Underground Farming

Veeky Forums Tell me about your dwarfs, what do they farm? what do they eat? how do they grow/feed their food?

They don't, they trade for it with everything they mine/forge with humans and elves nearby. The other societies need raw materials somehow

Plump helmets and dimple cups

Aquifers filled with blind fish
Bats
Certain plump insects
Mushrooms LOTS OF mushrooms
Growing goat herds on the side of the mountain


Basically the dwarfs could live on the stuff from under the mountain

They really dont want to

So they clash with races over the mountain surface or trade

This is what they eat. Also what eats them.

Bugs.

Have you ever wondered why Dwarves are known for using axes while there is no such thing as an underground lumberjack? It's the preferred tool for butchering giant underground bugs.

For some reason, there's this notion that dwarves can't do anything above ground unless it's fighting or trading.

My dwarves live in mountains, yes, but they farm above ground like anyone else. Being a dwarf doesn't mean you can't coexist with the surface.

Now, before my dwarves came to the surface they primarily ate mushrooms and cave fish.

You don't eat dimple cups, you filthy casual. They get milled into dye.

The real problem is growing anything other than plump helmets.

The mountains and below are honeycombed with caves with vibrant ecosystems. though they do farm a little they're hardly very advanced. They get by with gathering and hunting parties.

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but what do these shrooms and fishs eat?

goblin corpses

The caves are riddled with volcanic water spouts and blow holes, which keeps the organic detritus in a cycle up and down through the cave systems. which feeds the baseline of the ecosystems.

Sophisticated and near-industrialized mix of subsurface, mountainside, and foothill farming. They're able to self-sustain fairly well, they just like the cash from selling fancy crafts to humans.

Don't mushrooms have like 20cal per 100g? ITT dwarfs eating 10kg/day

Mud. Dwarves create underground "fields" by temprarily channelling rivers into caves to fill them with mud. Then they dam the river and have a fresh mud field. Of course, this needs to be regularly replenished, and various fertilizers are added.

The deepest dwarves have also bred fungi that live off of underground deposits of coal, natural gas, and even limestone. But these grow very slowly and can only support small dwarf colonies. Cities must use the mud farming methods.

what do they farm on mud? plants? without light?

> Urist likes plump helmet men for their similarity with food.
There is always something to eat if you dig deep enough

Nah. A pile of syrup roast and a barrel of sewerbrew every 3 or so months

>but what do these shrooms eat?
Generally dorfs in the unlikely eventuality that they reach critical mass

Underground, in their caves and forts ? Heavily handled Earth. Dwarves are born of rock, stone and Earth, require its magical essence to keep existing ; put to keep themselves alive above the level of elemental Earth, this energy has to be infused with concepts of Life too, and Life is Change (as far as Earth is concerned. Creatures of other elements have different opinions on what best defines life, but that's neither here nor there).
So, to generate a sufficient consumable "background radiation" of Living Earth in their holes, they have to pretty much incessantly inflict work on stones, rocks, muds, earth, et cetera. Mining, sculpting, forging, digging, burying, crafting, engraving, writing poetry on the walls, all those actions and more make the underground world literally alive, and keeps the dwarves alive. A dwarf works to live, and lives to work. But it's not a bad life, a variety of works and creations brings an equivalent of variety of "tastes" and feelings that are completely akin in fullness to the most glorious reaches of the arts, AND it means they get lots of art, objects, weapons, magical items, jewels and other cool toys.

Above the surface, where Earth is less Earthy and its elemental radiation less consumable in an appreciable form, they have to be less subtle and ingest in their ventral cavity large portions of other emanations of purer Living Earth, so they can catch it all and sustain themselves. Worked solid artifacts, metal that has been worked into preciosity, plants that have grown into the ground and left to rot to come back to the ground... or, as most people see it, they try to keep for themselves loot, gold and beer.

That assumes a dwarf needs as much nutrients as an adult.

follow the reply chain, you beardless sun-lover.

not that user but if they work as much as i wish they to, they will need it if not more

It also assumes that dwarven metabolism functions identically to a human's. Just because grass has close to 0 calories for a human doesn't mean that cows starve.

This. And, like humans, it leads to a stereotype that tans are ugly and show that your a poor slob. Real dwarves plumb the deeps, only hillbilly rednecks expose themselves to the sun out in the hills like idiots. From this, dwarven masks have become quite popular.

Modern mountain dwarves have become hardier but more reliant on their fortifications and cultivated land. It has allowed them to build deeper and bigger, but at the cost of becoming reliant on sunlight emitting magic stones and fish farms.

Used to be that a dwarf would live just under the surface cutting channels for sunlight and fostering the subterrainian jungles in their great cave-states.

user, 20 calories isn't what we receive from it, thats the fucking total, we humans can process only about half of it. Apparently edible fungi have indigestible fat, so if dwarfs can process everything they will get about 20cal per 100g

But why caves? Well because their long lives and low birth rates meant fortified cities on a grander scale than any human. Without order, without walls of stone, without the steel from the Earth the dwarves would not exist.

