https://dwarffortresswiki.org/api.php?action=feedcontributions&feedformat=atom&user=Silfir 2026-05-09T04:37:41Z User contributions MediaWiki 1.35.11 https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=40d:Starting_builds&diff=9555 2009-01-30T00:28:08Z

<p>Silfir: /* Items */</p> <hr /> <div>'''Starting builds''' are different strategies that you can choose when starting a new game in [[fortress mode]]. The skills and items which you assign to your [[dwarves]] will have a large impact on life in your new fortress, especially in its first year.<br /> <br /> This page gives advice on some of the many gameplay elements which influence the flow of your game based on your goals. These include: choosing a ''fortress site'', the ''starting build'' itself - defined by who and what to take with you - as well as ''challenge builds'' aimed at providing new or unusual challenges to advanced players.<br /> <br /> * Your First Fortress?<br /> Note: If you are a new player looking for a solid basis to survive the first couple of months or years, check out [[Your_first_fortress|this guide]]. It includes a basic starting build similar to the one discussed below.<br /> <br /> == &quot;Play Now!&quot; ==<br /> By default, you start with a Miner [5 skill points] and other dwarves with novice [1 skill point] in various areas (see object data for details), two axes and two picks, 20 and 40 of two kinds of [[alcohol]] (dwarven wine and ale below, though I've also started with dwarven beer so it's random), 15 units each of meat (the meat type is random and available types vary by civ; in the object data below it's donkey) and plump helmets, 5 each of plump helmet and pig tail seeds, two cats, two dogs.<br /> {{Game Data|[PROFILE]<br /> [TITLE:Default]<br /> [SKILL:1:MINING:5]<br /> [SKILL:2:CARPENTRY:1]<br /> [SKILL:2:BOWYER:1]<br /> [SKILL:3:WOODCUTTING:1]<br /> [SKILL:3:BREWING:1]<br /> [SKILL:3:COOK:1]<br /> [SKILL:3:PLANT:1]<br /> [SKILL:3:HERBALISM:1]<br /> [SKILL:3:SMELT:1]<br /> [SKILL:3:WOOD_BURNING:1]<br /> [SKILL:3:LYE_MAKING:1]<br /> [SKILL:3:POTASH_MAKING:1]<br /> [SKILL:4:DETAILSTONE:1]<br /> [SKILL:4:MASONRY:1]<br /> [SKILL:4:MECHANICS:1]<br /> [SKILL:4:DESIGNBUILDING:1]<br /> [SKILL:5:CUTGEM:1]<br /> [SKILL:5:ENCRUSTGEM:1]<br /> [SKILL:5:WOODCRAFT:1]<br /> [SKILL:5:STONECRAFT:1]<br /> [SKILL:5:BONECARVE:1]<br /> [SKILL:6:FISH:1]<br /> [SKILL:7:PROCESSFISH:1]<br /> [SKILL:7:BUTCHER:1]<br /> [SKILL:7:TANNER:1]<br /> [SKILL:7:WEAVING:1]<br /> [SKILL:7:CLOTHESMAKING:1]<br /> [SKILL:7:LEATHERWORK:1]<br /> , [ITEM:2:WEAPON:ITEM_WEAPON_PICK:METAL:COPPER]<br /> [ITEM:1:WEAPON:ITEM_WEAPON_AXE_BATTLE:METAL:STEEL]<br /> [ITEM:1:ANVIL:NONE:METAL:IRON]<br /> [ITEM:20:DRINK:NONE:PLANT_ALCOHOL:MUSHROOM_HELMET_PLUMP]<br /> [ITEM:40:DRINK:NONE:PLANT_ALCOHOL:GRASS_TAIL_PIG]<br /> [ITEM:5:SEEDS:NONE:MUSHROOM_HELMET_PLUMP:NONE]<br /> [ITEM:5:SEEDS:NONE:GRASS_TAIL_PIG:NONE]<br /> [ITEM:15:MEAT:NONE:DONKEY:NONE]<br /> [ITEM:15:PLANT:NONE:MUSHROOM_HELMET_PLUMP:NONE]<br /> [PET:2:DOG:STANDARD]<br /> [PET:2:CAT:STANDARD]<br /> }}<br /> One battle axe has been omitted from the listing above due to the full build going over the number of points you can spend.<br /> <br /> In addition to what is listed, a horse and a donkey may be provided with the wagon.<br /> <br /> == Components of a Starting Build ==<br /> <br /> === Skills ===<br /> <br /> Each [[dwarf]] can learn any of a large number of [[skills]]. Dwarves with little experience in a skill will work slowly and ineffectively.<br /> <br /> * For example inexperienced [[herbalist|herbalists]] will gather stacks of only one or two [[plants]] or even nothing, inexperienced [[farming|farmers]] will often plant stacks of only one or two plants. This results in a small overall output which takes many [[container#container|containers]] to store in, less effective [[food]] preparation in the [[kitchen]], and more space needed for [[stockpiles]].<br /> * Inexperienced [[Miner|miners]] work very slowly and are less likely to recover mined gems. Mining can be levelled up quite quickly by mining [[soil#soil|soil]], but taking two dwarves with at least some points in mining is recommended in many cases.<br /> * In nearly all [[workshop]]s, inexperienced dwarves who create items will create low quality goods, and take a long time doing so. Skilled dwarves work quickly and produce high-quality items.<br /> ** [[Quality]] is a central concept in the game - it affects [[food]], [[alcohol]], and almost anything you will have your dwarves create in the game: [[trading]] goods, [[barrel|barrels]], [[clothing]], [[armor]], [[furniture]], [[weapons]], and so on. Quality also has a large effect on the worth of an item while [[trading]].<br /> <br /> Dwarves improve their skills on a learning-by-doing-basis. Dwarves who have specific labors will attain Dabbling status as soon as they complete one job of that type. (Certain jobs, such as building workshops, won't make your dwarves more experienced. But most will.) As the number of jobs they do increases, their skill will increase as well. Overall, &quot;levelling up&quot; the dwarves' skills quickly is a good game goal to set. Doing so may result in your dwarves efficiently creating a magnificent fortress filled to the brim with valuable items and [[furniture]]. (Or it might [[losing|not]].)<br /> <br /> Using and seeing high-quality items gives dwarves happy [[thought]]s. This tends to decrease the incidences of [[tantrum]]s, increasing a fortress's longevity.<br /> <br /> === Which do I need, really? ===<br /> <br /> Most builds recommend:<br /> <br /> * 2 [[miner]]s<br /> * [[mason]]<br /> * [[brewer]]<br /> * [[cook]]<br /> * [[mechanic]]<br /> * [[farmer|grower]]<br /> * [[carpenter]]<br /> * [[woodcutter]]<br /> * [[herbalist]]<br /> * some skills (crafter, gem setter, smith..) to create trade goods or build up a dwarven [[glass]] or [[steel]] industry.<br /> <br /> ==== Combining Skills ====<br /> Some [[skills]] are highly time-consuming, and working at different jobs levels up specific [[attribute]]s. One could level up a miner until hes becomes mighty and ultra-tough - and then turn him into a soldier. If you plan on doing so, it may not be a good idea to give this guy another critical job.<br /> <br /> Since tasks will take place in specific areas, it makes sense to combine tasks into dwarves who will take care of a specific industry - so Combine (indoor) farming with cooking (not mining), for example.<br /> <br /> Most builds recommend combinations such as:<br /> <br /> * Woodcutter/Carpenter. Add [[axeman|Axedwarf]] for added security.<br /> * Mason+ : In many fortresses, the Mason is a very busy dwarf. He could be a spare miner, have abilities that are only rarely needed, or do tasks that can be accomplished quickly.<br /> * Farmer/Cook, Farmer/Brewer. Basic two-person food team.<br /> * Farmer/Herbalist, Farmer/Brewer/Cook. One bold dwarf to farm and venture outside looking for wild plants, the other to keep busy in the [[still]], kitchen, and indoor farms.<br /> * Boss: Novice [[Negotiator]]/Novice [[Judge of intent]]/Novice [[Appraiser]]. Combine this with a single time-intensive task such as [[Masonry]] and optionally turn off all hauling tasks right at the start of the game. This guy will be your Boss and Trader, make him [[record keeper]] too.<br /> * [[Craftsdwarf]], depending on your strategy - e.g. [[glass]] maker, [[weaponsmith]] or [[armorsmith]], sometimes combined with related tasks from that industry ([[furnace operating]], [[wood burner|wood burning]]). Typically an item hauler in the initial months of your fortress, this dwarf may become one of your most valuable dwarves later.<br /> <br /> === Items ===<br /> <br /> Some basics are recommended for all builds. You definitely need to bring one [[pick]] for each [[miner]], some [[food]], and some [[alcohol]]. If you plan to gather wood, you can bring an [[axe]], which will become a weapon in wartime. Everything else depends on your strategy and on how tough or leisurely a challenge you want the game to be.<br /> <br /> Note: Many builds recommend that you bring many different cheap foods, with quantities ending in a &quot;1&quot; or a &quot;6&quot;. This is to maximize the number of [[barrels]] you start with, since most foodstuffs fit five to a barrel. More barrels will let you build a larger stockpile for your first winter and conserves the [[wood]] you harvest in the early game for beds and other necessities.<br /> <br /> == Fortress Sites ==<br /> Each fortress [[location]] offers particular challenges and opportunities. The starting builds below should be adjusted depending on the [[region]] your fort occupies, the specific vision you have of your fortress, and what it will take to [[losing|stay alive]] where you're going!<br /> <br /> === Mountains ===<br /> Most dwarven fortresses are founded along the edges of [[mountain]] ranges on sites that combine abundant [[ore]] and access to the outside world. [[Magma]] and rare [[metal]]s lure settlers here, but [[goblins]], [[chasm]] dwellers, and even [[giant eagle]]s are potent threats.<br /> <br /> [[Tree]]s and plants do not grow at high elevations, so you'll want to include non-mountainous areas to obtain lumber and food - or, failing this, to pack a lot of extra food and logs.<br /> <br /> Other consideration is elevation range. The game allows access up to 15 levels above the highest peak and 15 levels below the deepest valley, so steeper slopes means much more diggable area. The downside is lag; more levels also means more CPU burden (this can cripple a fortress - be careful).<br /> <br /> Be sure to include a stream on the map; running [[water]] is (almost) essential for any fortress. In Cold and Freezing climates streams and [[lake]]s will often be frozen year-round and your dwarves may quickly die of exposure. Choose Temperate or tropical zones for an easier game.<br /> <br /> === Wooded Plains (with trees and plants) ===<br /> Flatlands with at least some trees and gatherable plants can also make for highly successful fortresses. <br /> <br /> Advantages over mountain zones include abundant trees and plants, guaranteed agriculture both on the surface and underground, fewer hostile fortresses and [[cave]]s, and (unless frozen) more abundant water. There are even (rare) magma vents.<br /> <br /> The greatest disadvantage is a lack of [[rock]] to mine. Fewer elevations means fewer exploitable z-levels. The first few levels below the surface are almost always [[soil]], peat, [[loam]], [[clay]], or [[sand]], none of which offers much (or any) [[gem]]s, ore, or building material. An [[aquifer]], if present, may bar all access to [[stone]] until you freeze, pump out, or find a way through the water.<br /> <br /> === Desert, Glaciers, and Barren (few or no trees and plants) ===<br /> Treeless (or near-treeless) [[biome]]s are challenging sites for a fortress: you get most of the disadvantages of a flatland site without having access to nearly as many trees and plants. However, near-lifeless zones such as [[glacier]]s are wonderful for those with slower machines, as there's little to burden the CPU but your dwarves and livestock. [[Desert]]s and barren areas often have sand; with a sufficient source of energy (preferably magma), you can build almost anything out of unlimited glass.<br /> <br /> === Ocean Side ===<br /> An interesting combination of a few of the above locations, [[beach]]es are often a mix of ease intermingled with bouts of extreme difficulty. Minerals and trees are often abundant, as well as farmland and sand, but there is often no drinking water unless the biome has a [[river]].<br /> There is also a likelihood that the settlement will fall between two [[biome]]s, potentially hazardous if the player expects a peaceful oceanside meadow, without realizing the ocean is full of amphibious zombie [[whale]]s.<br /> <br /> == Basic Build ==<br /> <br /> The first order of business is simply to survive. Here is a simple, somewhat paranoid, way to do this.<br /> <br /> ==== Dwarves &amp; skills ====<br /> On most (but not all) sites, you'll want to get food, brew drink, mine, make wood and stone items, and trade. Whatever additional skills you purchase, be sure to cover these. If you need more points to buy skills (and it's a good idea to buy lots of skills), remove a battle [[axe]].<br /> <br /> * 2 miners<br /> * 1 mason/mechanic<br /> * 1 carpenter/woodcutter<br /> * 1 grower/brewer/cook. He's responsible for making prepared meals and drinks.<br /> * either a herbalist/grower, or a [[fisherdwarf]], or a [[hunter]]. The first gets you lots of brewable plants on maps with plants, the second gets you food and [[bone]]s on maps with water (in maps with dangerous fish such as [[carp]] fishing is suicidal so be careful), and the third gets you meat and bones on maps with [[animals]]. Herbalism is usually the safest of the three.<br /> * 1 spare dwarf. You might make him the leader and [[broker]]; if so, give him at least novice [[appraiser]] skill so you know what stuff is worth. You might make him responsible for making trade goods, or turn him into your first soldier, or you might just give him some skills you want to experiment with.<br /> <br /> ==== Items ====<br /> You want picks, food, and drink. Everything else is optional. The suggestions below assume you spent the maximum possible on skills. We'll pack lots just to be safe.<br /> <br /> * 2 [[pick]]s - 1 per miner<br /> * 1 [[battle axe]] - so you can chop wood<br /> * 1 [[Anvil]] - so you can make weapons, trade [[craft]]s, and such<br /> * 20 units of drink: [[dwarven ale]], [[dwarven beer]], and [[dwarven rum]] are all good. [[dwarven wine]] you'll get through brewing.<br /> * 30 [[plump helmets]] - They're good to eat and produce 5 units of [[alcohol|booze]] for each one brewed at a [[still]].<br /> * 5 [[turtle]]s - they get you [[bone]]s and [[shell]]s<br /> * 20 [[plump helmet spawn]] - for planting.<br /> * 2 [[dog]]s - to guard against [[thief|thieves]] and help kill intruders.<br /> * (optional) other kinds of [[seed]]s and rock nuts<br /> * (optional) 1 of many different kinds of meats for extra barrels<br /> * (optional) some cheap (5 point) [[leather]] to make [[quiver]]s and [[bag]]s and such<br /> <br /> If the map is treeless, remove the battle axe and spend the freed points on more plump helmets and logs (you're going to run out however many you bring...).<br /> <br /> If you're willing to wait a year or two to do any metalworking and you're sure traders will come, remove the anvil and spend the freed points on such things as skills, food and drink, wood, leather, raw materials, or [[weapons]].<br /> <br /> <br /> == '''Rapid Expansion''' ==<br /> A plan for quick growth followed up by heavy immigration works well both as an early game strategy and as an assist for a late game foundation. Starting off with the anvil is also much less troublesome if you drop both battleaxes and make your own picks too. Don't worry though, you'll be digging out cavernous villas in no time, and cheaply too, with this build. Food and [[stone]] will be in abundance and you'll have excellent worker time utilization. And due to the early metalworking and distributed skills your dwarves have, soon you'll have powerful steel-armored warrior workers that'll form the bedrock of a city [[guard]].<br /> <br /> Always build a wood burning [[furnace]], [[Smelter]] and [[Metalsmith's forge]] first, and take apart that [[wagon]] for extra logs. Either burn those logs into [[charcoal]], or smelt [[coal]] into fuel, and then make your tools.<br /> <br /> ==== Dwarves &amp; skills ====<br /> By dropping both picks and axes you'll be able to afford a lot of useful skills, and you'll be able to get a metalsmithing shop running within the first seconds of your game, so no precious time is lost. Your Dwarves are divided largely into two groups, your laborers (Butcher, Baker and candle--er, Brewer) and your craftsdwarves. Essentially a Blue collar/White collar divide to set up a nice class war later. Also, by having such wide assortments of skills, your dwarves will get lots of attribute bonuses and become extremely capable fighters by the time you need to worry about that.<br /> <br /> Laborers are given mining and growing skills with some extra to cover food production. The Ranger is the oddball, but will spend his early days gathering plants and hauling items, so fits here. Your first order of business with them is to dig that top layer out quickly and get some farms started and fully stocked. Then, as they grow, you can go back to digging out the rest of the base.<br /> <br /> * The Baker: +5 Mining, +2 Growing, +3 Cooking.<br /> * The Brewer: +5 Mining, +2 Growing, +3 Brewing.<br /> * The Butcher: +5 Mining, +2 Growing, +1 Butchering, +1 Tanning, +1 Leatherworking. Make some bags for sand and the [[Quarry Bush]]es and a butcher's shop before the Ranger starts his hunts.<br /> <br /> * The Ranger: +3 Woodcutter, +3 Carpenter, +1 Herbalist, +1 Ambusher, +2 Axedwarf. Be sure to assign a [[war dog]] or two to this guy, since he's the only one who needs to go outside. Once he gets an axe, he'll also be a competent fighter and hunter and will start with armor due to +1 ambusher.<br /> <br /> Craftsdwarves focus on running shops, building trade goods, and making the outpost as profitable as possible in the first year, to attract additional immigrants that can be thrown into the mines or toil in the mushroom fields. They should have very broad skill bases, but the actual choice of leader is up to you.<br /> <br /> * The Smithy: +1 Weaponsmith, Armorsmith, Metalsmith, Furnace Operator, Wood Burner, Stone Crafting, Bone Carving. This guy will cover all of your rarely needed creation skills, and make your picks and axes. After this he usually ends up making scads of stone crafts for sale. [[Glassmaking]], [[gem cutting]], and [[potash maker|potash making]] are good as well, and even with novice in all areas you'll build fast enough for these rare items.<br /> * The Foreman: +3 Building Design, +3 Mechanic, +1 Judge of Intent, Appraiser, Organizer, Record Keeper. Building design and mechanical work is extremely quick work, so instead give him nobleman skills to spend the rest of his work hours on. These are extremely useful in the long-term.<br /> * The Freemason: +5 Masonry. It seems a bit silly to give him just one primary skill, but Masons are usually working 24 hours a day on all variety of stone [[door]]s, [[chair]]s and [[table]]s.<br /> <br /> There's a variation if you want a more 'compact' design of those last two:<br /> <br /> * The Construction Worker: +5 Masonry, +3 Mechanic, +2 Building Design.<br /> * The Lazy Boss: +3 Fishing, +3 Fish Cleaning, +1 Judge of Intent, Appraiser, Organizer, Record Keeper.<br /> <br /> This is not as useful or safe, as Fishing is a time-intensive skill, so it takes him away from his record keeping job for extended periods and a [[Carp|carp]] might kill him. It also forces your Mason to get behind on Queues every time someone needs a trap build or a workshop set up. Halting book-keeping doesn't slow down any production, so the original stat-spread can work out better.<br /> <br /> ==== Items ====<br /> The only thing you need is your anvil, a few stones and [[bar]]s of metal, everything else is optional. A point of contention is the [[Iron]] Axe you'll be making, as some may prefer it to be steel. Steel Bars cost 150, which is three times the cost of iron, and only provide a small damage bonus and no chopping speed bonus. If you start in an area with [[Limestone]] or [[Chalk]] you'll soon be able to smelt Steel with your functioning metalsmith shop anyway. If you're on a map without trees, well, I suppose you don't need the axe at all. But in that case you'd be better off taking the picks, dropping the anvil, and buying a few hundred logs.<br /> <br /> * 1 [[Anvil]] - this is what makes it all possible, and helps you get started faster.<br /> * 3 [[Copper|Copper bars]] - these cost 10 each, and will be your picks. Three for the price of one, literally.<br /> * 1 [[Iron|Iron bar]] - this costs 50, and will be your axe. The 40 extra is worth it for the damage increase you get over copper or bronze.<br /> * 2 [[Bituminous coal]] or [[Log]]s - you can smelt two coal into 4 fuel for the cost of 2 logs. Inexpensive at 3 each, one can afford to bring more.<br /> * 4 cheap stone - [[bauxite]] is good, because it can be used to build magma floodgates.<br /> <br /> That's what you need to get started, but this is a guide for the items on your list. This build does not require or recommend bringing plump helmets due to their cost. Instead, encourage your dwarves to eat the turtles and meat out of the barrels and cook wine biscuits. Your farms will be running amazingly quickly anyway, and for half the cost of a single helmet you can make feed several dwarves on baked beer. You'll get enough seeds from brewing the [[plump helmets]] soon enough.<br /> <br /> * 26 of [[Dwarven wine|Wine]], [[Dwarven rum|Rum]], [[Dwarven beer|Beer]] and [[Dwarven ale|Ale]]<br /> * 36 of [[rock nut]]s, [[Plump helmet spawn]] and [[Pig tail]] [[seed]]s<br /> * 11 [[turtle]]s - these hilarious little dudes are way better than the meat you usually set out with, what with all the bones they leave. I use these as 'before farming' rations and build up a good supply of bone [[bolt]]s. Shells are also valuable to have around.<br /> * 1 of each other 2 cost meat, for extra empty barrels. Barrels cost 10, so getting any food below that can save you money.<br /> * 2 [[Dogs]] - preferably war dogs or hunting dogs. Assign these to your Ranger. Bring a pair so you can make more dogs.<br /> * 1 [[Horse]] - they're relatively inexpensive and will help you begin breeding horses faster, as you nearly always get a horse with your wagon. Livestock are a valuable commodity for meat and bones, and you want as many of these possible 'emergency rations' on hand. Be aware that it is not garanteed to get a horse pulling your wagon, especially when [[muskox|muskoxen]] or [[camel|camels]] are also available. So ending up with three different typs of [[domestic animals]] is possible, making you unable to breed until a [[caravan]] or a [[migrant]] brings more. Consider wisely.<br /> * 4 [[Leather]] - you need leather bags to process [[quarry bush]]es and to gather sand for glass. Four will be enough, and you can get it for only 20.<br /> <br /> If you do it exactly as written, you will end up with a few points left over. Grab some extra food or upgrade one of your copper bars to an actual copper pick, if you want a faster start. These foodstuffs will last a very long time if managed properly, so get your farms going and start preparing for next year now.<br /> <br /> == Metalbashing/Glassworking ==<br /> Heavy metalbashing and glassworking requires a site with 1) abundant fuel and 2) raw materials. Magma is ideal but large coal seams or a forest will also suffice. A site with either limestone or chalk means nearly unlimited steel. Any site with &quot;sand&quot; (not &quot;loamy sand&quot; or the like) will permit glassworking. Failing these, any place with lots of rock, trees, and preferably sand will work fine. Your biggest choice when setting up is whether to optimize for a fast start or long-term success.<br /> <br /> ==== Dwarves &amp; Skills ====<br /> Unless you're trying a low-skills challenge, each dwarf should get the maximum possible number (currently 10) of skill boosts; remove a battle axe to free up needed points. Individual preferences can be mighty handy; if you have a dwarf who likes steel, [[clear glass]], [[crossbow]]s, [[siege engine]] parts, or something else equally interesting, he's an ideal candidate for matching skills.