Title really says it all. I am a new player. Every time I try starting a fortress and I get to an underlying cave.
I start a farming plot. Set them to plant plump helmets only for all seasons. I make sure they (my dwarves) don’t use the spawn as cooking material. And still they seem to be harvesting them without getting any new or extra seeds back in return.
What gives? Am I forgetting something here?
The number one cause of that happening is cooking the seeds. But if you are really sure that’s not it, then it might be that you are using in some other job like milling/pressing, or some critter is eating them all, or it might be the bug that causes seeds to become unavailable once stored (but I’m pretty sure that has already been patched time ago).
What you can try is selecting a plump helmet spawn and make the camera follow it to see where it ends up going.
As of last year the bug was where keeping seeds in a bag meant that a dwarf would take the whole bag of seeds to plant one helmet. That would cause all the other seeds in the bag to be unavailable and would cancel all the plant orders. I was still setting up quantum stockpiles to deal with this one.