That doesn't mean there are none the nomads and barbarians, their strange lives in affront to God are shortened but they always seems to have multiple children from a single birth. What was taken from them in lifespan something else gifted them in spreading their filthy litters. Those animals are hardly above a goblin themselves, I bet there is human in them.

Dwarves eat "pork oil", that is, live porks that are put inside the dwarven equivalent of an hydraulic press, and violently liquefied into a meaty, bloody, shitty, bonny smoothie.
Originally, the consumed just about any trace of organic matter they could put their mouth on, including slimes, shrooms, rots and corpses, until humans discovered them and how, without any appearance of culture, tools and educations, dwarves could shape any solid matter into aesthetic and technological wonders for which they had little interest. In a fit of honesty, the humans traded those creations for what they had on hand : porks.

How and why dwarves decided that crushing them alive was the most appropriate action to apply to them is lost to history.

Still, porks are the only trade that most dwarves will accept in exchange of their wares, and the pressing of the porks is the quintessential (if not the only) cultural events in their society, as the whole community gather around the presses to behold the animal getting crushed, hear the desperate and deafening squeals, smell the horrible odour of guts spilled open... all of which is irresistibly erotic for all dwarves (whose O-face naturally looks like a dying pig, whose speech sounds like squealing and whose odour is not unlike a rotting corpse) who can hardly be kept from throwing themselves into the presses to anoint themselves in liquefied pig, consume, binge, vomit and re-eat again what is left everywhere, and violently copulate with whatever falls under their hands.

Traders who bring anything else but porks are immediately put under the press for being stupid.

user, the calories in food labels aren't the same as the total energy contained. They only count the digestable components. For example, dietary fiber doesn't count towards the nutrition value calories.
A log of wood has alot of joules of energy (calories) but if it had a nutritional label the calorie count would be pretty low

Still, fungi doesn't have alot of energy either way

Different market

And besides its to flavor food, not be the source of nutrients

Or they have nutrient rich mushrooms that they have developed over time.

PLUMP HELMETS
ELF MAIDEN PUSSY

FUCKING METAALLLLLLLLLLL

MAGMA
A
G
M
A

Do you know why dwarves dig so deep they unearth balrogs all the time? Its because they eat them. Dwarves survive off eating underground demons.

Quite obvious.

Plump Helmets

No it's because dwarfs love shallow materialistic things like jewelries, so they dig deep to compensate for their shallow personas.
"that's deep, master dwarf"
"aye"

There's various magical leylines, portals to other dimensions, magma in more usable and controllable ways than irl, deposits of radioactive material, and magically superior fertilizer,while all the water underground is highly mineralized and rich. All of this would be a little much for humans to live on regularly, but with dwarves naturally hard stomachs and magic resistance, they can grow many sorts of fungus and plants that feed off all of these different forms of energy.

Spider eggs
Lichen wraps
Mushroom stew
Honey maggots
Mole milk
Crab on a stick
Marble flour bread
Lye cakes
Ant wine
Giant earthworm roast
Moss salad with caramelized bugs
Carapace flakes

Human flesh
Orc flesh
Elven flesh
Dwarven flesh
Spider flesh
Plant roots
Bats
Worms
Rocks
Moth pussy

They grow mushrooms and have a trade agreement with the elves to get them baked into cookies.

Dwarfs are not the only race that knows how to mine.

They eat what you and I eat after finding The Heart of The Mountain. A Giant Gem over 13 and a half Chains across that glows with the furiousity of the sun but only a degree of the heat.
They raised it on Chains of adamantium and affixed it in the roof of their volcano to shine down below.
They then imported as much dirt to cover the floor and side cliffs as possible and redirected rivers into water ladders that drop onto the Gems top for humidity control and occasional rains.
It's not perfect as its still a technically small amount of farm land for a kingdom and still have reliances on animal and mushroom farms elsewhere.

>what do they farm?
Lichen, vetch, potato, flax and albino-cactus.

>what do they eat?
Besides above, musk oxen, pork, fish, mushroom pie (you stuff the giant cap with whatever you want). Lead and batwing powder are spices.

Devil booze and elven brandy are the favorite drinks.

>how do they grow/feed their food?
With trenches, terraces, aqueducts and mounds. Dwarf agriculture requires a lot of engineering.

>Your setting has sources of energetic light (magic crystals or other shit like that) that allow a process similar to photosynthetis in absence of sunlight
You may have a thriving, independent underground echosystem.
>Your setting doesn't have the above
Your underground echosystem can only live off of what lives on the surface, or their discards. It can't be independent.
>Your setting doesn't care for scientific accuracy
Go with whatever the fuck you want