<br /> <br /> * A Carpenter/Leader: Points into Carpenter, Wood Cutter, and a bunch of nobles' skills, including at least novice Negotiator and Appraiser. This dwarf should have good inter-personal thoughts/preferences.<br /> * A Mason/Mechanic: Points into Mason, Building Designer, and Mechanic. Adding more points to Mason gets construction materials and furniture faster. More points to Mechanic allows faster [[trap]]-setting. Adding Appraiser and/or Negotiator skills gives you a back-up leader or broker. A boost to [[Wrestling]] gets you better on-call defense.<br /> * A Farmer/Herbalist (assumes the site has at least some plants): This dwarf will gather the plant material you need to brew drinks. Points into Grower and Herbalist. Leftover skill raises should be invested in a valuable, hard to raise trade skill such as [[Blacksmith]], [[Metal_crafter|Metal Crafter]], or perhaps [[Glassmaker]] or [[Clothier]].<br /> * A Farmer/Brewer/Cook: This dwarf is responsible for keeping your community fed and liquored up. Points into Grower, Brewer, and (optionally) Cook. Leftover skill raises should be invested as for the Farmer/Herbalist.<br /> * A Craftsdwarf: Points into whatever hard-to-raise skills you most want. [[Armorsmith]], [[Weaponsmith]], [[Bowyer]], [[Glassmaker]], and even [[Siege_engineer|Siege Engineer]], [[Clothier]], or [[Gem_setter|Gem Setter]] can all be good choices depending on your setup. If you plan to bash metal, remember to spend a few points on Furnace Operator and (if needed) Wood Burning.<br /> * 2 Miners/Soldiers: Points into both mining and military skills. The miners first get legendary and then become extremely powerful fighters. Remember that it's much easier to increase Mining skill than most of the military skills (especially Armor User), but also that you'll want capable miners immediately.<br /> <br /> With this setup, you have several ways to make the trade goods you'll need to buy what you lack. Metal [[goblet]]s, stone [[mug]]s, handwear, footwear, [[mechanism]]s, bone or wood crossbows, prepared meals, or bone and shell crafts are all solid choices.<br /> <br /> Food and drink for the first few seasons are assured by first cooking all the meat to free up barrels, then brewing your plump helmets (and any gathered plants) to make booze.<br /> <br /> ==== Items (all starts) ====<br /> * 2 [[pick]]s<br /> * 6 or 11 of each of [[dwarven ale]], [[dwarven beer]], and [[dwarven rum]]. With abundant brewable plants and lots of wood you don't actually need any starting booze, but it's nice to have a backup.<br /> * at least 11 [[plump helmet]]s. Bring a lot more if you anticipate problems with gathering brewable plants.<br /> * at least 6 [[turtle]]s. Not only are they good eating, they ensure you have the [[shell]]s and [[bone]]s needed to satisfy [[strange mood]]s.<br /> * 1 of every kind of meat that costs 2 or 4, as each type of meat will be packed in its own free barrel and cooking the meat will release that barrel for use. If you don't like this feature, bring more turtles or plump helmets instead.<br /> * Unless the map is glacial, or you intend only outdoor agriculture, bring plenty of seeds as well. A minimum of 15 plump helmet spawn are essential for a quick start to underground agriculture; rock nuts, [[sweet pod]] seeds, pig tail seeds, and [[cave wheat]] seeds will diversify your meals and drinks and let you set up for [[cloth]]es-making. Seeds are packed in bags.<br /> * (optional) some cheap (5 point) leather to make quivers and bags and such<br /> <br /> ===== Items (fast start) =====<br /> * 1 [[Anvil]]<br /> * no [[battle axe]] - you'll save points by making it yourself.<br /> * only a few logs (just enough to get started with), unless the map has no trees<br /> <br /> See [[Make Your Own Weapons]] for more details on what to bring and how to make the battle axes you need to chop wood.<br /> <br /> ===== Items (moderate start) =====<br /> Warning: Going without an anvil will slow you down until you get one in trade (which normally takes about 6 or 7 seasons) and might even cost you a failed [[strange mood]].<br /> * no [[Anvil]]<br /> * 1 [[battle axe]] (at present, steel is the only option)<br /> * few or no logs, unless the map has no trees<br /> * with the points you save by not bringing an anvil, buy logs, bars of base metals you expect your site to lack, and (if needed) coal (for fuel and coke) and/or dolomite (for flux).<br /> <br /> ===== Items (slow start) =====<br /> * no [[Anvil]]<br /> * no [[battle axe]]s<br /> * lots of logs - at least 25 on a heavily forested map. You can survive without them, but it's a lot cheaper to buy logs to make barrels than to bring more drink.<br /> <br /> == Everybody Mines Build ==<br /> One build that is actually very easy to use is to take no mining skills and 7 or more cheap picks. Then, pick a site with sand or dirt or clay, which is extremely easy to mine. Assign all of your dwarves except your woodcutter to mining, and dig out some big storage areas to begin with in the sand. By the time you have a basic fort laid out (less than a season) they will all have plenty of skill ups and will be able to go through regular rock quite quickly. Then you can turn them off mining, and turn any immigrants on mining and have them do the same skilling up on sand and dirt. This allows you to rapidly increase dwarf attributes, so they can later learn some other skill which aligns well with their attribute bonuses. Also, it makes them more dwarfy!<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> = Free Equipment =<br /> <br /> Dwarves who start with the ambusher skill may get some leather [[armor]], a crossbow and some bolts for free.<br /> : As of 27.176.38c, this appears to only be true if they have *only* military skills: ambusher/marksman/armor user/wrestler gets free gear, but replace any of those skills with something civilian and they show up in street clothes. (This has only been tested in cases where the civilian skill was their new highest skill; it might work to give them minor civilian skills, but that did not work in past versions.)<br /> <br /> = Challenge Builds =<br /> If you want a challenge try some [[Challenges]].<br /> <br /> {{Starting FAQ}}</div>

Silfir https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=User:Silfir&diff=44511 2008-11-16T13:43:16Z

<p>Silfir: </p> <hr /> <div>Dwarf Fortress Start Builds by Skill<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> This guide's purpose is to offer thoughts on the value of skills and their viability as part of a standard seven-dwarf-starting build, for all the crazy optimizers out there.<br /> <br /> All skills that the author deems to make any kind of sense as startup choices will be mentioned. Those that are not even mentioned are mostly useless even later on in the game, when there is no shortage of dwarves that have this skill, and simply are of no use to a fledgling fortress. (I wonder if some guy will come out now and say that he actually uses a Dyer very early to great effect by trading dyed clothing for obscene profits or something...)<br /> <br /> The order in which the skills are discussed follows the order in which they are listed on startup. An entry for the skill will try to discuss any viable combination, at least the tendencies; it is implied that taking one point off maximum skills for purposes of making room for others won't change the general idea.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''MINERS'''<br /> <br /> Almost essential if you want to set up an underground fortress early; dabbling miners will simply take too long. Having a maximum skill miner in your startup team also makes a lot of sense if you want to mine ore at any point before &quot;horribly late&quot;, since ore mining is something that shouldn't even be done by proficient miners; a miner that started out proficient and got to expert level or something while he dug out your initial fortress space will make you much happier with your ore output.<br /> <br /> NO MINER:<br /> <br /> For challenge games that forbid mining. You don't have to read a guide like this if you contemplate something along those lines.<br /> <br /> NO MINER/A COUPLE OF PICKS:<br /> <br /> If you don't want dedicated miners at all yet - put your unskilled dwarves to work! If you want the skills for other stuff...<br /> <br /> MINER:<br /> <br /> Doesn'T take a lot of skill points. Still will take bloody ages.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER:<br /> <br /> A single dwarf with maximum skill in mining will be hard at work to carve out your initial fortress; generally it will take long enough that you will have to set up workshops and stockpiles and work outside for a while. On the upside, if you don't plan on having much mining done later on, you can make sure that you still have one extremely skilled miner in any case if he is the only one who ever did any mining. Mining for ore once your fortress space is set up is thus very satisfying. However, it really does take long for your initial fortress to be dug out by a single miner; and if you happen to lose that one miner together with his pick... If you plan on setting up an underground fortress anyway though, one proficient miner is more than you'll ever need (you still want the one to dig out ore and stuff).<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER/EXTRA PICK:<br /> <br /> Well, this solves the problem of losing your only pick together with your one starting miner at the very least, with only 20 dwarfbux extra. Also, you can have one of your other dwarves help dig out the fortress, albeit at a very slow pace...<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER/MINER:<br /> <br /> Something to think about. Generally this might be enough to have your fortress dug out in a sensible timeframe. The level 2 Miner will not stay a miner forever; usually he will work at his other job once the initial fortress is dug out, and leave further mining, for instance exploratory mining, to his more skilled buddy, only mining out living spaces where you don't want to get too much stone. This might be a good choice for your fulltime single Mason in the beginning, when he doesn't have any stone to work on yet. Once he's done enough work, switch Mining off for him and never turn it on again. You'll still have a spare pick you can give to immigrants later if you need to do more mining than your single dedicated miner can take care of.<br /> <br /> TWO PROFICIENT MINERS:<br /> <br /> This is recommended often in beginner guides, and usually wise. You will have your initial mining done fast enough, and later you will often find at least one of your two miners ready to work. This also means that your miners can take up secondary jobs with relative ease; the other is there to pick up the slack, after all. In most beginner guides, one of the miners also gets the administrative skills (Judge of Intent, Appraiser, Organizer, Record Keeper, Social Skill (Negotiator, for instance) and becomes expedition leader, while the other gets Stonecrafter, a job that can be worked anytime if mining isn't needed, for the large benefit of turning useless stone into vendor trash. Other builds are imaginable, given the flexibility of this build variant. It does use up a seventh of your total skill points.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER/TWO EXTRA PICKS:<br /> <br /> A variant of one of the above builds; speeds up initial fortress set up with the help of two dwarves that don't have any jobs needed initially and thus can at least be put to this use without wasting any skill points on them. Only if you think putting this kind of inefficient use of dwarfpower in initial setup is worth it to save the few skill points that would make your dabblers much more effective...<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER/MINER/MINER:<br /> <br /> This gives you the rough initial setup speed of two proficient miners. It costs about the same in skill points and requires one more pick, but it divides the skill points used among two dwarves instead of another one. This is an option if you want these dwarves to get high level skills, but still work other jobs beyond Miner initally, which might be the case if you want to start out with Proficient Armor- and/or Weaponsmiths.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER/PROFICIENT MINER/PROFICIENT MINER:<br /> <br /> Honestly? This is overkill. You don't need this large a fortress set up this fast. It costs a bit too much in skill points with doubtful use. Having your initial mining divided up between three dwarves also isn't good for ore mining efficiency. Only choose this if you want to engage in some hardcore mining right from the start.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''WOODCUTTER'''<br /> <br /> Woodcutting is near useless on treeless maps (you might still be able to grow towercaps later). On maps WITH trees, at least some degree of Woodcutting skill is wise, especially if the trees are few and far between and it thus takes long enough time to even get to them.<br /> <br /> NO WOODCUTTER OR AXE:<br /> <br /> As mentioned, if there aren't any trees, and you know for sure you won't be growning towercaps for a while, if at all (no underground river or lake = no towercaps), then you don't need to bring a Woodcutter, or even an axe.<br /> <br /> STEEL BATTLE AXE:<br /> <br /> If you want a dabbler to cut your wood. This will take bloody ages, and so is not really recommended. If you've got trees, you should at least have a<br /> <br /> NOVICE WOODCUTTER:<br /> <br /> Yeah. This should be the minimum for Woodcutting skill. Give this to a Carpenter, in addition to some other skill or skills, and you're all set for reasonable wood item production. As a crazy optimizer, I won't go much higher.<br /> <br /> HIGHER THAN NOVICE WOODCUTTER:<br /> <br /> Got skill points left over and want to increase your woodcutting speed for any reason, for instance since you want to use wood for more than just carpentry? Then invest some skill points here, but keep in mind that your Woodcutter will practice cutting wood anyway. I stop at Competent Woodcutter at the most.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT WOODCUTTER:<br /> <br /> Starting builds choose this for simplicity. I consider this a waste of skill points that could have gone into some more useful level 1 skills, like Metalsmith, Thresher, or even Woodcrafter, or most notably Axedwarf for extra early defense (remember the axe you have to bring with you anyway?) If you combine Woodcutter with Carpenter, take points away from Woodcutter, not Carpenter.<br /> <br /> If you have TWO Carpenters working since you plan on building an aboveground fortress, having a Proficient Woodcutter is actually worth it, since you have to cut the wood at about the same speed at which your carpenters work. Of course, since you don't need miners, this is easily forgiven.<br /> <br /> MORE THAN ONE WOODCUTTER:<br /> <br /> Axes are too friggin' expensive. If you plan on forging two copper axes on site... Nah, not even then. One Proficient Woodcutter is generally enough.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''CARPENTER'''<br /> <br /> The only carpenter-only items that you need for a well-rounded fortress are beds. Beds have quality levels, so high-quality beds are useful, but they are not strictly essential as you can impress nobles with other stuff.<br /> <br /> Carpenter is usually paired up with Woodcutter because of the obvious synergy: If your carpenter runs out of wood to work with, he doesn't have to wait for any other dwarf to get the wood for him, but can go and cut it himself, and have the haulers fetch it for him so he can start right on carpenting once he's finished.<br /> <br /> NO CARPENTER:<br /> <br /> A possibility on woodless maps or maps with very low supplies of wood, if you only plan on making beds and buckets out of wood anyway and don't care about the quality. Does take a lot of time, so your dabbler of choice should get to work immediately in an aboveground workshop. You'll get carpenter immigrants later to work on your traded-for wood to make more beds, and you have the skill points free for other, more useful stuff. Does pretty much require you to have magma or at the very least bituminous coal or lignite, because if you don't have those you need wood made out of charcoal for barrels and bins, too, and even if you do have access to coke, it's only a limited resource better used on steel, armor or weapons.<br /> <br /> NOVICE CARPENTER:<br /> <br /> Like the above build, with one skill point spent on having it require less time to make the initial beds and bucket, and subsequent beds.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT CARPENTER:<br /> <br /> This is generally recommended if your map has at least some wood, and to get beds of at least some quality. Even more suitable if your map has decent supplies of wood, and definitely worth it if you plan to make bins and barrels all out of wood (i. e. no magma or superfluous metal). Taking one point off to make room for Novice Woodcutter and another Proficient level skill is not unwise, as there is not that much difference and high skill levels aren't that crucial, especially if you happen to have large amounts of wood to train with, as is the case on maps containing Woodland or Heavily Forested biomes.<br /> <br /> TWO PROFICIENT CARPENTERS:<br /> <br /> In case you want to build an aboveground fortress out of wood. On Heavily Forested all-aquifer maps, this can happen, and might be preferable to having a fortress entirely in soil. You need the extra carpenter to construct buildings.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''MASON'''<br /> <br /> Masons are usually hard at work, because usually stone is the material of choice for anything that can be made out of it. If there's no aquifer, stone is essentially available in practically limitless amounts. It's not the only and definite building material, especially if magma and sand are available, or the map is heavily forested anyway. On maps with aquifer, it's almost reversed; stone can be sparse there, and wood the better choice for furniture. Few important items need to be made of stone or stone blocks (mechanisms spring to mind), after all. Only stone blocks (they can be traded for), millstones and querns need to be made by a mason, and these don't need any quality levels.<br /> <br /> NO MASON:<br /> <br /> As has been mentioned, maps with an aquifer generally contain few stone or none at all. If you don't plan on breaching through the aquifer anytime soon, then you'll never get stone except for trading or deposits above aquifer level. Even if you do need to make some furniture items out of stone, you can have a dabbler or later on immigrant work on it.<br /> <br /> MASON:<br /> <br /> The alternative if dabblers don't work fast enough for you. Cheap in skill points.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MASON:<br /> <br /> The most popular build choice for maps WITHOUT aquifers, or for people who plan on breaching through the aquifer early anyway and want their mason to work full-time on transforming stone into furniture. High-quality furniture is worth your while since it makes dwarves happy, and happy dwarves are farther away from a homicidal rampage than unhappy ones. Also, if your mason needs to provide the fortress with most of its furniture, you need him to work reasonably fast pretty much all the time. This is one of the main problems with this build: Giving your one Proficient Mason skills that he'll even have time to make use of. Some even don't give him any skills beyond Proficient Mason; I think that at the very least you can have him be Novice Building Designer, since he will have to build most of the buildings that require a designer himself anyway, and it comes up rarely enough that it won't take away much of his time. Also useful: Novice Animal Trainer, to transform your starting dogs into war dogs while there is not yet any stone to work with. Give him Competent Herbalist in addition to those two and have him gather some plants while there is still no stone or particular need to make furniture quick, and you're set. Also a possibility is to give him some Mining skills so he can help set up the fortress. In short, any skill that, although useful, takes very few or almost no time away from his Masonry will suit your Mason dwarf well. It might even be prudent to give him some fighting skills just in case.<br /> <br /> TWO PROFICIENT MASONS:<br /> <br /> Having two Proficient Masons only makes sense if you plan on having them working both at the same time; if you only plan on having two masons so you can give them some other skills they can work on while the other takes up mason duty, it's more sensible to have one dedicated mason and another dwarf with both of those non-mason skills - you'll always need at least one Mason working full-time. TWO Masons working full-time - or at least, one full, one half - are generally not necessary, except if you plan on setting up an aboveground fortress with stone dug up by a single Miner. You'll need the extra Mason then, and can substitute one of your miners for him because you only need to mine for stone, not space.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''ENGRAVER'''<br /> <br /> The value of this at startup is doubtful. Engraving is mostly decorative work with the exception of fortifications. Of course, having a high-value dining room early does wonders for dwarf moral. There are stupider skills to take.<br /> <br /> NOVICE ENGRAVER:<br /> <br /> Well, if you do get an early Engraver, he needs some mad skills to be of use, since he can't waste time training for them as one of your starting dwarves. Only choose this if you absolutely must have some early fortifications carved out of walls, and even then you might just hand that to a dabbler. For early smoothing with a dwarf that you think won't get much better to do with his time for a while, this is okay.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT ENGRAVER:<br /> <br /> Get a legendary dining room in no time! Beyond that, pretty much a waste of skill points. The truth may lie inbetween for you.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''BUILDING DESIGNER'''<br /> <br /> Not strictly necessary - you can also simply enable the labor for any dwarf and have him get to work. But that will take longer. At least<br /> <br /> NOVICE BUILDING DESIGNER:<br /> <br /> Should always be worth it. Give it to your primary Mason, or any other Dwarf that still has room for a level 1 skill that seldom will be used. Your single Mason is best because he usually doesn't have many other sensible choices anyway, and will be the one who constructs the building designed most of the time.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''WEAPONSMITH'''<br /> <br /> Usually metal industry takes up time, so it's not much trouble to wait for an immigrant Weaponsmith. BUT - since these are not guaranteed, and they will start at skill level 2, it's tempting to include a highly skilled Weaponsmith among your starting dwarves, especially if you have no magma and can't quite waste coal fuel training a n00b.<br /> <br /> NOVICE WEAPONSMITH:<br /> <br /> In case you plan on setting up a metal industry very early. Novice already means a lot towards higher skill levels compared to zero, so this is an effective use of skill points if you don't plan on having enough to go all the way.