40d:Important advice

Here are a few things to keep in mind when playing Dwarf Fortress.

Above all, one must remember that losing is fun! Be prepared to lose a few fortresses before you get the hang of things – it can be easy to accidentally kill the entire fortress while playing around with the different mechanics. But remember: losing means that next time, you'll remember how you lost! In a big way, Dwarf Fortress uses the principle of learning from one's mistakes.

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Advice

• Keep in mind that Dwarf Fortress doesn't have a "win" condition: It just has a long series of "lose" conditions.

• Learn the controls. There's lots of them, and learning them may seem daunting at first, but once you get the basics down (like how to check the status of your dwarves or the hotkeys for building certain structures), you'll find yourself playing much more efficiently. Efficient Gameplay offers some time-saving tips.

• If your game is running slowly, learn how to maximize your framerate.

• Save often! Although it can be a hassle to have to quit out and get back in, it's a lot better than having to build that long hallway of stone-fall traps, plant the whole bag of plump helmet seeds, and make that shipment of steel battleaxes for the caravan next year, all over again.
  • In this vein, there is a seasonal auto-save feature which you can turn on by editing your /data/init/init.txt file.

• Plan ahead a little during construction. When building your first couple dozen rooms, consider that in the future you might want to make certain busy hallways wider so dwarves aren't always climbing over each other. This will be a lot easier if you put rooms back an extra tile so you don't have to rebuild everything.

• Think three-dimensionally. You have a Z-axis. Things will be much closer when they're downstairs one floor then they if they're 20 tiles away down the hallway. Also note that, with the default tileset, your display of the fortress is not square, so north/south distances will appear longer than east/west distances -- they aren't.

Tips

• Dwarves thrive on alcohol. If a dwarf drinks only water, the rate at which he gets tasks done decreases. If the fortress has no alcohol for years, things will slow down quite a bit.
• Dwarves also need food, obviously - and a good cook (and a nice dining hall) go a long way towards keeping your fortress happy.

• Dwarves tend to get trapped easily. They like building and digging things from certain directions, so try to make sure there is a way out (and keep an eye on them just in case they try something crazy). Also keep in mind that workshops block certain squares, so if ever notice that your jeweler dies after constructing a workshop with a door on the east side, that's why.

• Workshops, construction and combat are noisy. Keep your sleeping areas away from noise and your dwarves will get a good night's rest.

• If a dwarf gets badly injured, he'll need a hospital bed and someone to bring him water in a bucket. It's probably a good idea to have a set of those sitting around.

• Traps can help take care of invaders at no risk to your dwarves. Any fortress can build a bunch of stone-fall traps.

• Having a dwarf with the Appraiser skill to be your outpost broker will help a lot when trading. Otherwise, you can't see how much an item is worth.

• Dwarves can be assigned new jobs at any time. If your carpenter has died, your farmer can start making beds. (He probably won't be very good at it, since he doesn't have the skill, but it's better than nothing.)

• It's hard to have too many barrels (or too many bins).

Tricks

• To find a dead dwarf, go under status (z), then select stock>>corpses. Hit tab, and use z to zoom to the particular dwarf to find a hint on where and how he died.

• Don't like all the stone laying around? Instead of using a stone stockpile create a 1-square garbage zone and dump the stone. Reclaim the stone after it's been dumped. This way, you can store an unlimited amount of stone in just 1 tile! (This is especially useful when the tile in question is next to your mason shop).

• Usually the closest available material is used for ambiguous tasks such as building a floodgate, but not always. To prevent frustration, you can make a custom stockpile (e.g. for bauxite) next to your workshop and close the dwarf in. Don't forget theres a z-axis, so make sure there aren't unwanted materials above/below your workshop. (A good start for magma maps is to build the workshop next to the wagon, and get your magma-proof grate/floodgate/mechanisms painlessly)

• The Standing Orders (o) screen can be used for a variety of useful settings, like having your dwarves temporarily ignore wood, or all hide inside for a seige, or making your weavers stop heading outside all the time to collect spiderwebs and get slaughtered by wild animals.

• Hitting x when building a building expands the list of items, so you can pick one with a specific quality (a nice bed for a noble's bedroom, or a good door for your dining hall).

• Designate some high-traffic lanes (d o h) outside leading away from your doors, leading to your timber. Your dwarves will trample fewer saplings, so you'll have more trees. (They also won't mess up the ground and leave a bunch of ugly sand spots scattered around on a sandy map.)

• Build a walled statue garden outside your fortress so that your dwarves don't get cave adaptation.