One of the ways that you can feed your dwarves is by hunting meat to cook. One of these food types is fish. Not only will Dwarves love to go out for a days fishing, this will also keep the belly’s of the other dwarves full.
This guide will show you how to catch fish in Dwarf Fortress.
Contents:
How to Have Your Dwarves Fish
To being with, you will have to make sure some of your dwarves are actually set to fish. To check and change this, open up the labor menu using the Y key. You can also select the Hammer icon in the bottom left. Now, you will see the dwarves in your fortress and select which types of jobs they will be doing.
This is very important as you generally want your specialty dwarves only doing the actions that they are really great at. There’s no point having a master surgeon out hunting when there are people that need to be treated. So here, you want to make sure your Fisherdwarves are actually assigned to fish.
The easiest way to do this is to select the Fisherdwarves menu option on the left. This will automatically sort the dwarves by fishing competency. You can select at the top between Everybody does this, Only selected do this or Nobody does this. These are all pretty self-explanatory. I usually go with Only selected to this. Now, select the checkmark on the right next to the dwarves that you want to be out fishing. It’s generally best to pick a few from the top.
Creating Specific Fishing Zones
Now that we have some dwarves that will be fishing for the fortress, we will need somewhere to catch some fish. You can create specific zones if there are certain areas your want your dwarves to fish. They will generally find the closest location to them automatically but I find it better to fine-tune which water sources to use. There are different animals that can be found in lakes, rivers and oceans.
To create a fishing zone we first open up the Zone menu with the Z key. Once here, you can see the option to create a Fishing zone. Simply select this and find a water source to paint over. You can left-click to start a zone, then create a grid over a body of water. Once you’re happy with your selection, press the Accept button and your new fishing zone will be created. Dwarves will now fish in this area.
You can select the zone and change details about it to. For example you can change the name from this menu or suspend activities here if you want your fisherdwarves to focus on a different area for a period of time.
How to Use/Cook Fish
Now that we have fish, we are going to have to cook it for our dwarves to enjoy. Once you are collecting fish, you are going to need two different workshops to process this into food. a Fishery and a Kitchen. You can find both the fishery and the kitchen in the Build menu (B hotkey) under Workshops. Both can be found under the Farming category.
Build both of these somewhere in your fortress. It doesn’t matter in which order. Now, open up the fishery and Add new task. In this menu find the option Prepare a raw fish to gut and filet the fish into cookable pieces. Now, open up the kitchen and start the work order to create meals. It doesn’t matter which type of meal you choose but your dwarves will be happier and work better if they have high quality meals to eat.