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT WEAPONSMITH:<br /> <br /> But I say, if you plan on including one at all, try to make him or her as skilled as possible. He'll work some other job until a metal industry is set up, and he won't churn out weapons exactly all the time even then, so give him a useful secondary job, like some sort of crafting, or Furnace Operating, or Grower. Even Carpenter, he can still make beds, barrels and bins during his downtime as a Weaponsmith.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''BOWYER'''<br /> <br /> Wooden or bone crossbows - that's all you can do with this. This is only worth it if you plan on having no metal at all for a prolonged time early on, and you must equip your military with SOMETHING, and you have no obsidian for swords either, and you don't want to rely on traders.<br /> <br /> NOVICE BOWYER:<br /> <br /> At least it won't be all no-quality, and you can't go that much wrong with only one skill point for a seldom-used skill. If you have surplus wood, have your Novice Bowyer churn out a lot of crossbows and trade away (or just dump) the low-quality ones before assigning any to your marksdwarves or hunters. Your material is shitty, so try to make the best of it.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT BOWYER:<br /> <br /> In theory, this gives you the best weapons outside of obsidian and metal. In practice, a waste of skill points. Getting access to better weapons shouldn't be THIS hard. Better get higher-skilled crafters, to get more trade goods worth more dwarfbux, and TRADE for some weapons until you can set up a metal industry. If you don't plan on having a metal industry at all... Well, get this if you must. Dwarves in leather, wearing wooden shields and firing bone crossbows are still better than dwarves wrestling naked.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''ARMORSMITH'''<br /> <br /> I could write &quot;See Weaponsmith&quot;, as the same criteria apply. Armorsmiths tend to be a bit more busy than Weaponsmiths once the metal industry has started, because you need only one weapon per military dwarf, but in theory they all can wear multiple pieces of different armor. (Plate mail + helmet + shield + boots + greaves...) Keep this in mind when assigning your Proficient Armorsmith his other job to work on until he gets to apply his mad skillz. Carpenter is probably not the thing for this guy.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''METALSMITH'''<br /> <br /> Metalsmiths produce items with quality levels, but not usually items that NEED to be of high quality. You can make furniture out of metal, but that requires fuel and a lot of metal bars versus one single stone. Usually metal furniture is only made out of bars of metal that you obtained in trade - if you dig the metal out, it's much more efficient to just have a mason use the ore to make the statue, resulting in the same value, no fuel used to turn the ore into bars, and most importantly only one ore's worth of metal used instead of three. Thus, metalsmiths don't usually make furniture, but anvils, chains, cages or barrels, bins and buckets.<br /> <br /> NO METALSMITH:<br /> <br /> No early metal industry planned, you'll make one of your free immigrants dabbling Metalsmith if he isn't already a level two one.<br /> <br /> NOVICE METALSMITH:<br /> <br /> This is generally enough even if you do plan on having a metal industry early. Barrels, bins and buckets don't need to be of any kind of quality. Usually you only want to churn out barrels, bins and buckets if you are low on wood, but have magma and a lot of superfluous metal to work with.<br /> <br /> HIGHER THAN NOVICE METALSMITH:<br /> <br /> Usefulness is doubtful. You'll never need that many items or that high quality to warrant things like a Proficient Metalsmith at startup.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''FURNACE OPERATOR'''<br /> <br /> Furnace Operators are needed to make coke out of your coal, metal bars out of your ore with some measure of speed to supply your smiths.<br /> <br /> NO FURNACE OPERATOR:<br /> <br /> If you ever do need one, you can have one dabble in it. Usually you can wait for your first immigrant wave.<br /> <br /> NOVICE FURNACE OPERATOR:<br /> <br /> To do your early Furnace Operating, before you have immigrant dwarves to train in this task. Since Furnace Operating is essentially a full-time job in a running metal industry, you usually don't plan on having an initial dwarf do this for any kind of prolonged time, so don't spend more. Go regular Furnace Operator at the most, and even that is probably not required.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''WOOD BURNER'''<br /> <br /> Only needed if you don't have magma. With magma, the only use of this is to get access to fertilizer potash, soap, and clear glass. Also, steel if there is no other source of refined fuel whatsoever. If you don't have Magma, then you need your Wood Burner to start off your metal industry. More useful if you have lots of wood on your map, as you don't need to rely as much on lignite or bituminous coal.<br /> <br /> NO WOOD BURNER:<br /> <br /> If you have magma.<br /> <br /> NOVICE WOOD BURNER:<br /> <br /> If you have no magma, or want to smelt stuff without having found it or any kind of advanced coal yet, which will require you to produce quite a pile of charcoal.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''METAL CRAFTER'''<br /> <br /> A highly skilled Metal Crafter is nice to have in case you have access to highly valuable metal bars early, so you can make high-quality goblets out of them. Usually it's easier to get highly skilled Stone Crafters to make stuff out of the ore though, which makes Metal Crafter another skill of doubtful priority.<br /> <br /> NO METAL CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> No problem at all with this. Apart from trade goods, the only item you need to have a Metal Crafter for is metal chains for your jail (ropes can be snapped by angry dwarves). You can get those from a dabbler too.<br /> <br /> NOVICE METAL CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> AT MOST. Find some better use for that skill point, if you ask me.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''STONE CRAFTER'''<br /> <br /> Stone is a dime a dozen. Actually, more like a dime a hundred dozen. Unless there is an aquifer, there is no shortage of stone. Stone trade goods aren't worth much (unless made of rare ores or obsidian/flux), but in this case it's a matter of sheer mass - and crafter skill.<br /> <br /> NOVICE STONE CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> Giving this to one of your dwarves is not bad, but not worth much either. He or she'll produce goods at a slow pace and they will be of low quality. If you want to use crafts by your stone crafter to buy a lot of stuff from caravans early, you should go<br /> <br /> SKILLED STONE CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> Or something along those lines. Nothing wrong with having a Proficient one. Set him to work relatively early, and he'll buy you an anvil and some more useful stuff. This is well placed with one of your Miners (not your single Miner though) usually, because you can essentially choose freely whether you produce crafts or mine. Give this, in any case, to some dwarf who'll have time to do it most of the time. If you go high with this skill, disable the stonecrafting labor from the immigrant craftsdwarves unless you really want another one producing low-quality stone crafts uglying up the content of your bins. With craftsdwarves in general, specialization is key.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''WOOD CRAFTER'''<br /> <br /> The least useful of the material crafting skills. Wood crafts are worth much less than the wood they are made of (not in dwarfbux, but in actuality, since wood makes beds and beds can only be made of wood). Even in a wood-rich map, the proper use for surplus wood is not crafts, but bolts. And that's the one thing a Wood Crafter is useful for: Bolts. Not for war, mind you, but for training. If you have more wood than you ever need, make bolts. Make crafts for trading out of rock - it has the advantage that even the hippie elves will take it.<br /> <br /> NO WOOD CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> What I do usually. I generally don't start getting wood surpluses until later, when I already have immigrants, and usually there's some n00b craftsdwarf available to do this instead of one of my valuable starting dwarfs.<br /> <br /> NOVICE WOOD CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> We've established that you only want to produce training bolts with a Wood Crafter. Your skill level doesn't matter one iota in this case. Give this skill to some dwarf who doesn't mind wasting some of his time producing a couple of training bolts. Maybe your Carpenter/Woodcutter, should he have more than enough wood and have produced more then enough bins, barrels and buckets... Or some other starting dwarf who finds himself with too much freetime. Other skills might be more useful.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''BONE CARVER'''<br /> <br /> Bone has many uses. For bone or shell armor, you should have skilled Bone Carvers at the ready. Otherwise, there's always bone bolts to make, or skull totems to use in trade. Bone isn't usually worth much unless it's some awesome stuff like dragon bone.<br /> <br /> NO BONE CARVER:<br /> <br /> I don't recommend this, actually. You'll always have bone, from unlucky invaders to eaten fish, even very early on. On the other hand, if kept in an inside refuse stockpile, it won't disappear either, and you can usually wait for an immigrant craftsdwarf to take up your main bone carving business.<br /> <br /> NOVICE BONE CARVER:<br /> <br /> Enough to make training bolts... But you won't need these much until you have a military. If you have a skill point to spare and need to provide a dwarf with some skill he can pursue while his other, main jobs don't require his attention, get this, usually in favour of Wood Crafter, since you can make better use of your wood in the early times of your fortress, even if there is a lot.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT BONE CARVER:<br /> <br /> Overkill. You simply don't get enough bones to justify this investment; high value bones are too rare. (Of course, there are the likes of Nist Akath, where bones are too numerous to count, but in that kind of environment FETCHING the bones will prove more problematic) For money, you want highly skilled Stone Crafters working away at the assloads of stones your fortress produces. That's not to say that highly skilled bone carvers are useless, but they are most useful if you have a skilled hunter at work, which is going to be much later - and immigrant bone carvers are better for that.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''GEM CUTTER'''<br /> <br /> Another one of the &quot;moneymaker&quot; skills. If you do find gems early on, this will help you transform them into dwarfbux in trade. Needless to say, however, stone is much more numerous and reliable. Pass. Wait for immigrants.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''GEM SETTER'''<br /> <br /> See above.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''MECHANIC'''<br /> <br /> This is very useful to have in general, and good use of starting dwarf skill points. The question is: How much points will you give this, and what will you combine it with? Mechanisms are considered decent, if somewhat heavy, export goods, so quality is not entirely unimportant. A Mechanic can do a lot even in early fortresses; his mechanisms will be required for early irrigation schemes or other things done with levers, and traps are considered to be the easiest way to protect your fortress bar nothing at all, considering that it takes only a single mechanic to produce sufficient stone fall traps to smash hordes of early attacking animals, and more devious traps capable of handling sieges (also, cage traps, but you need a Metalsmith or a Carpenter for the Cage).<br /> <br /> NO MECHANIC:<br /> <br /> Not recommended, even if you don't plan on using any traps. At the very least you need someone to make mechanisms and set up some lever schemes. Even if your map happens to lack any stone, you need this guy working on the imported stone for mechanisms all the more.<br /> <br /> NOVICE MECHANIC:<br /> <br /> Minimum. Maybe enough if no traps are planned and mechanisms will not be used for trading.<br /> <br /> COMPETENT MECHANIC:<br /> <br /> This is a good average value if you intend to produce traps at a decent speed very early.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MECHANIC:<br /> <br /> In case you want to just go all out and use these for trading. Keep in mind that you have to trade items of sufficient weight for these. If you have Proficient Mechanic, you can in theory use it as a substitute for any kind of Stone Crafting. Stone crafts ARE less cumbersome to trade with (they go in bins!), however. Your choice.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''FISHERDWARF'''<br /> <br /> Fishing is the simplest source of food. Get fish, clean it, eat. You can cook your fish if you want, too, but that means you don't get bones and in case of turtles, shells.<br /> <br /> NO FISHERDWARF:<br /> <br /> Maps without water: Of course. If it does have water, then you might still shrug and point to your Grower dwarfs, who will make more than enough food to get by and don't have to risk their necks going outside. Shell can be gotten from turtles you bring at startup and simply stored in an inside refuse stockpile.<br /> <br /> FISHERDWARF:<br /> <br /> Sensible. Only two skill points, and it gives one of your starting dwarf something to do until you have set up your fortress. You should probably give some other dwarf the Fish Cleaning skill, since if you give it to this guy you have to turn the Fishing labor on and off periodically. You'll also have to turn the Fishing labor off to let him work on his numerous secondary skills, like Mechanic or a Crafting skill. This guy is never unemployed, but flexible. Don't overdo it with the secondary skills, and remember to turn some off once the first immigrant wave hits.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT FISHERDWARF:<br /> <br /> Overkill on most maps. If there's a lot of water you can get more out of this, but it only improves speed to have high Fisherdwarf skills... Remember the risk for carp to be generated, and how useless this major skill point investment will be then.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''MILLER'''<br /> <br /> Makes flour out of longland grass and cave wheat that can be used for cooking.<br /> <br /> NO MILLER:<br /> <br /> Entirely okay. Both longland grass and cave wheat can be brewed instead. You need bags to put flour in too.<br /> <br /> NOVICE MILLER:<br /> <br /> Not the most useless skill ever though... Well... Maybe not worth it.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''THRESHER'''<br /> <br /> Processing plants gives you seeds. Useful for pig tails if you lack barrels for brewing.<br /> <br /> NO THRESHER:<br /> <br /> You can live with this. But:<br /> <br /> NOVICE THRESHER:<br /> <br /> Bags can be very useful to get early, and this is the first step on the way from pig tail to pig tail bag. And it gives you seeds, as mentioned, without having to rely on barrels. More skill points are probably overkill though. Give this to a dwarf who will find himself with occasional freetime in the beginning.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''GROWER'''<br /> <br /> Unless you are batshit crazy, you want to make plants the mainstay of your food and alcohol supply. So you'll want Growers, since having dabblers do this wastes a lot of seeds while they learn.<br /> <br /> LOW SKILL GROWERS:<br /> <br /> You'll have no shortage of low-skill Growers later on. If you get Growers, make them highly skilled, as this makes the most use of your occasionally sparse starting seeds. You never know.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT GROWER:<br /> <br /> Might be enough, though you might get in trouble if you want to plant many different kinds of crops. And you also will most definitely get in trouble with All Dwarves Harvest turned off unless you give this guy NO secondary job (Proficient Weaponsmith for instance, which is NOT supposed to be even used early on)<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT GROWER/PROFICIENT GROWER:<br /> <br /> This is generally recommended (you can afford going Skilled/Skilled, or even Competent/Competent too here). Has the advantage that you can have them work most secondary jobs pretty freely, like Brewing, Cooking, Fish Cleaning, while still being able to grow a lot of useful and nutritious crops.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''HERBALIST'''<br /> <br /> If you want to set up aboveground crop farming early, you need a Herbalist to get some aboveground plants.<br /> <br /> NO HERBALIST:<br /> <br /> One does not have to be a skilled Herbalist to do this, but since it will take long and have a high chance of failure if you send out a dabbler at least<br /> <br /> NOVICE HERBALIST:<br /> <br /> Should be considered. For speed reasons and efficiency, especially should you have to rely on these guys to help you out of food shortages, you might want to get<br /> <br /> COMPETENT HERBALIST:<br /> <br /> instead. There. Herbalism, not unlike Fishing, is a job a dwarf can work anytime they find themselves with nothing better to do, like Masons before there is stone - you can use immigrant Herbalists later; they can train the skill easily if it's the only thing they ever do and become better than your starting Herbalist has time for considering the other skills he might want to work.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''BREWER'''<br /> <br /> Sober dwarfs are unhappy dwarfs and don't work effectively at all. Brewer is an essential job in a fledgling fortress. You also need your brewer to get seeds out of aboveground plants picked in the beginning.<br /> <br /> NO BREWER:<br /> <br /> Next!<br /> <br /> BREWER:<br /> <br /> Minimum. Brewery does not have to be executed all that fast, and you will want additional stills and brewers for larger communities, much, much later, but this is something you should be able to afford for the sake of your dwarfs. Remember, dwarfs would rather run around naked than drink inferior booze.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT BREWER:<br /> <br /> Definitely not a bad idea if you can spare the skill points. Distilled happiness for your dwarfs! Other skills might strike your fancy more, though. Maybe the truth lies between Brewer and Proficient Brewer...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''COOK'''<br /> <br /> Well, food is as important as booze, needless to say.<br /> <br /> NO COOK:<br /> <br /> Are you serious? Do you want your dwarfs to eat only shitty food made by a bumbling fool dabbling as a cook?<br /> <br /> COOK:<br /> <br /> Probably minimum. Cooking is less critical than Brewing is, because dwarves can eat stuff that isn't cooked, but never stuff that hasn't been brewed. A decided disadvantage of cooking is that it doesn't produce seeds, bones or shells. And also, dwarves drink twice as often as they eat. You should always give Brewing a slightly higher priority than you give Cooking.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT COOK:<br /> <br /> Only if you already have a Proficient Brewer. Do you really have this many skill points?<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''WEAVER'''<br /> <br /> A low-priority skill that will not be used for long by any of your starting dwarves. This is excellent for later immigrants.<br /> <br /> NO WEAVER:<br /> <br /> Okay. If you don't have Novice Thresher, then you also don't need Novice Weaver.<br /> <br /> NOVICE WEAVER:<br /> <br /> BUT if you already got Novice Thresher, you might want to invest a point in this for quicker early bags.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''CLOTHIER'''<br /> <br /> The prime purpose of this in an EARLY fortress is to make bags. Cloth bags are easier to make than leather bags because pig tails are much, much easier to obtain than animal hides. A dedicated cloth industry for clothing should be left to immigrants.<br /> <br /> NO CLOTHIER:<br /> <br /> If you don't think you'll need bags, and if you ever do you'll have dabblers work on it.<br /> <br /> NOVICE CLOTHIER:<br /> <br /> Almost essential if you plan on not only getting a few bags, but quite a lot - maps with magma and sand might need this. Bags are also required to store quarry bush leaves. You probably can't go wrong with this. Think about getting the Novice Thresher and Novice Weaver skills too.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''AMBUSHER'''<br /> <br /> Combine this with some sort of weapon skill. Hunting is a gamble - your dwarf might always be slaughtered, by real badass horses, or two-humped camels... Hunting is something you should reserve for expendable dwarfs, not one of your starting seven!<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''BUTCHER'''<br /> <br /> Not for hunted animals, that's for sure. But you can butcher your tame animals in the beginning to get hides that you can tan to leather, and have a leatherworker produce some bags. But pig tails and an cloth industry are much better for this, since early on you won't have many animals at all, and slaughtering those will inhibit your breeding. Keep this in mind for immigrants, when your animals have had time to breed... and get on your nerves.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''TANNER'''<br /> <br /> Only if you have a Butcher, which you usually don't.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''LEATHERWORKER'''<br /> <br /> This is very useful. Leather can be made into all sorts of useful items: Clothing, bags, armor...<br /> <br /> NO LEATHERWORKER:<br /> <br /> But, of course, you can keep this in mind for your first immigrants. If you don't have a Butcher or Tanner planned in, you can still use traded-for leather, but that will take some time to get anyway. Bags can be made out of cloth. Quivers, backpacks and armor cannot, but they can wait for your first immigrant wave, which is the earliest point to build up a dedicated military who would need those.<br /> <br /> NOVICE LEATHERWORKER:<br /> <br /> But this is probably a bit more sensible than Butcher or Tanner, since you'll get your first leather by autumn most of the time, earlier than the first immigrant wave. Still, you want a dedicated Leatherworker later, so don't put more into this.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''FISH CLEANER'''<br /> <br /> Get Novice Fish Cleaner if you have a Fisherdwarf - it doesn't take up much time, just queue up a repeated Clean Fish task at the Fishery occasionally. Without Fisherdwarf, getting Fish Cleaner would be just nutty. If you like, you can have a dabbling guy do this job, too.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''ANIMAL TRAINER'''<br /> <br /> Get Novice if you like, beyond is a waste of skill points. You can also have dabbling animal trainers working on your starting dogs. I usually give this to my mason.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''GLASSMAKER'''<br /> <br /> First of all, you need a map with sand for this choice to make any sense. Beyond that, if your map has magma, think about getting a dedicated Glassmaker to churn out large parts of your furniture in green glass form; you have infinite sand and infinite fuel! Of course, stone is never exactly sparse and Magma Glass Furnaces take some time to set up.