin. The calculator does not predict migrant wave timing; it sizes your farm for the eventual ceiling. If you are at 80 dwarves but expect to hit 150 by year 5, plan the farm at 150 + 1.5x now.

Why does my food bind, not booze, on the calculator?

At low planter skill (Dabbling through Skilled) the food term beats the booze term because food is consumed at 8 units per dwarf-year and booze at 20, but each plant brews into 5 alcohol units. So 1 plant = 1 food, but 1 plant = 5 booze. Once your planter is rank 9 (Professional) or higher, per-tile yield grows fast enough that booze becomes the bottleneck. The calculator labels the binding constraint under the Farm tiles output card.

Does this calculator support Masterwork DF or other mods?

No. The calculator targets vanilla Dwarf Fortress only — Modern DF (DF2014/v0.47 free + Steam Premium v50+) and Legacy v0.31 (pre-2014). Mods like Masterwork DF, DFHack overrides, or Earth-like raws change crop yields, growth times, and the brew multiplier in ways we cannot enumerate. If you mod, treat the calculator's output as a vanilla baseline and adjust by your mod's published yield ratios.

What about animals, military rations and children — do they eat differently?

No. Per the wiki, all dwarves (civilian, military, children) consume food and booze at the same rate. Animals are out of scope — pasture animals eat grass, butchered animals add meat to your food stockpile but are not subtracted from this calculator. Military soldiers eat the same 8 food + 20 booze per year as civilians; their barracks rations come out of the same fortress stockpile.

Dwarf Fortress food and brewing glossary

Planter

A dwarf with the Plant Grower labour enabled. Plants seeds in farm plots and harvests larger stacks per tile as their skill rises (Dabbling 1.0 -> Legendary+5 3.17 plants/tile/harvest).

Brewer

A dwarf with the Brewing labour enabled. Turns 1 plant stack into 5 alcohol units per brew job at a still. Skill affects job duration only — never yield.

Still

The workshop where brewing jobs run. Built from one workshop block; the calculator emits one still per active brewer.

Barrel

Wooden or metal container used to hold finished alcohol. Each brew job consumes one empty barrel and produces one filled barrel of stack-size 5x the input plant stack.

Plump helmet

Underground purple mushroom — the default brewable in Dwarf Fortress. Grows in all four seasons (12 harvests/year), brews into Dwarven wine, can be eaten raw.

Dwarven wine

The alcohol produced by brewing plump helmet. One of seven standard alcohols (wine, ale, beer, rum, prickle berry wine, sunshine, longland beer); all share the same 5x brew multiplier.

Pig tail

Underground brewable that grows only in summer + autumn (6 harvests/year). Brews into Dwarven ale and yields cloth fiber when processed at a Farmer's Workshop.

Cave wheat

Underground brewable with a 42-day growth time and a 2-season window (4 harvests/year). Brews into Dwarven beer; mills into flour for cooking.

Sweet pod

Underground brewable with a 42-day growth time and a 2-season window (4 harvests/year). Brews into Dwarven rum; processes into Dwarven syrup at a Farmer's Workshop.

Fertilization

Treating a farm plot with potash, increasing per-harvest yield by roughly 60%. Requires a wood-burning ash production chain (woodcutter -> ashery -> potash). Must be repeated each season.

Safety margin

Multiplier applied on top of the bare-minimum tile count to absorb migrant waves and bad-luck seasons. 1.5x is the recommended default; 2x is a paranoid buffer that buys 168 extra days of food.

Bound by

Which constraint sets the tile count: food or booze. At low planter skill, food binds (a counter-intuitive result the calculator labels explicitly). At Professional+ skill, booze binds.

Vyanzo na Marejeo

  1. dwarffortresswiki.org/Farm_size_calculations — Canonical farm yield table: harvests per year, days per harvest, plants harvested per tile per year for every brewable crop. Primary source for the calculator's formula chain.
  2. dwarffortresswiki.org/Brewer — Defines the 5× plant-to-alcohol multiplier and the wiki-confirmed rule that brewer skill affects job speed only, not yield.
  3. dwarffortresswiki.org/DF2014:Alcohol — modern DF (DF2014/v0.47 free release and Steam Premium v50+) consumption rate of 5 drinks per dwarf per season → 20 per year, used in the calculator's modern toggle.
  4. dwarffortresswiki.org/v0.31:Alcohol — legacy DF (v0.31 and earlier, pre-2014) consumption rate of 4 drinks per dwarf per season → 16 per year, used in the calculator's legacy toggle.
  5. dwarffortresswiki.org/Skill — Skill-rank ladder (Dabbling → Legendary+5) the calculator anchors its planter yield interpolation against.
  6. dwarffortresswiki.org/Plump_helmet — Default crop reference: confirms 4-season underground growth and dwarven wine as the brewed product.
  7. dwarffortresswiki.org/Cooking — Documents cooking ingredient counts (2/3/4 per meal) and confirms cooking does not multiply nutritional total — the basis for omitting a cooking-ratio toggle.

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