<br /> <br /> NO GLASSMAKER:<br /> <br /> No sand. Or, sand and no magma. A glass industry without magma is of highly doubtful use and can definitely wait for immigrants.<br /> <br /> NOVICE GLASSMAKER OR MAYBE UP TO COMPETENT:<br /> <br /> Sand and magma... It might be of use. Most stuff that can be made out of glass can be made out of stone too, but this guy can somewhat relieve your mason of some of his stress.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT GLASSMAKER:<br /> <br /> This is if you go all out and make ALL your furniture out of glass, possibly even replace your mason. This is actually an excellent course of action you have on maps that contain magma, sand AND an aquifer, so very few stone is available if at all. You might even be able to forget about a mason entirely!<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT GLASSMAKER/PROFICIENT GLASSMAKER:<br /> <br /> Same conditions, enormous building projects planned... If you want to make a glass-themed fortress, this certainly is in style!<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''WRESTLER'''<br /> <br /> Unarmed Combat skill. Whether you want combat skills at all depends on the type of map you embark on and the level of paranoia you display. This has the advantage that you don't need to give your wrestler dwarf any weapons, and is a good defensive choice for dwarves that do not carry a weapon-like item at work...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''AXEDWARF'''<br /> <br /> While this is the most logical choice for your Woodcutter. If you want only one dwarf with at least a semblance of military skill to protect the others, make it this.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''SWORDSDWARF<br /> MACEDWARF<br /> HAMMERDWARF<br /> SPEARDWARF'''<br /> <br /> You'll have to bring extra weapons for these guys, so consider with care. Hammers and Maces are probably the best to use against skeletal entities in terrifying biomes... Remember that there is no way to have your dwarves still carry these weapons while they are civilians. Giving them Wrestling will benefit them more in emergency situations.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''MARKSDWARF'''<br /> <br /> Crossbows have the advantage that they need only wood to make on-site, and that they are the least risky weapon for your dwarfs. So you might give this to one of your guys. If you give him the Hunting labor, he'll still carry this as a civilian - but of course, he'll go out to hunt and do nothing else. Not a good thing. So like the other non-axe, non-pick weapons, hardly useful in an emergency.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''SHIELD USER<br /> ARMOR USER'''<br /> <br /> Consider these for terrifying biomes where well-rounded soldiers have a much greater influence on survivability than most other things. Remember that these make no sense if you don't also get armor and shields. Expensive.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''SIEGE ENGINEER'''<br /> <br /> Like Weaponsmith and Armorsmith, you might want this at maximum level for later - siege engines definitely only make sense if you have skilled operators working them, so you need immigrants anyway. High quality siege engines are important though, and Siege engine parts consume materials like crazy...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''SWIMMER'''<br /> <br /> A reserve skill for your Fisherdwarf just in case? I dunno. More of an adventure mode skill I suppose. Maybe if you want your miner to make some really crazy mining stunts. In that case, go as high as you can afford (Novice skill is no guarantee for survival), or grow some brains.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''PERSUADER<br /> NEGOTIATOR<br /> LIAR<br /> INTIMIDATOR<br /> CONVERSATIONALIST<br /> COMEDIAN<br /> FLATTERER'''<br /> <br /> Social skills to choose from. Doesn't make much difference. Novice level is all you need if you ever choose one.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''JUDGE OF INTENT'''<br /> <br /> Useful for your Broker, as it displays the attitude of the people you trade with. Since it is also a social skill like the above, it's more useful than the others - slightly, of course. Novice level is all you need.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''APPRAISER'''<br /> <br /> Your broker needs this to properly calculate prices. Novice level is all you need.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''ORGANIZER'''<br /> <br /> This does not have to be a skill of your brokerdwarf, as it doesn't need social skills to work. It trains very fast, you putting this above Novice is probably not required. If you do not have an Organizer at all, you can't use the job manager to issue work orders, but have to queue up items in the workshops by hand. There's enough micromanagement in Dwarf Fortress even without that. Still, you can have an immigrant in your first wave become Organizer and save this skill point for other things.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''RECORD KEEPER'''<br /> <br /> You need SOME dwarf with bookkeeper skill to get even the roughest estimate of your stocks beyond counting it all yourself. For accurate counts, you also need to give him an office and have him work. You can have a dabbler do all this though - he'll get Novice in the shortest time, and if you set him to Highest Precision (not recommended for a starting dwarf, since that will require most of his attention) he'll reach legendary status very quick.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''CONSOLER<br /> PACIFIER'''<br /> <br /> These skills are useful for your leaderdwarf, and you might choose this in favor of other social skills. Consolers will have a positive influence on sad dwarves, Pacifiers will be able to calm those that have snapped and thrown a tantrum.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> With all these in mind, this is my current build, for a map that contains a magma pipe, no aquifer, a river and sand:<br /> <br /> 5 MINER/1 JUDGE OF INTENT/1 APPRAISER/1 NEGOTIATOR/1 ORGANIZER/1 BONE CARVER (The Guy. Yup, I decided against having him keep records like is usually recommended. The reason for this is I can't control when the bugger goes off keeping his damn records, but I can EASILY control when he goes carving some bolts out of bone. The fact that I have to set up a second office if I want both Organizing and Record Keeping done doesn't faze me in the slightest - one more chair and table doesn't make much of a difference, and Organizing isn't that helpful in an early game fortress anyway. Yeah, I can just have him stop keeping records when I want to by putting out his chair under him or something, but that would be mean.)<br /> <br /> 5 MINER/4 STONE CRAFTER/1 CLOTHIER (Mine, Produce vendor trash and occasionally bags)<br /> <br /> 5 MASON/1 ANIMAL TRAINER/1 BUILDING DESIGNER/3 HERBALIST (The key is being moderate with the herbalism. You only need to do enough herbalism to get some of every crop that groves in your biomes. Then you switch off cooking for them and set up a brewery, supply it with barrels, brew, and boom, outdoor farming. By this time, he should be able to get to work producing doors. If not, he can train my two starting dogs, and THEN produce doors.)<br /> <br /> 5 WEAPONSMITH/4 CARPENTER/1 WOODCUTTER (First thing: set him to shop some assloads of wood. Second, have him start carpentry. Much, much later he can produce some kickass weapons on the side while he carpents stuff as his main job. Some other schmuck should eventually do the woodcutting for him.)<br /> <br /> 5 ARMORSMITH/4 GROWER/1 FISH CLEANER (He's going to plant stuff and clean fish while he doesn't plant stuff, and haul if he ever has no stuff to plant or fish to clean. Once the metal industry starts, he's going to make armor, armor, armor, and have others pick up the slack for his other skills. Maybe keep Grower enabled for the rare cases when he doesn't have armor to forge.)<br /> <br /> 5 GROWER/3 BREWER/2 COOK (Everybody loves this guy! He plants, produces most of the seeds to plant by making the much-coveted alcoholic beverages, and occasionally makes some prepared meals out of the meat, flour, sugar, leaves and expendable fish I produce. I don't do cooking drinks; It's a waste of good alcohol.)<br /> <br /> 3 FISHERDWARF/3 MECHANIC/1 THRESHER/1 WEAVER/1 METALSMITH/1 RECORD KEEPING (I like to think of this guy as the bitch who has to all sorts of menial work for the other guys who bully him. In truth, he would like nothing more than just being kept alone with his mechanisms and traps. The only other thing he really enjoys is to go out fishing to be alone sometimes. He will get a LOT of relief once the immigrant wave hits and other guys can do his threshing, weaving, metalsmithing and record keeping. He'll always stay a Fisherdwarf/Mechanic though.)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Finished! Hope this doesn't waste too much server space.</div>

Silfir https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=40d_Talk:Maximizing_framerate&diff=30804 2008-11-05T12:17:20Z

<p>Silfir: /* One Way Stairs */</p> <hr /> <div>== Effect on # of dwarves, framerate calculations ==<br /> <br /> I'm not sure how important the number of dwarves is on the framerate. I was getting about 12 to 15 with 22 dwarves, and this has fallen to 9 with 97 dwarves. I think it is more bad pathing, like animals being caught behind doors that causes more problems than the number of units themselves. The addition of 80 goblins had an impact of 1 fps as well... although again, they probably weren't having any trouble path finding to no where. --Gotthard 13:53, 3 December 2007 (EST)<br /> <br /> :I typically see a substantial drop in framerate when new immigrants come, and afterward the game's never as fast or responsive. However, I also demand a higher framerate (not less than 40, to avoid annoying interface lagging/jerkiness) than many people seem prepared to tolerate, so our findings aren't inconsistent. You just have more load already and so don't notice a given amount of additional usage as much. [[User:Fedor|Fedor]] 05:39, 7 December 2007 (EST)<br /> <br /> ::If this is the case, then I doubt there is a linear relationship associated with the FPS values. The G_FPS might also impact this. Typically, 10-12 more dwarves lowered my FPS by 1 at max, and I have 6 masons making blocks for my castle, and 18 dwarves running around permanently putting them up. I would guess that the FPS drops off fast to begin with, so it takes a lot to go down from 10-9 fps compared to 40-39 fps. --Gotthard 08:35, 7 December 2007 (EST)<br /> <br /> :::Yes, this is expected. Framerate changes aren't linear and here's why: Let us imagine that a given computer can process 10,000 game things per second. A framerate of 100 means that the game requires only 100 calculations per update, and therefore can update 100 times/second. A framerate of 1 means the game has to perform 10,000 calculations per update. To drop from 40 to 39 FPS, the game must require ~6 more calculations per update. To drop from 10 to 9 FPS, the game must require ~111 more calculations per update. [[User:Fedor|Fedor]] 08:51, 13 December 2007 (EST)<br /> <br /> ::Wow, I can't stand things if FPS falls under ~80! Though, running a 2.1Ghz Dual Core and 512M 8600GeForce probably has some bearing on it. Personally, I run my G_FPS at only 10, and FPS_CAP at 200. I haven't gotten to economy sized populations yet with these settings (mostly on purpose cause I also keep my POP_CAP to only 10 until I've gotten the majority of the fortress dug out and a good stock of food and bedrooms, etc. The extra dwarves end up just getting in the way any other time I've tried my play-style. With this setup, I usually average around 150 FPS. Also, I've noticed a difference in FPS if I have the map section open, either single or double pane, moreso when there are a large number of creatures on the map. Simply closing (tabbing) the map got me an increase from ~125 to ~140. Should be worth 2-3 frames at the low FPS levels you guys are talking about. I'm also curious if the FPS counter itself has a significant effect on frames... --[[User:n9103|n9103]] 11:40, 17 Dec 2007 (PST)<br /> <br /> == Weather and Trees ==<br /> <br /> Is it just me, or with weather turned trees will not grow back. Most saplings have withered and died. The landscape is littered with them. I'm in a Mirthful area, so it's not alignment. I haven't been able to get any trees since I deforested the entire area, and yes, it has been over three years. I'm playing 33d. [[User:Klada|Klada]] 19:50, 5 December 2007 (EST)<br /> <br /> :Well I've been playing map for 6 years now, and I've had weather on the entire time, tons of trees have grown back. I've not deforested the ENTIRE area, but from what I understand trees grow back at a proportional rate to the amount of area there was to grow, so it should be better. I think saplings randomly die, perhaps moreso with traffic on them but... I don't have an explanation. --Gotthard 19:23, 6 December 2007 (EST)<br /> <br /> ::&quot;Is it just me, or with weather turned trees will not grow back.&quot; Turned on or turned off? Logically, if weather were turned off, trees shouldn't grow to maturity. --[[User:n9103|n9103]] 11:29, 17 Dec 2007 (PST)<br /> <br /> :::Trees grow back just fine with weather turned off. I don't know why sometimes most or all the saplings die, but it's not turning weather off that causes it. --[[User:BurnedToast|BurnedToast]] 00:00, 4 January 2008 (EST)<br /> <br /> ::::N9103, logic has no place here. Begone! --[[User:Savok|Savok]] 15:12, 21 March 2008 (EDT)<br /> <br /> :::::HA! Tell that to Flingify() ^.^ Most things in DF do get a logical implementation... notable exceptions exist of course, but generally speaking, things follow commonsense. ... So Nya! --[[User:N9103|Edward]] 05:55, 22 March 2008 (EDT)<br /> <br /> :Is any part of the area you embarked at evil? If so, are they the areas that the trees could grow in? (i.e. a mirthful mountain next to haunted woods) If you're beyond doubt sure that that's not the case, then going on what else has been investigated, I see one of two things: Complete deforestation *stops* tree growth, including saplings; Or, you've got some kind of bug that hasn't been documented yet. --[[User:N9103|Edward]] 19:05, 2 April 2008 (EDT)<br /> <br /> == Economy ==<br /> <br /> Can we confirm/disprove the effect of the economy on framerate? --[[User:DDouble|DDouble]] 02:42, 13 December 2007 (EST)<br /> <br /> :Not sure what you mean exactly. The economy makes several changes, any of which might potentially impact speed. Can you give more detail on what specifically might potentially be causing a slowdown (or speed boost)? Is there a discussion on the forum that you have in mind? [[User:Fedor|Fedor]] 08:51, 13 December 2007 (EST)<br /> <br /> ::I'm pretty sure he's talking about the init setting and turning it off. The 'potentially' part you mentioned is what he wanted clarification on. Does turning the setting off before the economy activates improve pre-economy performance? There might indeed be people out there that are willing to lose one of the cooler features for a much improved framerate. A good question is does turning that setting off prevent you from ever gaining an economy (when you decide to turn the option back on) should you pass the point where it should have activated? --[[User:n9103|n9103]] 11:27, 17 Dec 2007 (PST)<br /> <br /> == One Way Stairs ==<br /> <br /> &quot;Use ...multiple one-way stairways to connect any two spots where lots of dwarves will want to be&quot;<br /> <br /> How do you make a one way stair? I tried searching here, and on the forum, but didn't find it. [[User:Calculus|Calculus]]<br /> <br /> :I mean to use paired up and down staircases instead of up/down ones. This suggestion is now removed because I'm not sure it actually makes a difference (it's safer for your dwarves, but I don't see a difference in game speed) [[User:Fedor|Fedor]] 14:50, 2 January 2008 (EST)<br /> <br /> ::How is a single-floor staircase (down+up) any safer than using a multiple-floor staircase (down+down/up+up)?<br /> <br /> ::Or for that matter, how is it different than making all your staircases down/up (minus bottom level of course)? --[[User:N9103|Edward]] 22:40, 3 January 2008 (EST)<br /> <br /> :::If a dwarf falls down a multi-level up/down staircase, he may die or be badly injured.[[User:Fedor|Fedor]] 22:52, 3 January 2008 (EST)<br /> <br /> ::::What would cause a dwarf to fall down stairs aside from combat?--[[User:Maximus|Maximus]] 01:59, 4 January 2008 (EST)<br /> <br /> :::::Haven't a clue. I just know that several people have reported their dwarves getting killed or maimed that way.[[User:Fedor|Fedor]] 15:17, 5 January 2008 (EST)<br /> <br /> ::::I used to use the up/down staircases for a central mineshaft until I had multiple dwarves become maimed/die when fighting on the stairs. I now use a spiral staircase design instead. I don't think anything BUT combat makes them fall, but if they charge a goblin snatcher and miss, there's no promise they won't end up 15 levels down missing all their limbs. --Gotthard 11:08, 7 January 2008 (EST)<br /> <br /> :::::How about using floor hatches every level? -- Digger<br /> <br /> ::::::Those cause annoying blinkage. --[[User:Silfir|Silfir]] 07:17, 5 November 2008 (EST)<br /> <br /> == Weather and windmills ==<br /> <br /> To BurnedToast: You seem to be right that turning weather off doesn't stop windmills from working. I wasn't sure where I got that impression, but after looking it up, it was from several instances on IRC where people came in, said &quot;The windmill isn't making power :(&quot;, were told to &quot;turn weather on&quot;, went &quot;Ah ha!&quot;, and never said that it didn't make them start working. (After I while I started suggesting it too since nobody had reported it not working, until recently.) So, hmm. I just switched a fort that had weather to not having it, and yeah, the windmills all still work. So I built a new one - also works. Then I generated a new world with weather off, started a new fort in it, built a windmill, and it produced 20 power. Oh well. --[[User:SL|SL]] 13:24, 9 January 2008 (EST)<br /> <br /> == Multiple CPUs/Cores ==<br /> <br /> As far as I have tested, DF uses 3 threads. It seems to put all its efforts in a single one, but even so, the other two still take cpu time, so having a dual-core machine still helps even if the threads are synchronized (and it isn't such a huge difference). I assume one of the threads link the display to the game core while the other runs the input buffer. I'd have to do more testing. [[User:Soulwynd|Soulwynd]] 23:37, 17 March 2008 (EDT)<br /> <br /> == Bulging Histories ==<br /> <br /> Any chance history plays a role in framerates? I have a fairly beefy machine and was regularly getting 100FPS in my first few forts, but after about 15 forts and 30 adventure modes (I'm quite suicidal), I can't get my FPS above 35 even on initial embark and a 3x3 fortress plot. [[User:Weasello|Weasello]] 12:43, 21 March 2008 (EDT)<br /> <br /> :Well... from that data, that's likely. Personally, I play all my forts on separate worlds. --[[User:Savok|Savok]] 15:12, 21 March 2008 (EDT)<br /> <br /> :I think I have to second the idea of (small histories == higher framerates) I've been playing a lot of small and smaller worlds, and even when I pick larger than normal sites, my frames seem to stay up better than on standard worlds. I'll test at some point just how well a Full Local map holds up in a Pocket world. --[[User:N9103|Edward]] 19:04, 2 April 2008 (EDT)<br /> <br /> == Disconnection ==<br /> <br /> I've found it '''VERY''' important, in terms of framerates, not to block all paths between your fortress and the outside world, either with raised bridges, or with forbidden doors. I'm not certain about walls, as I haven't desired &quot;permanent&quot; blocking, but temporary, to prevent thives and the like. Infact, pathfinding errors from those I desire to keep out are exactly what crashes the framerate.&lt;br&gt;<br /> &lt;br&gt;<br /> I'm talking about '''50% loss''', and that's just to start. If you continue to block the pathfinding, It's possible to have it completely crawl to a stop, as in 0-1 FPS!&lt;br&gt;<br /> It's a shame that such a primitive defense results in such a catastrophic failure of the pathing system. :(&lt;br&gt;<br /> &lt;br&gt;<br /> As I didn't see it mentioned anywhere, I'm adding it here, and will eventually add it to the main article if no one else feels like pretty-ing it up for display.&lt;br&gt;<br /> --[[User:N9103|Edward]] 17:42, 29 March 2008 (EDT)<br /> <br /> :That's happening for you? I've been setting up an elaborate set of bridges and floodgates that serves as the only entrance to my fortress, and have closed my dwarves off inside on numerable occasions and it caused little more than make them cancel tasks that required them to leave the fortress.--[[User:Eurytus|Eurytus]] 15:57, 2 April 2008 (EST)<br /> <br /> ::Have you turned off invasions as well? I used to do that when I played with invasions off to develop my management abilities. I did it now in three different worlds (smaller) and have had it happen every time. The framerate loss began as soon as a goblin/kobold tried to do mischief and pull a lever, as determined in the error log. I would assume that thieves/snatchers would likely cause similar frame-crashes, but that much isn't verified on my part. --[[User:N9103|Edward]] 04:04, 4 April 2008 (EDT)<br /> <br /> :::I have invasions on, although any attackers have died rather quickly.--[[User:Eurytus|Eurytus]] 21:48, 2 April 2008 (EST)<br /> <br /> ::::Hey look! invaders! I closed the gates and lowered the bridge, but my framerate didn't drop. In fact, just as the invaders got there my framerate went back up from a puzzlingly low 40 back up to a regular 90.--[[User:Eurytus|Eurytus]] 22:19, 2 April 2008 (EST)<br /> <br /> ::::I've tested it again with a couple more waves of goblins, and I've come to the conclusion that the preceding immense slowdown is while the goblins are on the map but not in view. This makes me think that either hidden units contribute to lag more, or the difficult terrain in my area causes their pathfinding to temporarily &quot;freak out.&quot;--[[User:Eurytus|Eurytus]] 1:03, 3 April 2008 (EST)<br /> <br /> :::::Well, it would seem obvious that invaders have glitches that have direct effects on framerates... just not well defined effects :-/ The &quot;not in view&quot; part seems true enough since the 'mischief-makers' are always invisible until discovered, and my forts generally have been rather far from invasion points. Looks like this is gonna be on hold for the page until someone does some '''extensive''' testing. --[[User:N9103|Edward]] 04:04, 4 April 2008 (EDT)<br /> <br /> ::::::I'll be happy to start testing it as soon as I start establishing some more long-term fortresses.--[[User:Eurytus|Eurytus]] 11:23, 4 April 2008 (EST)<br /> <br /> :[[User_talk:Squirrelloid#Animals_try_to_path_through_tightly_closed_doors|Squirrelloid]]'s done some tests that end up proving the same point, but with animals instead of thieves/snatchers. Both of those groups use flawed pathfinding that doesn't properly account for created obstacles that are passable under certain conditions that aren't true at the time of the pathfind. (Doors being forbidden, or bridges raised for the thieves, and doors being designated as pet forbidden for the animals.) I still say that failed pathfinds cause 90% of framerate loss. --[[User:N9103|Edward]] 06:24, 1 May 2008 (EDT)<br /> <br /> :I've uploaded a zip of my errorlog.txt that encompasses a decent, but not overly long amount of time. The unzipped file is 22MB! Thankfully, text compresses very well, and the zip is only 387K. &lt;99% of the file is failed mischief from either goblins or kobolds. [http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=167] --[[User:N9103|Edward]] 02:29, 11 May 2008 (EDT)<br /> <br /> == Dual Screens ==<br /> <br /> I just put a second monitor on my computer, partly so I could fullscreen DF with the wiki in another screen. However, running DF in fullscreen make sit take up one screen like normal, and the other goes black. Ckciking the black monitor causes DF to stretch across the monitors. Since there is info here about running DF in one monitor to save CPU cycles, I was wondering is anyone could help. &lt;small&gt;&amp;ndash; [[template:unsigned|unsigned]] comment by [[User:Ilmmad|Ilmmad]]&lt;/small&gt;<br /> <br /> :I don't understand what you're saying. Dwarf Fortress does not do that on my computer. Operating system, perhaps?&lt;br&gt;By the way, sign your comments using &lt;nowiki&gt;--~~~~&lt;/nowiki&gt;. --[[User:GreyMario|GreyMario]] 17:24, 22 April 2008 (EDT)<br /> <br /> :When you enter fullscreen mode with most graphics apis (such as OpenGL) you will take full control, which is why the other screen goes black. Your best bet is to run in windowed mode with the window size set to your resolution. --[[User:Shades|Shades]] 18:01, 22 April 2008 (EDT)<br /> <br /> ::I had this same thought; and did some measurement - on Windows with the &quot;windows standard&quot; theme and default fonts, the room needed for the chrome is 27 pixels vertical, 8 pixels horizontal. [[User:Random832|Random832]] 10:31, 14 October 2008 (EDT)<br /> <br /> == temperature ==<br /> <br /> From the article &quot;&quot; You're well-advised to stick with &quot;warm&quot; or &quot;hot&quot; fortress sites if you turn temperature off and your source of water is a stream.&quot;&quot; --- I cannot understand that. --[[User:Catpaw|Catpaw]] 08:29, 16 September 2008 (EDT)<br /> <br /> :If you turn temperature off, and you start on a cold location with a stream, the stream will be frozen and never thaw.[[User:DaBing|DaBing]]</div>

Silfir https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=40d:Things_to_Do&diff=30671 2008-11-05T12:04:53Z

<p>Silfir: </p> <hr /> <div>'''The basic point of Fortress mode is:'''<br /> *Build/[[dig]] a place for your dwarves to work and live<br /> *Ensure survivability by providing [[food]] and [[water]]/[[alcohol|drink]] for every dwarf<br /> *Provide basic comfort by building [[bed]]s/[[Bedroom|quarter]]s, a [[dining room]]<br /> *Defend your fortress ([[trap]]s/[[military]])<br /> *From the way Toady implements some features, have a lot of (twisted) [[fun]]<br /> *Accumulate [[wealth]]<br /> *Build and sustain a bustling full 200 dwarf fortress (this is already a bit &quot;optional&quot;)<br /> <br /> Most people prefer to do some/most of these steps:<br /> *Expand the cave to have own specific areas for specific purposes ([[Bedroom]]s, [[workshops]], [[farm]]s etc)<br /> *Create various items for exporting ([[Trade]])<br /> *Create a working [[military]]<br /> *Dig out the wealth of the mountain/ground (Mainly [[platinum]], [[gold]], [[gem]]s, [[adamantine]] etc)<br /> *Create luxury for your dwarves and a generally grand and nicely smoothed fortress<br /> *Generally make your fort self-sustaining and self-supplied<br /> *Experiment with and experience the full depth of all game features<br /> *Complete megalomaniac construction projects<br /> *Kill Elves<br /> *Create the worlds largest Brewery<br /> *Do it all over again with one skill-less dwarf in a [[terrifying]] biome<br /> *Profit!<br /> <br /> Beyond this, it's really up to your own imagination what you wish to do. After all, this game is a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_game sandbox game]. The possibilities are endless.<br /> If you feel the need to play a more goal-based game, then check out the list of [[game goals]] for suggestions.<br /> <br /> <br /> {{Game Basics FAQ}}</div>

Silfir https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=40d:Things_to_Do&diff=30670 2008-11-05T12:04:34Z

<p>Silfir: </p> <hr /> <div>'''The basic point of Fortress mode is:'''<br /> *Build/[[dig]] a place for your dwarves to work and live<br /> *Ensure survivability by providing [[food]] and [[water]]/[[alcohol|drink]] for every dwarf<br /> *Provide basic comfort by building [[bed]]s/[[Bedroom|quarter]]s, a [[dining room]]<br /> *Defend your fortress ([[trap]]s/[[military]])<br /> *From the way Toady implements some features, have a lot of (twisted) [[fun]]<br /> *Accumulate [[wealth]]<br /> *Build and sustain a bustling full 200 dwarf fortress (this is already a bit &quot;optional&quot;)<br /> <br /> Most people prefer to do some/most of these steps:<br /> *Expand the cave to have own specific areas for specific purposes ([[Bedroom]]s, [[workshops]], [[farm]]s etc)<br /> *Create various items for exporting ([[Trade]])<br /> *Create a working [[military]]<br /> *Dig out the wealth of the mountain/ground (Mainly [[platinum]], [[gold]], [[gem]]s, [[adamantine]] etc)<br /> *Create luxury for your dwarves and a generally grand and nicely smoothed fortress<br /> *Generally make your fort self-sustaining and self-supplied<br /> *Experiment with and experience the full depth of all game features<br /> *Complete megalomaniac construction projects<br /> *Kill Elves<br /> *Create the worlds largest Brewery<br /> *Do it all over again with one skill-less dwarf in a [[terriying]] biome<br /> *Profit!<br /> <br /> Beyond this, it's really up to your own imagination what you wish to do. After all, this game is a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_game sandbox game]. The possibilities are endless.<br /> If you feel the need to play a more goal-based game, then check out the list of [[game goals]] for suggestions.<br /> <br /> <br /> {{Game Basics FAQ}}</div>

Silfir https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=User:Silfir&diff=44510 2008-11-05T11:38:23Z

<p>Silfir: </p> <hr /> <div>Dwarf Fortress Start Builds by Skill<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> This guide's purpose is to offer thoughts on the value of skills and their viability as part of a standard seven-dwarf-starting build, for all the crazy optimizers out there.<br /> <br /> All skills that the author deems to make any kind of sense as startup choices will be mentioned. Those that are not even mentioned are mostly useless even later on in the game, when there is no shortage of dwarves that have this skill, and simply are of no use to a fledgling fortress. (I wonder if some guy will come out now and say that he actually uses a Dyer very early to great effect by trading dyed clothing for obscene profits or something...)<br /> <br /> The order in which the skills are discussed follows the order in which they are listed on startup. An entry for the skill will try to discuss any viable combination, at least the tendencies; it is implied that taking one point off maximum skills for purposes of making room for others won't change the general idea.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''MINERS'''<br /> <br /> Almost essential if you want to set up an underground fortress early; dabbling miners will simply take too long. Having a maximum skill miner in your startup team also makes a lot of sense if you want to mine ore at any point before &quot;horribly late&quot;, since ore mining is something that shouldn't even be done by proficient miners; a miner that started out proficient and got to expert level or something while he dug out your initial fortress space will make you much happier with your ore output.<br /> <br /> NO MINER:<br /> <br /> For challenge games that forbid mining. You don't have to read a guide like this if you contemplate something along those lines.<br /> <br /> NO MINER/A COUPLE OF PICKS:<br /> <br /> If you don't want dedicated miners at all yet - put your unskilled dwarves to work! If you want the skills for other stuff...<br /> <br /> MINER:<br /> <br /> Doesn'T take a lot of skill points. Still will take bloody ages.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER:<br /> <br /> A single dwarf with maximum skill in mining will be hard at work to carve out your initial fortress; generally it will take long enough that you will have to set up workshops and stockpiles and work outside for a while. On the upside, if you don't plan on having much mining done later on, you can make sure that you still have one extremely skilled miner in any case if he is the only one who ever did any mining. Mining for ore once your fortress space is set up is thus very satisfying. However, it really does take long for your initial fortress to be dug out by a single miner; and if you happen to lose that one miner together with his pick... If you plan on setting up an underground fortress anyway though, one proficient miner is more than you'll ever need (you still want the one to dig out ore and stuff).<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER/EXTRA PICK:<br /> <br /> Well, this solves the problem of losing your only pick together with your one starting miner at the very least, with only 20 dwarfbux extra. Also, you can have one of your other dwarves help dig out the fortress, albeit at a very slow pace...<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER/MINER:<br /> <br /> Something to think about. Generally this might be enough to have your fortress dug out in a sensible timeframe. The level 2 Miner will not stay a miner forever; usually he will work at his other job once the initial fortress is dug out, and leave further mining, for instance exploratory mining, to his more skilled buddy, only mining out living spaces where you don't want to get too much stone. This might be a good choice for your fulltime single Mason in the beginning, when he doesn't have any stone to work on yet. Once he's done enough work, switch Mining off for him and never turn it on again. You'll still have a spare pick you can give to immigrants later if you need to do more mining than your single dedicated miner can take care of.<br /> <br /> TWO PROFICIENT MINERS:<br /> <br /> This is recommended often in beginner guides, and usually wise. You will have your initial mining done fast enough, and later you will often find at least one of your two miners ready to work. This also means that your miners can take up secondary jobs with relative ease; the other is there to pick up the slack, after all. In most beginner guides, one of the miners also gets the administrative skills (Judge of Intent, Appraiser, Organizer, Record Keeper, Social Skill (Negotiator, for instance) and becomes expedition leader, while the other gets Stonecrafter, a job that can be worked anytime if mining isn't needed, for the large benefit of turning useless stone into vendor trash. Other builds are imaginable, given the flexibility of this build variant. It does use up a seventh of your total skill points.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER/TWO EXTRA PICKS:<br /> <br /> A variant of one of the above builds; speeds up initial fortress set up with the help of two dwarves that don't have any jobs needed initially and thus can at least be put to this use without wasting any skill points on them. Only if you think putting this kind of inefficient use of dwarfpower in initial setup is worth it to save the few skill points that would make your dabblers much more effective...<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER/MINER/MINER:<br /> <br /> This gives you the rough initial setup speed of two proficient miners. It costs about the same in skill points and requires one more pick, but it divides the skill points used among two dwarves instead of another one. This is an option if you want these dwarves to get high level skills, but still work other jobs beyond Miner initally, which might be the case if you want to start out with Proficient Armor- and/or Weaponsmiths.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER/PROFICIENT MINER/PROFICIENT MINER:<br /> <br /> Honestly? This is overkill. You don't need this large a fortress set up this fast. It costs a bit too much in skill points with doubtful use. Having your initial mining divided up between three dwarves also isn't good for ore mining efficiency. Only choose this if you want to engage in some hardcore mining right from the start.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''WOODCUTTER'''<br /> <br /> Woodcutting is near useless on treeless maps (you might still be able to grow towercaps later). On maps WITH trees, at least some degree of Woodcutting skill is wise, especially if the trees are few and far between and it thus takes long enough time to even get to them.<br /> <br /> NO WOODCUTTER OR AXE:<br /> <br /> As mentioned, if there aren't any trees, and you know for sure you won't be growning towercaps for a while, if at all (no underground river or lake = no towercaps), then you don't need to bring a Woodcutter, or even an axe.<br /> <br /> STEEL BATTLE AXE:<br /> <br /> If you want a dabbler to cut your wood. This will take bloody ages, and so is not really recommended. If you've got trees, you should at least have a<br /> <br /> NOVICE WOODCUTTER:<br /> <br /> Yeah. This should be the minimum for Woodcutting skill. Give this to a Carpenter, in addition to some other skill or skills, and you're all set for reasonable wood item production. As a crazy optimizer, I won't go much higher.<br /> <br /> HIGHER THAN NOVICE WOODCUTTER:<br /> <br /> Got skill points left over and want to increase your woodcutting speed for any reason, for instance since you want to use wood for more than just carpentry? Then invest some skill points here, but keep in mind that your Woodcutter will practice cutting wood anyway. I stop at Competent Woodcutter at the most.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT WOODCUTTER:<br /> <br /> Starting builds choose this for simplicity. I consider this a waste of skill points that could have gone into some more useful level 1 skills, like Metalsmith, Thresher, or even Woodcrafter, or most notably Axedwarf for extra early defense (remember the axe you have to bring with you anyway?) If you combine Woodcutter with Carpenter, take points away from Woodcutter, not Carpenter.<br /> <br /> If you have TWO Carpenters working since you plan on building an aboveground fortress, having a Proficient Woodcutter is actually worth it, since you have to cut the wood at about the same speed at which your carpenters work. Of course, since you don't need miners, this is easily forgiven.<br /> <br /> MORE THAN ONE WOODCUTTER:<br /> <br /> Axes are too friggin' expensive. If you plan on forging two copper axes on site... Nah, not even then. One Proficient Woodcutter is generally enough.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''CARPENTER'''<br /> <br /> The only carpenter-only items that you need for a well-rounded fortress are beds. Beds have quality levels, so high-quality beds are useful, but they are not strictly essential as you can impress nobles with other stuff.<br /> <br /> Carpenter is usually paired up with Woodcutter because of the obvious synergy: If your carpenter runs out of wood to work with, he doesn't have to wait for any other dwarf to get the wood for him, but can go and cut it himself, and have the haulers fetch it for him so he can start right on carpenting once he's finished.<br /> <br /> NO CARPENTER:<br /> <br /> A possibility on woodless maps or maps with very low supplies of wood, if you only plan on making beds and buckets out of wood anyway and don't care about the quality. Does take a lot of time, so your dabbler of choice should get to work immediately in an aboveground workshop. You'll get carpenter immigrants later to work on your traded-for wood to make more beds, and you have the skill points free for other, more useful stuff. Does pretty much require you to have magma or at the very least bituminous coal or lignite, because if you don't have those you need wood made out of charcoal for barrels and bins, too, and even if you do have access to coke, it's only a limited resource better used on steel, armor or weapons.<br /> <br /> NOVICE CARPENTER:<br /> <br /> Like the above build, with one skill point spent on having it require less time to make the initial beds and bucket, and subsequent beds.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT CARPENTER:<br /> <br /> This is generally recommended if your map has at least some wood, and to get beds of at least some quality. Even more suitable if your map has decent supplies of wood, and definitely worth it if you plan to make bins and barrels all out of wood (i. e. no magma or superfluous metal). Taking one point off to make room for Novice Woodcutter and another Proficient level skill is not unwise, as there is not that much difference and high skill levels aren't that crucial, especially if you happen to have large amounts of wood to train with, as is the case on maps containing Woodland or Heavily Forested biomes.<br /> <br /> TWO PROFICIENT CARPENTERS:<br /> <br /> In case you want to build an aboveground fortress out of wood. On Heavily Forested all-aquifer maps, this can happen, and might be preferable to having a fortress entirely in soil. You need the extra carpenter to construct buildings.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''MASON'''<br /> <br /> Masons are usually hard at work, because usually stone is the material of choice for anything that can be made out of it. If there's no aquifer, stone is essentially available in practically limitless amounts. It's not the only and definite building material, especially if magma and sand are available, or the map is heavily forested anyway. On maps with aquifer, it's almost reversed; stone can be sparse there, and wood the better choice for furniture. Few important items need to be made of stone or stone blocks (mechanisms spring to mind), after all. Only stone blocks (they can be traded for), millstones and querns need to be made by a mason, and these don't need any quality levels.<br /> <br /> NO MASON:<br /> <br /> As has been mentioned, maps with an aquifer generally contain few stone or none at all. If you don't plan on breaching through the aquifer anytime soon, then you'll never get stone except for trading or deposits above aquifer level. Even if you do need to make some furniture items out of stone, you can have a dabbler or later on immigrant work on it.<br /> <br /> MASON:<br /> <br /> The alternative if dabblers don't work fast enough for you. Cheap in skill points.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MASON:<br /> <br /> The most popular build choice for maps WITHOUT aquifers, or for people who plan on breaching through the aquifer early anyway and want their mason to work full-time on transforming stone into furniture. High-quality furniture is worth your while since it makes dwarves happy, and happy dwarves are farther away from a homicidal rampage than unhappy ones. Also, if your mason needs to provide the fortress with most of its furniture, you need him to work reasonably fast pretty much all the time. This is one of the main problems with this build: Giving your one Proficient Mason skills that he'll even have time to make use of. Some even don't give him any skills beyond Proficient Mason; I think that at the very least you can have him be Novice Building Designer, since he will have to build most of the buildings that require a designer himself anyway, and it comes up rarely enough that it won't take away much of his time. Also useful: Novice Animal Trainer, to transform your starting dogs into war dogs while there is not yet any stone to work with. Give him Competent Herbalist in addition to those two and have him gather some plants while there is still no stone or particular need to make furniture quick, and you're set. Also a possibility is to give him some Mining skills so he can help set up the fortress. In short, any skill that, although useful, takes very few or almost no time away from his Masonry will suit your Mason dwarf well. It might even be prudent to give him some fighting skills just in case.<br /> <br /> TWO PROFICIENT MASONS:<br /> <br /> Having two Proficient Masons only makes sense if you plan on having them working both at the same time; if you only plan on having two masons so you can give them some other skills they can work on while the other takes up mason duty, it's more sensible to have one dedicated mason and another dwarf with both of those non-mason skills - you'll always need at least one Mason working full-time. TWO Masons working full-time - or at least, one full, one half - are generally not necessary, except if you plan on setting up an aboveground fortress with stone dug up by a single Miner. You'll need the extra Mason then, and can substitute one of your miners for him because you only need to mine for stone, not space.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''ENGRAVER'''<br /> <br /> The value of this at startup is doubtful. Engraving is mostly decorative work with the exception of fortifications. Of course, having a high-value dining room early does wonders for dwarf moral. There are stupider skills to take.<br /> <br /> NOVICE ENGRAVER:<br /> <br /> Well, if you do get an early Engraver, he needs some mad skills to be of use, since he can't waste time training for them as one of your starting dwarves. Only choose this if you absolutely must have some early fortifications carved out of walls, and even then you might just hand that to a dabbler. For early smoothing with a dwarf that you think won't get much better to do with his time for a while, this is okay.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT ENGRAVER:<br /> <br /> Get a legendary dining room in no time! Beyond that, pretty much a waste of skill points. The truth may lie inbetween for you.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''BUILDING DESIGNER'''<br /> <br /> Not strictly necessary - you can also simply enable the labor for any dwarf and have him get to work. But that will take longer. At least<br /> <br /> NOVICE BUILDING DESIGNER:<br /> <br /> Should always be worth it. Give it to your primary Mason, or any other Dwarf that still has room for a level 1 skill that seldom will be used. Your single Mason is best because he usually doesn't have many other sensible choices anyway, and will be the one who constructs the building designed most of the time.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''WEAPONSMITH'''<br /> <br /> Usually metal industry takes up time, so it's not much trouble to wait for an immigrant Weaponsmith. BUT - since these are not guaranteed, and they will start at skill level 2, it's tempting to include a highly skilled Weaponsmith among your starting dwarves, especially if you have no magma and can't quite waste coal fuel training a n00b.<br /> <br /> NOVICE WEAPONSMITH:<br /> <br /> In case you plan on setting up a metal industry very early. Novice already means a lot towards higher skill levels compared to zero, so this is an effective use of skill points if you don't plan on having enough to go all the way.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT WEAPONSMITH:<br /> <br /> But I say, if you plan on including one at all, try to make him or her as skilled as possible. He'll work some other job until a metal industry is set up, and he won't churn out weapons exactly all the time even then, so give him a useful secondary job, like some sort of crafting, or Furnace Operating, or Grower. Even Carpenter, he can still make beds, barrels and bins during his downtime as a Weaponsmith.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''BOWYER'''<br /> <br /> Wooden or bone crossbows - that's all you can do with this. This is only worth it if you plan on having no metal at all for a prolonged time early on, and you must equip your military with SOMETHING, and you have no obsidian for swords either, and you don't want to rely on traders.<br /> <br /> NOVICE BOWYER:<br /> <br /> At least it won't be all no-quality, and you can't go that much wrong with only one skill point for a seldom-used skill. If you have surplus wood, have your Novice Bowyer churn out a lot of crossbows and trade away (or just dump) the low-quality ones before assigning any to your marksdwarves or hunters. Your material is shitty, so try to make the best of it.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT BOWYER:<br /> <br /> In theory, this gives you the best weapons outside of obsidian and metal. In practice, a waste of skill points. Getting access to better weapons shouldn't be THIS hard. Better get higher-skilled crafters, to get more trade goods worth more dwarfbux, and TRADE for some weapons until you can set up a metal industry. If you don't plan on having a metal industry at all... Well, get this if you must. Dwarves in leather, wearing wooden shields and firing bone crossbows are still better than dwarves wrestling naked.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''ARMORSMITH'''<br /> <br /> I could write &quot;See Weaponsmith&quot;, as the same criteria apply. Armorsmiths tend to be a bit more busy than Weaponsmiths once the metal industry has started, because you need only one weapon per military dwarf, but in theory they all can wear multiple pieces of different armor. (Plate mail + helmet + shield + boots + greaves...) Keep this in mind when assigning your Proficient Armorsmith his other job to work on until he gets to apply his mad skillz. Carpenter is probably not the thing for this guy.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''METALSMITH'''<br /> <br /> Metalsmiths produce items with quality levels, but not usually items that NEED to be of high quality. You can make furniture out of metal, but that requires fuel and a lot of metal bars versus one single stone. Usually metal furniture is only made out of bars of metal that you obtained in trade - if you dig the metal out, it's much more efficient to just have a mason use the ore to make the statue, resulting in the same value, no fuel used to turn the ore into bars, and most importantly only one ore's worth of metal used instead of three. Thus, metalsmiths don't usually make furniture, but anvils, chains, cages or barrels, bins and buckets.<br /> <br /> NO METALSMITH:<br /> <br /> No early metal industry planned, you'll make one of your free immigrants dabbling Metalsmith if he isn't already a level two one.<br /> <br /> NOVICE METALSMITH:<br /> <br /> This is generally enough even if you do plan on having a metal industry early. Barrels, bins and buckets don't need to be of any kind of quality. Usually you only want to churn out barrels, bins and buckets if you are low on wood, but have magma and a lot of superfluous metal to work with.<br /> <br /> HIGHER THAN NOVICE METALSMITH:<br /> <br /> Usefulness is doubtful. You'll never need that many items or that high quality to warrant things like a Proficient Metalsmith at startup.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''FURNACE OPERATOR'''<br /> <br /> Furnace Operators are needed to make coke out of your coal, metal bars out of your ore with some measure of speed to supply your smiths.<br /> <br /> NO FURNACE OPERATOR:<br /> <br /> If you ever do need one, you can have one dabble in it. Usually you can wait for your first immigrant wave.<br /> <br /> NOVICE FURNACE OPERATOR:<br /> <br /> To do your early Furnace Operating, before you have immigrant dwarves to train in this task. Since Furnace Operating is essentially a full-time job in a running metal industry, you usually don't plan on having an initial dwarf do this for any kind of prolonged time, so don't spend more. Go regular Furnace Operator at the most, and even that is probably not required.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''WOOD BURNER'''<br /> <br /> Only needed if you don't have magma. With magma, the only use of this is to get access to fertilizer potash, soap, and clear glass. Also, steel if there is no other source of refined fuel whatsoever. If you don't have Magma, then you need your Wood Burner to start off your metal industry. More useful if you have lots of wood on your map, as you don't need to rely as much on lignite or bituminous coal.<br /> <br /> NO WOOD BURNER:<br /> <br /> If you have magma.<br /> <br /> NOVICE WOOD BURNER:<br /> <br /> If you have no magma, or want to smelt stuff without having found it or any kind of advanced coal yet, which will require you to produce quite a pile of charcoal.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''METAL CRAFTER'''<br /> <br /> A highly skilled Metal Crafter is nice to have in case you have access to highly valuable metal bars early, so you can make high-quality goblets out of them. Usually it's easier to get highly skilled Stone Crafters to make stuff out of the ore though, which makes Metal Crafter another skill of doubtful priority.<br /> <br /> NO METAL CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> No problem at all with this. Apart from trade goods, the only item you need to have a Metal Crafter for is metal chains for your jail (ropes can be snapped by angry dwarves). You can get those from a dabbler too.<br /> <br /> NOVICE METAL CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> AT MOST. Find some better use for that skill point, if you ask me.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''STONE CRAFTER'''<br /> <br /> Stone is a dime a dozen. Actually, more like a dime a hundred dozen. Unless there is an aquifer, there is no shortage of stone. Stone trade goods aren't worth much (unless made of rare ores or obsidian/flux), but in this case it's a matter of sheer mass - and crafter skill.<br /> <br /> NOVICE STONE CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> Giving this to one of your dwarves is not bad, but not worth much either. He or she'll produce goods at a slow pace and they will be of low quality. If you want to use crafts by your stone crafter to buy a lot of stuff from caravans early, you should go<br /> <br /> SKILLED STONE CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> Or something along those lines. Nothing wrong with having a Proficient one. Set him to work relatively early, and he'll buy you an anvil and some more useful stuff. This is well placed with one of your Miners (not your single Miner though) usually, because you can essentially choose freely whether you produce crafts or mine. Give this, in any case, to some dwarf who'll have time to do it most of the time. If you go high with this skill, disable the stonecrafting labor from the immigrant craftsdwarves unless you really want another one producing low-quality stone crafts uglying up the content of your bins. With craftsdwarves in general, specialization is key.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''WOOD CRAFTER'''<br /> <br /> The least useful of the material crafting skills. Wood crafts are worth much less than the wood they are made of (not in dwarfbux, but in actuality, since wood makes beds and beds can only be made of wood). Even in a wood-rich map, the proper use for surplus wood is not crafts, but bolts. And that's the one thing a Wood Crafter is useful for: Bolts. Not for war, mind you, but for training. If you have more wood than you ever need, make bolts. Make crafts for trading out of rock - it has the advantage that even the hippie elves will take it.<br /> <br /> NO WOOD CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> What I do usually. I generally don't start getting wood surpluses until later, when I already have immigrants, and usually there's some n00b craftsdwarf available to do this instead of one of my valuable starting dwarfs.<br /> <br /> NOVICE WOOD CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> We've established that you only want to produce training bolts with a Wood Crafter. Your skill level doesn't matter one iota in this case. Give this skill to some dwarf who doesn't mind wasting some of his time producing a couple of training bolts. Maybe your Carpenter/Woodcutter, should he have more than enough wood and have produced more then enough bins, barrels and buckets... Or some other starting dwarf who finds himself with too much freetime. Other skills might be more useful.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''BONE CARVER'''<br /> <br /> Bone has many uses. For bone or shell armor, you should have skilled Bone Carvers at the ready. Otherwise, there's always bone bolts to make, or skull totems to use in trade. Bone isn't usually worth much unless it's some awesome stuff like dragon bone.<br /> <br /> NO BONE CARVER:<br /> <br /> I don't recommend this, actually. You'll always have bone, from unlucky invaders to eaten fish, even very early on. On the other hand, if kept in an inside refuse stockpile, it won't disappear either, and you can usually wait for an immigrant craftsdwarf to take up your main bone carving business.<br /> <br /> NOVICE BONE CARVER:<br /> <br /> Enough to make training bolts... But you won't need these much until you have a military. If you have a skill point to spare and need to provide a dwarf with some skill he can pursue while his other, main jobs don't require his attention, get this, usually in favour of Wood Crafter, since you can make better use of your wood in the early times of your fortress, even if there is a lot.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT BONE CARVER:<br /> <br /> Overkill. You simply don't get enough bones to justify this investment; high value bones are too rare. (Of course, there are the likes of Nist Akath, where bones are too numerous to count, but in that kind of environment FETCHING the bones will prove more problematic) For money, you want highly skilled Stone Crafters working away at the assloads of stones your fortress produces. That's not to say that highly skilled bone carvers are useless, but they are most useful if you have a skilled hunter at work, which is going to be much later - and immigrant bone carvers are better for that.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''GEM CUTTER'''<br /> <br /> Another one of the &quot;moneymaker&quot; skills. If you do find gems early on, this will help you transform them into dwarfbux in trade. Needless to say, however, stone is much more numerous and reliable. Pass. Wait for immigrants.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''GEM SETTER'''<br /> <br /> See above.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''MECHANIC'''<br /> <br /> This is very useful to have in general, and good use of starting dwarf skill points. The question is: How much points will you give this, and what will you combine it with? Mechanisms are considered decent, if somewhat heavy, export goods, so quality is not entirely unimportant. A Mechanic can do a lot even in early fortresses; his mechanisms will be required for early irrigation schemes or other things done with levers, and traps are considered to be the easiest way to protect your fortress bar nothing at all, considering that it takes only a single mechanic to produce sufficient stone fall traps to smash hordes of early attacking animals, and more devious traps capable of handling sieges (also, cage traps, but you need a Metalsmith or a Carpenter for the Cage).<br /> <br /> NO MECHANIC:<br /> <br /> Not recommended, even if you don't plan on using any traps. At the very least you need someone to make mechanisms and set up some lever schemes. Even if your map happens to lack any stone, you need this guy working on the imported stone for mechanisms all the more.<br /> <br /> NOVICE MECHANIC:<br /> <br /> Minimum. Maybe enough if no traps are planned and mechanisms will not be used for trading.<br /> <br /> COMPETENT MECHANIC:<br /> <br /> This is a good average value if you intend to produce traps at a decent speed very early.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MECHANIC:<br /> <br /> In case you want to just go all out and use these for trading. Keep in mind that you have to trade items of sufficient weight for these. If you have Proficient Mechanic, you can in theory use it as a substitute for any kind of Stone Crafting. Stone crafts ARE less cumbersome to trade with (they go in bins!), however. Your choice.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''FISHERDWARF'''<br /> <br /> Fishing is the simplest source of food. Get fish, clean it, eat. You can cook your fish if you want, too, but that means you don't get bones and in case of turtles, shells.<br /> <br /> NO FISHERDWARF:<br /> <br /> Maps without water: Of course. If it does have water, then you might still shrug and point to your Grower dwarfs, who will make more than enough food to get by and don't have to risk their necks going outside. Shell can be gotten from turtles you bring at startup and simply stored in an inside refuse stockpile.<br /> <br /> FISHERDWARF:<br /> <br /> Sensible. Only two skill points, and it gives one of your starting dwarf something to do until you have set up your fortress. You should probably give some other dwarf the Fish Cleaning skill, since if you give it to this guy you have to turn the Fishing labor on and off periodically. You'll also have to turn the Fishing labor off to let him work on his numerous secondary skills, like Mechanic or a Crafting skill. This guy is never unemployed, but flexible. Don't overdo it with the secondary skills, and remember to turn some off once the first immigrant wave hits.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT FISHERDWARF:<br /> <br /> Overkill on most maps. If there's a lot of water you can get more out of this, but it only improves speed to have high Fisherdwarf skills... Remember the risk for carp to be generated, and how useless this major skill point investment will be then.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''MILLER'''<br /> <br /> Makes flour out of longland grass and cave wheat that can be used for cooking.<br /> <br /> NO MILLER:<br /> <br /> Entirely okay. Both longland grass and cave wheat can be brewed instead. You need bags to put flour in too.<br /> <br /> NOVICE MILLER:<br /> <br /> Not the most useless skill ever though... Well... Maybe not worth it.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''THRESHER'''<br /> <br /> Processing plants gives you seeds. Useful for pig tails if you lack barrels for brewing.<br /> <br /> NO THRESHER:<br /> <br /> You can live with this. But:<br /> <br /> NOVICE THRESHER:<br /> <br /> Bags can be very useful to get early, and this is the first step on the way from pig tail to pig tail bag. And it gives you seeds, as mentioned, without having to rely on barrels. More skill points are probably overkill though. Give this to a dwarf who will find himself with occasional freetime in the beginning.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''GROWER'''<br /> <br /> Unless you are batshit crazy, you want to make plants the mainstay of your food and alcohol supply. So you'll want Growers, since having dabblers do this wastes a lot of seeds while they learn.<br /> <br /> LOW SKILL GROWERS:<br /> <br /> You'll have no shortage of low-skill Growers later on. If you get Growers, make them highly skilled, as this makes the most use of your occasionally sparse starting seeds. You never know.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT GROWER:<br /> <br /> Might be enough, though you might get in trouble if you want to plant many different kinds of crops. And you also will most definitely get in trouble with All Dwarves Harvest turned off unless you give this guy NO secondary job (Proficient Weaponsmith for instance, which is NOT supposed to be even used early on)<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT GROWER/PROFICIENT GROWER:<br /> <br /> This is generally recommended (you can afford going Skilled/Skilled, or even Competent/Competent too here). Has the advantage that you can have them work most secondary jobs pretty freely, like Brewing, Cooking, Fish Cleaning, while still being able to grow a lot of useful and nutritious crops.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''HERBALIST'''<br /> <br /> If you want to set up aboveground crop farming early, you need a Herbalist to get some aboveground plants.<br /> <br /> NO HERBALIST:<br /> <br /> One does not have to be a skilled Herbalist to do this, but since it will take long and have a high chance of failure if you send out a dabbler at least<br /> <br /> NOVICE HERBALIST:<br /> <br /> Should be considered. For speed reasons and efficiency, especially should you have to rely on these guys to help you out of food shortages, you might want to get<br /> <br /> COMPETENT HERBALIST:<br /> <br /> instead. There. Herbalism, not unlike Fishing, is a job a dwarf can work anytime they find themselves with nothing better to do, like Masons before there is stone - you can use immigrant Herbalists later; they can train the skill easily if it's the only thing they ever do and become better than your starting Herbalist has time for considering the other skills he might want to work.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''BREWER'''<br /> <br /> Sober dwarfs are unhappy dwarfs and don't work effectively at all. Brewer is an essential job in a fledgling fortress. You also need your brewer to get seeds out of aboveground plants picked in the beginning.<br /> <br /> NO BREWER:<br /> <br /> Next!<br /> <br /> BREWER:<br /> <br /> Minimum. Brewery does not have to be executed all that fast, and you will want additional stills and brewers for larger communities, much, much later, but this is something you should be able to afford for the sake of your dwarfs. Remember, dwarfs would rather run around naked than drink inferior booze.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT BREWER:<br /> <br /> Definitely not a bad idea if you can spare the skill points. Distilled happiness for your dwarfs! Other skills might strike your fancy more, though. Maybe the truth lies between Brewer and Proficient Brewer...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''COOK'''<br /> <br /> Well, food is as important as booze, needless to say.<br /> <br /> NO COOK:<br /> <br /> Are you serious? Do you want your dwarfs to eat only shitty food made by a bumbling fool dabbling as a cook?<br /> <br /> COOK:<br /> <br /> Probably minimum. Cooking is less critical than Brewing is, because dwarves can eat stuff that isn't cooked, but never stuff that hasn't been brewed. A decided disadvantage of cooking is that it doesn't produce seeds, bones or shells. And also, dwarves drink twice as often as they eat. You should always give Brewing a slightly higher priority than you give Cooking.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT COOK:<br /> <br /> Only if you already have a Proficient Brewer. Do you really have this many skill points?<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''WEAVER'''<br /> <br /> A low-priority skill that will not be used for long by any of your starting dwarves. This is excellent for later immigrants.<br /> <br /> NO WEAVER:<br /> <br /> Okay. If you don't have Novice Thresher, then you also don't need Novice Weaver.<br /> <br /> NOVICE WEAVER:<br /> <br /> BUT if you already got Novice Thresher, you might want to invest a point in this for quicker early bags.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''CLOTHIER'''<br /> <br /> The prime purpose of this in an EARLY fortress is to make bags. Cloth bags are easier to make than leather bags because pig tails are much, much easier to obtain than animal hides. A dedicated cloth industry for clothing should be left to immigrants.<br /> <br /> NO CLOTHIER:<br /> <br /> If you don't think you'll need bags, and if you ever do you'll have dabblers work on it.<br /> <br /> NOVICE CLOTHIER:<br /> <br /> Almost essential if you plan on not only getting a few bags, but quite a lot - maps with magma and sand might need this. Bags are also required to store quarry bush leaves. You probably can't go wrong with this. Think about getting the Novice Thresher and Novice Weaver skills too.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''AMBUSHER'''<br /> <br /> Combine this with some sort of weapon skill. Hunting is a gamble - your dwarf might always be slaughtered, by real badass horses, or two-humped camels... Hunting is something you should reserve for expendable dwarfs, not one of your starting seven!<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''BUTCHER'''<br /> <br /> Not for hunted animals, that's for sure. But you can butcher your tame animals in the beginning to get hides that you can tan to leather, and have a leatherworker produce some bags. But pig tails and an cloth industry are much better for this, since early on you won't have many animals at all, and slaughtering those will inhibit your breeding. Keep this in mind for immigrants, when your animals have had time to breed... and get on your nerves.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''TANNER'''<br /> <br /> Only if you have a Butcher, which you usually don't.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''LEATHERWORKER'''<br /> <br /> This is very useful. Leather can be made into all sorts of useful items: Clothing, bags, armor...<br /> <br /> NO LEATHERWORKER:<br /> <br /> But, of course, you can keep this in mind for your first immigrants. If you don't have a Butcher or Tanner planned in, you can still use traded-for leather, but that will take some time to get anyway. Bags can be made out of cloth. Quivers, backpacks and armor cannot, but they can wait for your first immigrant wave, which is the earliest point to build up a dedicated military who would need those.<br /> <br /> NOVICE LEATHERWORKER:<br /> <br /> But this is probably a bit more sensible than Butcher or Tanner, since you'll get your first leather by autumn most of the time, earlier than the first immigrant wave. Still, you want a dedicated Leatherworker later, so don't put more into this.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''FISH CLEANER'''<br /> <br /> Get Novice Fish Cleaner if you have a Fisherdwarf - it doesn't take up much time, just queue up a repeated Clean Fish task at the Fishery occasionally. Without Fisherdwarf, getting Fish Cleaner would be just nutty. If you like, you can have a dabbling guy do this job, too.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''ANIMAL TRAINER'''<br /> <br /> Get Novice if you like, beyond is a waste of skill points. You can also have dabbling animal trainers working on your starting dogs. I usually give this to my mason.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''GLASSMAKER'''<br /> <br /> First of all, you need a map with sand for this choice to make any sense. Beyond that, if your map has magma, think about getting a dedicated Glassmaker to churn out large parts of your furniture in green glass form; you have infinite sand and infinite fuel! Of course, stone is never exactly sparse and Magma Glass Furnaces take some time to set up.<br /> <br /> NO GLASSMAKER:<br /> <br /> No sand. Or, sand and no magma. A glass industry without magma is of highly doubtful use and can definitely wait for immigrants.<br /> <br /> NOVICE GLASSMAKER OR MAYBE UP TO COMPETENT:<br /> <br /> Sand and magma... It might be of use. Most stuff that can be made out of glass can be made out of stone too, but this guy can somewhat relieve your mason of some of his stress.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT GLASSMAKER:<br /> <br /> This is if you go all out and make ALL your furniture out of glass, possibly even replace your mason. This is actually an excellent course of action you have on maps that contain magma, sand AND an aquifer, so very few stone is available if at all. You might even be able to forget about a mason entirely!<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT GLASSMAKER/PROFICIENT GLASSMAKER:<br /> <br /> Same conditions, enormous building projects planned... If you want to make a glass-themed fortress, this certainly is in style!<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''WRESTLER'''<br /> <br /> Unarmed Combat skill. Whether you want combat skills at all depends on the type of map you embark on and the level of paranoia you display. This has the advantage that you don't need to give your wrestler dwarf any weapons, and is a good defensive choice for dwarves that do not carry a weapon-like item at work...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''AXEDWARF'''<br /> <br /> While this is the most logical choice for your Woodcutter. If you want only one dwarf with at least a semblance of military skill to protect the others, make it this.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''SWORDSDWARF<br /> MACEDWARF<br /> HAMMERDWARF'''<br /> <br /> You'll have to bring extra weapons for these guys, so consider with care. Hammers and Maces are probably the best to use against skeletal entities in terrifying biomes... Remember that there is no way to have your dwarves still carry these weapons while they are civilians. Giving them Wrestling will benefit them more in emergency situations; this is if you plan on having them stand watch or something.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''SPEARDWARF'''<br /> <br /> The skill your miner uses in combat with your pick, if I remember right, so sensible to use those instead of Wrestling. Apart from that, see swords, maces and hammers.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''MARKSDWARF'''<br /> <br /> Crossbows have the advantage that they need only wood to make on-site, and that they are the least risky weapon for your dwarfs. So you might give this to one of your guys. If you give him the Hunting labor, he'll still carry this as a civilian - but of course, he'll go out to hunt and do nothing else. Not a good thing. So like the other non-axe, non-pick weapons, hardly useful in an emergency.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''SHIELD USER<br /> ARMOR USER'''<br /> <br /> Consider these for terrifying biomes where well-rounded soldiers have a much greater influence on survivability than most other things. Remember that these make no sense if you don't also get armor and shields. Expensive.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''SIEGE ENGINEER'''<br /> <br /> Like Weaponsmith and Armorsmith, you might want this at maximum level for later - siege engines definitely only make sense if you have skilled operators working them, so you need immigrants anyway. High quality siege engines are important though, and Siege engine parts consume materials like crazy...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''SWIMMER'''<br /> <br /> A reserve skill for your Fisherdwarf just in case? I dunno. More of an adventure mode skill I suppose. Maybe if you want your miner to make some really crazy mining stunts. In that case, go as high as you can afford (Novice skill is no guarantee for survival), or grow some brains.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''PERSUADER<br /> NEGOTIATOR<br /> LIAR<br /> INTIMIDATOR<br /> CONVERSATIONALIST<br /> COMEDIAN<br /> FLATTERER'''<br /> <br /> Social skills to choose from. Doesn't make much difference. Novice level is all you need if you ever choose one.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''JUDGE OF INTENT'''<br /> <br /> Useful for your Broker, as it displays the attitude of the people you trade with. Since it is also a social skill like the above, it's more useful than the others - slightly, of course. Novice level is all you need.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''APPRAISER'''<br /> <br /> Your broker needs this to properly calculate prices. Novice level is all you need.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''ORGANIZER'''<br /> <br /> This does not have to be a skill of your brokerdwarf, as it doesn't need social skills to work. It trains very fast, you putting this above Novice is probably not required. If you do not have an Organizer at all, you can't use the job manager to issue work orders, but have to queue up items in the workshops by hand. There's enough micromanagement in Dwarf Fortress even without that. Still, you can have an immigrant in your first wave become Organizer and save this skill point for other things.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''RECORD KEEPER'''<br /> <br /> You need SOME dwarf with bookkeeper skill to get even the roughest estimate of your stocks beyond counting it all yourself. For accurate counts, you also need to give him an office and have him work. You can have a dabbler do all this though - he'll get Novice in the shortest time, and if you set him to Highest Precision (not recommended for a starting dwarf, since that will require most of his attention) he'll reach legendary status very quick.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> '''CONSOLER<br /> PACIFIER'''<br /> <br /> These skills are useful for your leaderdwarf, and you might choose this in favor of other social skills. Consolers will have a positive influence on sad dwarves, Pacifiers will be able to calm those that have snapped and thrown a tantrum.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> With all these in mind, this is my current build, for a map that contains a magma pipe, no aquifer, a river and sand:<br /> <br /> 5 MINER/1 JUDGE OF INTENT/1 APPRAISER/1 NEGOTIATOR/1 ORGANIZER/1 BONE CARVER (The Guy. Yup, I decided against having him keep records like is usually recommended. The reason for this is I can't control when the bugger goes off keeping his damn records, but I can EASILY control when he goes carving some bolts out of bone. The fact that I have to set up a second office if I want both Organizing and Record Keeping done doesn't faze me in the slightest - one more chair and table doesn't make much of a difference, and Organizing isn't that helpful in an early game fortress anyway. Yeah, I can just have him stop keeping records when I want to by putting out his chair under him or something, but that would be mean.)<br /> <br /> 5 MINER/4 STONE CRAFTER/1 CLOTHIER (Mine, Produce vendor trash and occasionally bags)<br /> <br /> 5 MASON/1 ANIMAL TRAINER/1 BUILDING DESIGNER/3 HERBALIST (The key is being moderate with the herbalism. You only need to do enough herbalism to get some of every crop that groves in your biomes. Then you switch off cooking for them and set up a brewery, supply it with barrels, brew, and boom, outdoor farming. By this time, he should be able to get to work producing doors. If not, he can train my two starting dogs, and THEN produce doors.)<br /> <br /> 5 WEAPONSMITH/4 CARPENTER/1 WOODCUTTER (First thing: set him to shop some assloads of wood. Second, have him start carpentry. Much, much later he can produce some kickass weapons on the side while he carpents stuff as his main job. Some other schmuck should eventually do the woodcutting for him.)<br /> <br /> 5 ARMORSMITH/4 GROWER/1 FISH CLEANER (He's going to plant stuff and clean fish while he doesn't plant stuff, and haul if he ever has no stuff to plant or fish to clean. Once the metal industry starts, he's going to make armor, armor, armor, and have others pick up the slack for his other skills. Maybe keep Grower enabled for the rare cases when he doesn't have armor to forge.)<br /> <br /> 5 GROWER/3 BREWER/2 COOK (Everybody loves this guy! He plants, produces most of the seeds to plant by making the much-coveted alcoholic beverages, and occasionally makes some prepared meals out of the meat, flour, sugar, leaves and expendable fish I produce. I don't do cooking drinks; It's a waste of good alcohol.)<br /> <br /> 3 FISHERDWARF/3 MECHANIC/1 THRESHER/1 WEAVER/1 METALSMITH/1 RECORD KEEPING (I like to think of this guy as the bitch who has to all sorts of menial work for the other guys who bully him. In truth, he would like nothing more than just being kept alone with his mechanisms and traps. The only other thing he really enjoys is to go out fishing to be alone sometimes. He will get a LOT of relief once the immigrant wave hits and other guys can do his threshing, weaving, metalsmithing and record keeping. He'll always stay a Fisherdwarf/Mechanic though.)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Finished! Hope this doesn't waste too much server space.</div>

Silfir https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=User:Silfir&diff=44509 2008-11-05T11:34:42Z

<p>Silfir: </p> <hr /> <div>Dwarf Fortress Start Builds by Skill<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> This guide's purpose is to offer thoughts on the value of skills and their viability as part of a standard seven-dwarf-starting build, for all the crazy optimizers out there.<br /> <br /> All skills that the author deems to make any kind of sense as startup choices will be mentioned. Those that are not even mentioned are mostly useless even later on in the game, when there is no shortage of dwarves that have this skill, and simply are of no use to a fledgling fortress. (I wonder if some guy will come out now and say that he actually uses a Dyer very early to great effect by trading dyed clothing for obscene profits or something...)<br /> <br /> The order in which the skills are discussed follows the order in which they are listed on startup. An entry for the skill will try to discuss any viable combination, at least the tendencies; it is implied that taking one point off maximum skills for purposes of making room for others won't change the general idea.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> MINERS<br /> <br /> Almost essential if you want to set up an underground fortress early; dabbling miners will simply take too long. Having a maximum skill miner in your startup team also makes a lot of sense if you want to mine ore at any point before &quot;horribly late&quot;, since ore mining is something that shouldn't even be done by proficient miners; a miner that started out proficient and got to expert level or something while he dug out your initial fortress space will make you much happier with your ore output.<br /> <br /> NO MINER:<br /> <br /> For challenge games that forbid mining. You don't have to read a guide like this if you contemplate something along those lines.<br /> <br /> NO MINER/A COUPLE OF PICKS:<br /> <br /> If you don't want dedicated miners at all yet - put your unskilled dwarves to work! If you want the skills for other stuff...<br /> <br /> MINER:<br /> <br /> Doesn'T take a lot of skill points. Still will take bloody ages.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER:<br /> <br /> A single dwarf with maximum skill in mining will be hard at work to carve out your initial fortress; generally it will take long enough that you will have to set up workshops and stockpiles and work outside for a while. On the upside, if you don't plan on having much mining done later on, you can make sure that you still have one extremely skilled miner in any case if he is the only one who ever did any mining. Mining for ore once your fortress space is set up is thus very satisfying. However, it really does take long for your initial fortress to be dug out by a single miner; and if you happen to lose that one miner together with his pick... If you plan on setting up an underground fortress anyway though, one proficient miner is more than you'll ever need (you still want the one to dig out ore and stuff).<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER/EXTRA PICK:<br /> <br /> Well, this solves the problem of losing your only pick together with your one starting miner at the very least, with only 20 dwarfbux extra. Also, you can have one of your other dwarves help dig out the fortress, albeit at a very slow pace...<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER/MINER:<br /> <br /> Something to think about. Generally this might be enough to have your fortress dug out in a sensible timeframe. The level 2 Miner will not stay a miner forever; usually he will work at his other job once the initial fortress is dug out, and leave further mining, for instance exploratory mining, to his more skilled buddy, only mining out living spaces where you don't want to get too much stone. This might be a good choice for your fulltime single Mason in the beginning, when he doesn't have any stone to work on yet. Once he's done enough work, switch Mining off for him and never turn it on again. You'll still have a spare pick you can give to immigrants later if you need to do more mining than your single dedicated miner can take care of.<br /> <br /> TWO PROFICIENT MINERS:<br /> <br /> This is recommended often in beginner guides, and usually wise. You will have your initial mining done fast enough, and later you will often find at least one of your two miners ready to work. This also means that your miners can take up secondary jobs with relative ease; the other is there to pick up the slack, after all. In most beginner guides, one of the miners also gets the administrative skills (Judge of Intent, Appraiser, Organizer, Record Keeper, Social Skill (Negotiator, for instance) and becomes expedition leader, while the other gets Stonecrafter, a job that can be worked anytime if mining isn't needed, for the large benefit of turning useless stone into vendor trash. Other builds are imaginable, given the flexibility of this build variant. It does use up a seventh of your total skill points.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER/TWO EXTRA PICKS:<br /> <br /> A variant of one of the above builds; speeds up initial fortress set up with the help of two dwarves that don't have any jobs needed initially and thus can at least be put to this use without wasting any skill points on them. Only if you think putting this kind of inefficient use of dwarfpower in initial setup is worth it to save the few skill points that would make your dabblers much more effective...<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER/MINER/MINER:<br /> <br /> This gives you the rough initial setup speed of two proficient miners. It costs about the same in skill points and requires one more pick, but it divides the skill points used among two dwarves instead of another one. This is an option if you want these dwarves to get high level skills, but still work other jobs beyond Miner initally, which might be the case if you want to start out with Proficient Armor- and/or Weaponsmiths.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MINER/PROFICIENT MINER/PROFICIENT MINER:<br /> <br /> Honestly? This is overkill. You don't need this large a fortress set up this fast. It costs a bit too much in skill points with doubtful use. Having your initial mining divided up between three dwarves also isn't good for ore mining efficiency. Only choose this if you want to engage in some hardcore mining right from the start.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> WOODCUTTER<br /> <br /> Woodcutting is near useless on treeless maps (you might still be able to grow towercaps later). On maps WITH trees, at least some degree of Woodcutting skill is wise, especially if the trees are few and far between and it thus takes long enough time to even get to them.<br /> <br /> NO WOODCUTTER OR AXE:<br /> <br /> As mentioned, if there aren't any trees, and you know for sure you won't be growning towercaps for a while, if at all (no underground river or lake = no towercaps), then you don't need to bring a Woodcutter, or even an axe.<br /> <br /> STEEL BATTLE AXE:<br /> <br /> If you want a dabbler to cut your wood. This will take bloody ages, and so is not really recommended. If you've got trees, you should at least have a<br /> <br /> NOVICE WOODCUTTER:<br /> <br /> Yeah. This should be the minimum for Woodcutting skill. Give this to a Carpenter, in addition to some other skill or skills, and you're all set for reasonable wood item production. As a crazy optimizer, I won't go much higher.<br /> <br /> HIGHER THAN NOVICE WOODCUTTER:<br /> <br /> Got skill points left over and want to increase your woodcutting speed for any reason, for instance since you want to use wood for more than just carpentry? Then invest some skill points here, but keep in mind that your Woodcutter will practice cutting wood anyway. I stop at Competent Woodcutter at the most.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT WOODCUTTER:<br /> <br /> Starting builds choose this for simplicity. I consider this a waste of skill points that could have gone into some more useful level 1 skills, like Metalsmith, Thresher, or even Woodcrafter, or most notably Axedwarf for extra early defense (remember the axe you have to bring with you anyway?) If you combine Woodcutter with Carpenter, take points away from Woodcutter, not Carpenter.<br /> <br /> If you have TWO Carpenters working since you plan on building an aboveground fortress, having a Proficient Woodcutter is actually worth it, since you have to cut the wood at about the same speed at which your carpenters work. Of course, since you don't need miners, this is easily forgiven.<br /> <br /> MORE THAN ONE WOODCUTTER:<br /> <br /> Axes are too friggin' expensive. If you plan on forging two copper axes on site... Nah, not even then. One Proficient Woodcutter is generally enough.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> CARPENTER<br /> <br /> The only carpenter-only items that you need for a well-rounded fortress are beds. Beds have quality levels, so high-quality beds are useful, but they are not strictly essential as you can impress nobles with other stuff.<br /> <br /> Carpenter is usually paired up with Woodcutter because of the obvious synergy: If your carpenter runs out of wood to work with, he doesn't have to wait for any other dwarf to get the wood for him, but can go and cut it himself, and have the haulers fetch it for him so he can start right on carpenting once he's finished.<br /> <br /> NO CARPENTER:<br /> <br /> A possibility on woodless maps or maps with very low supplies of wood, if you only plan on making beds and buckets out of wood anyway and don't care about the quality. Does take a lot of time, so your dabbler of choice should get to work immediately in an aboveground workshop. You'll get carpenter immigrants later to work on your traded-for wood to make more beds, and you have the skill points free for other, more useful stuff. Does pretty much require you to have magma or at the very least bituminous coal or lignite, because if you don't have those you need wood made out of charcoal for barrels and bins, too, and even if you do have access to coke, it's only a limited resource better used on steel, armor or weapons.<br /> <br /> NOVICE CARPENTER:<br /> <br /> Like the above build, with one skill point spent on having it require less time to make the initial beds and bucket, and subsequent beds.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT CARPENTER:<br /> <br /> This is generally recommended if your map has at least some wood, and to get beds of at least some quality. Even more suitable if your map has decent supplies of wood, and definitely worth it if you plan to make bins and barrels all out of wood (i. e. no magma or superfluous metal). Taking one point off to make room for Novice Woodcutter and another Proficient level skill is not unwise, as there is not that much difference and high skill levels aren't that crucial, especially if you happen to have large amounts of wood to train with, as is the case on maps containing Woodland or Heavily Forested biomes.<br /> <br /> TWO PROFICIENT CARPENTERS:<br /> <br /> In case you want to build an aboveground fortress out of wood. On Heavily Forested all-aquifer maps, this can happen, and might be preferable to having a fortress entirely in soil. You need the extra carpenter to construct buildings.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> MASON<br /> <br /> Masons are usually hard at work, because usually stone is the material of choice for anything that can be made out of it. If there's no aquifer, stone is essentially available in practically limitless amounts. It's not the only and definite building material, especially if magma and sand are available, or the map is heavily forested anyway. On maps with aquifer, it's almost reversed; stone can be sparse there, and wood the better choice for furniture. Few important items need to be made of stone or stone blocks (mechanisms spring to mind), after all. Only stone blocks (they can be traded for), millstones and querns need to be made by a mason, and these don't need any quality levels.<br /> <br /> NO MASON:<br /> <br /> As has been mentioned, maps with an aquifer generally contain few stone or none at all. If you don't plan on breaching through the aquifer anytime soon, then you'll never get stone except for trading or deposits above aquifer level. Even if you do need to make some furniture items out of stone, you can have a dabbler or later on immigrant work on it.<br /> <br /> MASON:<br /> <br /> The alternative if dabblers don't work fast enough for you. Cheap in skill points.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MASON:<br /> <br /> The most popular build choice for maps WITHOUT aquifers, or for people who plan on breaching through the aquifer early anyway and want their mason to work full-time on transforming stone into furniture. High-quality furniture is worth your while since it makes dwarves happy, and happy dwarves are farther away from a homicidal rampage than unhappy ones. Also, if your mason needs to provide the fortress with most of its furniture, you need him to work reasonably fast pretty much all the time. This is one of the main problems with this build: Giving your one Proficient Mason skills that he'll even have time to make use of. Some even don't give him any skills beyond Proficient Mason; I think that at the very least you can have him be Novice Building Designer, since he will have to build most of the buildings that require a designer himself anyway, and it comes up rarely enough that it won't take away much of his time. Also useful: Novice Animal Trainer, to transform your starting dogs into war dogs while there is not yet any stone to work with. Give him Competent Herbalist in addition to those two and have him gather some plants while there is still no stone or particular need to make furniture quick, and you're set. Also a possibility is to give him some Mining skills so he can help set up the fortress. In short, any skill that, although useful, takes very few or almost no time away from his Masonry will suit your Mason dwarf well. It might even be prudent to give him some fighting skills just in case.<br /> <br /> TWO PROFICIENT MASONS:<br /> <br /> Having two Proficient Masons only makes sense if you plan on having them working both at the same time; if you only plan on having two masons so you can give them some other skills they can work on while the other takes up mason duty, it's more sensible to have one dedicated mason and another dwarf with both of those non-mason skills - you'll always need at least one Mason working full-time. TWO Masons working full-time - or at least, one full, one half - are generally not necessary, except if you plan on setting up an aboveground fortress with stone dug up by a single Miner. You'll need the extra Mason then, and can substitute one of your miners for him because you only need to mine for stone, not space.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ENGRAVER<br /> <br /> The value of this at startup is doubtful. Engraving is mostly decorative work with the exception of fortifications. Of course, having a high-value dining room early does wonders for dwarf moral. There are stupider skills to take.<br /> <br /> NOVICE ENGRAVER:<br /> <br /> Well, if you do get an early Engraver, he needs some mad skills to be of use, since he can't waste time training for them as one of your starting dwarves. Only choose this if you absolutely must have some early fortifications carved out of walls, and even then you might just hand that to a dabbler. For early smoothing with a dwarf that you think won't get much better to do with his time for a while, this is okay.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT ENGRAVER:<br /> <br /> Get a legendary dining room in no time! Beyond that, pretty much a waste of skill points. The truth may lie inbetween for you.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> BUILDING DESIGNER<br /> <br /> Not strictly necessary - you can also simply enable the labor for any dwarf and have him get to work. But that will take longer. At least<br /> <br /> NOVICE BUILDING DESIGNER:<br /> <br /> Should always be worth it. Give it to your primary Mason, or any other Dwarf that still has room for a level 1 skill that seldom will be used. Your single Mason is best because he usually doesn't have many other sensible choices anyway, and will be the one who constructs the building designed most of the time.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> WEAPONSMITH<br /> <br /> Usually metal industry takes up time, so it's not much trouble to wait for an immigrant Weaponsmith. BUT - since these are not guaranteed, and they will start at skill level 2, it's tempting to include a highly skilled Weaponsmith among your starting dwarves, especially if you have no magma and can't quite waste coal fuel training a n00b.<br /> <br /> NOVICE WEAPONSMITH:<br /> <br /> In case you plan on setting up a metal industry very early. Novice already means a lot towards higher skill levels compared to zero, so this is an effective use of skill points if you don't plan on having enough to go all the way.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT WEAPONSMITH:<br /> <br /> But I say, if you plan on including one at all, try to make him or her as skilled as possible. He'll work some other job until a metal industry is set up, and he won't churn out weapons exactly all the time even then, so give him a useful secondary job, like some sort of crafting, or Furnace Operating, or Grower. Even Carpenter, he can still make beds, barrels and bins during his downtime as a Weaponsmith.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> BOWYER<br /> <br /> Wooden or bone crossbows - that's all you can do with this. This is only worth it if you plan on having no metal at all for a prolonged time early on, and you must equip your military with SOMETHING, and you have no obsidian for swords either, and you don't want to rely on traders.<br /> <br /> NOVICE BOWYER:<br /> <br /> At least it won't be all no-quality, and you can't go that much wrong with only one skill point for a seldom-used skill. If you have surplus wood, have your Novice Bowyer churn out a lot of crossbows and trade away (or just dump) the low-quality ones before assigning any to your marksdwarves or hunters. Your material is shitty, so try to make the best of it.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT BOWYER:<br /> <br /> In theory, this gives you the best weapons outside of obsidian and metal. In practice, a waste of skill points. Getting access to better weapons shouldn't be THIS hard. Better get higher-skilled crafters, to get more trade goods worth more dwarfbux, and TRADE for some weapons until you can set up a metal industry. If you don't plan on having a metal industry at all... Well, get this if you must. Dwarves in leather, wearing wooden shields and firing bone crossbows are still better than dwarves wrestling naked.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ARMORSMITH<br /> <br /> I could write &quot;See Weaponsmith&quot;, as the same criteria apply. Armorsmiths tend to be a bit more busy than Weaponsmiths once the metal industry has started, because you need only one weapon per military dwarf, but in theory they all can wear multiple pieces of different armor. (Plate mail + helmet + shield + boots + greaves...) Keep this in mind when assigning your Proficient Armorsmith his other job to work on until he gets to apply his mad skillz. Carpenter is probably not the thing for this guy.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> METALSMITH<br /> <br /> Metalsmiths produce items with quality levels, but not usually items that NEED to be of high quality. You can make furniture out of metal, but that requires fuel and a lot of metal bars versus one single stone. Usually metal furniture is only made out of bars of metal that you obtained in trade - if you dig the metal out, it's much more efficient to just have a mason use the ore to make the statue, resulting in the same value, no fuel used to turn the ore into bars, and most importantly only one ore's worth of metal used instead of three. Thus, metalsmiths don't usually make furniture, but anvils, chains, cages or barrels, bins and buckets.<br /> <br /> NO METALSMITH:<br /> <br /> No early metal industry planned, you'll make one of your free immigrants dabbling Metalsmith if he isn't already a level two one.<br /> <br /> NOVICE METALSMITH:<br /> <br /> This is generally enough even if you do plan on having a metal industry early. Barrels, bins and buckets don't need to be of any kind of quality. Usually you only want to churn out barrels, bins and buckets if you are low on wood, but have magma and a lot of superfluous metal to work with.<br /> <br /> HIGHER THAN NOVICE METALSMITH:<br /> <br /> Usefulness is doubtful. You'll never need that many items or that high quality to warrant things like a Proficient Metalsmith at startup.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> FURNACE OPERATOR<br /> <br /> Furnace Operators are needed to make coke out of your coal, metal bars out of your ore with some measure of speed to supply your smiths.<br /> <br /> NO FURNACE OPERATOR:<br /> <br /> If you ever do need one, you can have one dabble in it. Usually you can wait for your first immigrant wave.<br /> <br /> NOVICE FURNACE OPERATOR:<br /> <br /> To do your early Furnace Operating, before you have immigrant dwarves to train in this task. Since Furnace Operating is essentially a full-time job in a running metal industry, you usually don't plan on having an initial dwarf do this for any kind of prolonged time, so don't spend more. Go regular Furnace Operator at the most, and even that is probably not required.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> WOOD BURNER<br /> <br /> Only needed if you don't have magma. With magma, the only use of this is to get access to fertilizer potash, soap, and clear glass. Also, steel if there is no other source of refined fuel whatsoever. If you don't have Magma, then you need your Wood Burner to start off your metal industry. More useful if you have lots of wood on your map, as you don't need to rely as much on lignite or bituminous coal.<br /> <br /> NO WOOD BURNER:<br /> <br /> If you have magma.<br /> <br /> NOVICE WOOD BURNER:<br /> <br /> If you have no magma, or want to smelt stuff without having found it or any kind of advanced coal yet, which will require you to produce quite a pile of charcoal.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> METAL CRAFTER<br /> <br /> A highly skilled Metal Crafter is nice to have in case you have access to highly valuable metal bars early, so you can make high-quality goblets out of them. Usually it's easier to get highly skilled Stone Crafters to make stuff out of the ore though, which makes Metal Crafter another skill of doubtful priority.<br /> <br /> NO METAL CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> No problem at all with this. Apart from trade goods, the only item you need to have a Metal Crafter for is metal chains for your jail (ropes can be snapped by angry dwarves). You can get those from a dabbler too.<br /> <br /> NOVICE METAL CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> AT MOST. Find some better use for that skill point, if you ask me.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> STONE CRAFTER<br /> <br /> Stone is a dime a dozen. Actually, more like a dime a hundred dozen. Unless there is an aquifer, there is no shortage of stone. Stone trade goods aren't worth much (unless made of rare ores or obsidian/flux), but in this case it's a matter of sheer mass - and crafter skill.<br /> <br /> NOVICE STONE CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> Giving this to one of your dwarves is not bad, but not worth much either. He or she'll produce goods at a slow pace and they will be of low quality. If you want to use crafts by your stone crafter to buy a lot of stuff from caravans early, you should go<br /> <br /> SKILLED STONE CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> Or something along those lines. Nothing wrong with having a Proficient one. Set him to work relatively early, and he'll buy you an anvil and some more useful stuff. This is well placed with one of your Miners (not your single Miner though) usually, because you can essentially choose freely whether you produce crafts or mine. Give this, in any case, to some dwarf who'll have time to do it most of the time. If you go high with this skill, disable the stonecrafting labor from the immigrant craftsdwarves unless you really want another one producing low-quality stone crafts uglying up the content of your bins. With craftsdwarves in general, specialization is key.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> WOOD CRAFTER<br /> <br /> The least useful of the material crafting skills. Wood crafts are worth much less than the wood they are made of (not in dwarfbux, but in actuality, since wood makes beds and beds can only be made of wood). Even in a wood-rich map, the proper use for surplus wood is not crafts, but bolts. And that's the one thing a Wood Crafter is useful for: Bolts. Not for war, mind you, but for training. If you have more wood than you ever need, make bolts. Make crafts for trading out of rock - it has the advantage that even the hippie elves will take it.<br /> <br /> NO WOOD CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> What I do usually. I generally don't start getting wood surpluses until later, when I already have immigrants, and usually there's some n00b craftsdwarf available to do this instead of one of my valuable starting dwarfs.<br /> <br /> NOVICE WOOD CRAFTER:<br /> <br /> We've established that you only want to produce training bolts with a Wood Crafter. Your skill level doesn't matter one iota in this case. Give this skill to some dwarf who doesn't mind wasting some of his time producing a couple of training bolts. Maybe your Carpenter/Woodcutter, should he have more than enough wood and have produced more then enough bins, barrels and buckets... Or some other starting dwarf who finds himself with too much freetime. Other skills might be more useful.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> BONE CARVER<br /> <br /> Bone has many uses. For bone or shell armor, you should have skilled Bone Carvers at the ready. Otherwise, there's always bone bolts to make, or skull totems to use in trade. Bone isn't usually worth much unless it's some awesome stuff like dragon bone.<br /> <br /> NO BONE CARVER:<br /> <br /> I don't recommend this, actually. You'll always have bone, from unlucky invaders to eaten fish, even very early on. On the other hand, if kept in an inside refuse stockpile, it won't disappear either, and you can usually wait for an immigrant craftsdwarf to take up your main bone carving business.<br /> <br /> NOVICE BONE CARVER:<br /> <br /> Enough to make training bolts... But you won't need these much until you have a military. If you have a skill point to spare and need to provide a dwarf with some skill he can pursue while his other, main jobs don't require his attention, get this, usually in favour of Wood Crafter, since you can make better use of your wood in the early times of your fortress, even if there is a lot.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT BONE CARVER:<br /> <br /> Overkill. You simply don't get enough bones to justify this investment; high value bones are too rare. (Of course, there are the likes of Nist Akath, where bones are too numerous to count, but in that kind of environment FETCHING the bones will prove more problematic) For money, you want highly skilled Stone Crafters working away at the assloads of stones your fortress produces. That's not to say that highly skilled bone carvers are useless, but they are most useful if you have a skilled hunter at work, which is going to be much later - and immigrant bone carvers are better for that.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> GEM CUTTER<br /> <br /> Another one of the &quot;moneymaker&quot; skills. If you do find gems early on, this will help you transform them into dwarfbux in trade. Needless to say, however, stone is much more numerous and reliable. Pass. Wait for immigrants.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> GEM SETTER<br /> <br /> See above.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> MECHANIC<br /> <br /> This is very useful to have in general, and good use of starting dwarf skill points. The question is: How much points will you give this, and what will you combine it with? Mechanisms are considered decent, if somewhat heavy, export goods, so quality is not entirely unimportant. A Mechanic can do a lot even in early fortresses; his mechanisms will be required for early irrigation schemes or other things done with levers, and traps are considered to be the easiest way to protect your fortress bar nothing at all, considering that it takes only a single mechanic to produce sufficient stone fall traps to smash hordes of early attacking animals, and more devious traps capable of handling sieges (also, cage traps, but you need a Metalsmith or a Carpenter for the Cage).<br /> <br /> NO MECHANIC:<br /> <br /> Not recommended, even if you don't plan on using any traps. At the very least you need someone to make mechanisms and set up some lever schemes. Even if your map happens to lack any stone, you need this guy working on the imported stone for mechanisms all the more.<br /> <br /> NOVICE MECHANIC:<br /> <br /> Minimum. Maybe enough if no traps are planned and mechanisms will not be used for trading.<br /> <br /> COMPETENT MECHANIC:<br /> <br /> This is a good average value if you intend to produce traps at a decent speed very early.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT MECHANIC:<br /> <br /> In case you want to just go all out and use these for trading. Keep in mind that you have to trade items of sufficient weight for these. If you have Proficient Mechanic, you can in theory use it as a substitute for any kind of Stone Crafting. Stone crafts ARE less cumbersome to trade with (they go in bins!), however. Your choice.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> FISHERDWARF<br /> <br /> Fishing is the simplest source of food. Get fish, clean it, eat. You can cook your fish if you want, too, but that means you don't get bones and in case of turtles, shells.<br /> <br /> NO FISHERDWARF:<br /> <br /> Maps without water: Of course. If it does have water, then you might still shrug and point to your Grower dwarfs, who will make more than enough food to get by and don't have to risk their necks going outside. Shell can be gotten from turtles you bring at startup and simply stored in an inside refuse stockpile.<br /> <br /> FISHERDWARF:<br /> <br /> Sensible. Only two skill points, and it gives one of your starting dwarf something to do until you have set up your fortress. You should probably give some other dwarf the Fish Cleaning skill, since if you give it to this guy you have to turn the Fishing labor on and off periodically. You'll also have to turn the Fishing labor off to let him work on his numerous secondary skills, like Mechanic or a Crafting skill. This guy is never unemployed, but flexible. Don't overdo it with the secondary skills, and remember to turn some off once the first immigrant wave hits.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT FISHERDWARF:<br /> <br /> Overkill on most maps. If there's a lot of water you can get more out of this, but it only improves speed to have high Fisherdwarf skills... Remember the risk for carp to be generated, and how useless this major skill point investment will be then.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> MILLER<br /> <br /> Makes flour out of longland grass and cave wheat that can be used for cooking.<br /> <br /> NO MILLER:<br /> <br /> Entirely okay. Both longland grass and cave wheat can be brewed instead. You need bags to put flour in too.<br /> <br /> NOVICE MILLER:<br /> <br /> Not the most useless skill ever though... Well... Maybe not worth it.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> THRESHER<br /> <br /> Processing plants gives you seeds. Useful for pig tails if you lack barrels for brewing.<br /> <br /> NO THRESHER:<br /> <br /> You can live with this. But:<br /> <br /> NOVICE THRESHER:<br /> <br /> Bags can be very useful to get early, and this is the first step on the way from pig tail to pig tail bag. And it gives you seeds, as mentioned, without having to rely on barrels. More skill points are probably overkill though. Give this to a dwarf who will find himself with occasional freetime in the beginning.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> GROWER<br /> <br /> Unless you are batshit crazy, you want to make plants the mainstay of your food and alcohol supply. So you'll want Growers, since having dabblers do this wastes a lot of seeds while they learn.<br /> <br /> LOW SKILL GROWERS:<br /> <br /> You'll have no shortage of low-skill Growers later on. If you get Growers, make them highly skilled, as this makes the most use of your occasionally sparse starting seeds. You never know.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT GROWER:<br /> <br /> Might be enough, though you might get in trouble if you want to plant many different kinds of crops. And you also will most definitely get in trouble with All Dwarves Harvest turned off unless you give this guy NO secondary job (Proficient Weaponsmith for instance, which is NOT supposed to be even used early on)<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT GROWER/PROFICIENT GROWER:<br /> <br /> This is generally recommended (you can afford going Skilled/Skilled, or even Competent/Competent too here). Has the advantage that you can have them work most secondary jobs pretty freely, like Brewing, Cooking, Fish Cleaning, while still being able to grow a lot of useful and nutritious crops.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> HERBALIST<br /> <br /> If you want to set up aboveground crop farming early, you need a Herbalist to get some aboveground plants.<br /> <br /> NO HERBALIST:<br /> <br /> One does not have to be a skilled Herbalist to do this, but since it will take long and have a high chance of failure if you send out a dabbler at least<br /> <br /> NOVICE HERBALIST:<br /> <br /> Should be considered. For speed reasons and efficiency, especially should you have to rely on these guys to help you out of food shortages, you might want to get<br /> <br /> COMPETENT HERBALIST:<br /> <br /> instead. There. Herbalism, not unlike Fishing, is a job a dwarf can work anytime they find themselves with nothing better to do, like Masons before there is stone - you can use immigrant Herbalists later; they can train the skill easily if it's the only thing they ever do and become better than your starting Herbalist has time for considering the other skills he might want to work.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> BREWER<br /> <br /> Sober dwarfs are unhappy dwarfs and don't work effectively at all. Brewer is an essential job in a fledgling fortress. You also need your brewer to get seeds out of aboveground plants picked in the beginning.<br /> <br /> NO BREWER:<br /> <br /> Next!<br /> <br /> BREWER:<br /> <br /> Minimum. Brewery does not have to be executed all that fast, and you will want additional stills and brewers for larger communities, much, much later, but this is something you should be able to afford for the sake of your dwarfs. Remember, dwarfs would rather run around naked than drink inferior booze.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT BREWER:<br /> <br /> Definitely not a bad idea if you can spare the skill points. Distilled happiness for your dwarfs! Other skills might strike your fancy more, though. Maybe the truth lies between Brewer and Proficient Brewer...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> COOK<br /> <br /> Well, food is as important as booze, needless to say.<br /> <br /> NO COOK:<br /> <br /> Are you serious? Do you want your dwarfs to eat only shitty food made by a bumbling fool dabbling as a cook?<br /> <br /> COOK:<br /> <br /> Probably minimum. Cooking is less critical than Brewing is, because dwarves can eat stuff that isn't cooked, but never stuff that hasn't been brewed. A decided disadvantage of cooking is that it doesn't produce seeds, bones or shells. And also, dwarves drink twice as often as they eat. You should always give Brewing a slightly higher priority than you give Cooking.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT COOK:<br /> <br /> Only if you already have a Proficient Brewer. Do you really have this many skill points?<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> WEAVER<br /> <br /> A low-priority skill that will not be used for long by any of your starting dwarves. This is excellent for later immigrants.<br /> <br /> NO WEAVER:<br /> <br /> Okay. If you don't have Novice Thresher, then you also don't need Novice Weaver.<br /> <br /> NOVICE WEAVER:<br /> <br /> BUT if you already got Novice Thresher, you might want to invest a point in this for quicker early bags.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> CLOTHIER<br /> <br /> The prime purpose of this in an EARLY fortress is to make bags. Cloth bags are easier to make than leather bags because pig tails are much, much easier to obtain than animal hides. A dedicated cloth industry for clothing should be left to immigrants.<br /> <br /> NO CLOTHIER:<br /> <br /> If you don't think you'll need bags, and if you ever do you'll have dabblers work on it.<br /> <br /> NOVICE CLOTHIER:<br /> <br /> Almost essential if you plan on not only getting a few bags, but quite a lot - maps with magma and sand might need this. Bags are also required to store quarry bush leaves. You probably can't go wrong with this. Think about getting the Novice Thresher and Novice Weaver skills too.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> AMBUSHER<br /> <br /> Combine this with some sort of weapon skill. Hunting is a gamble - your dwarf might always be slaughtered, by real badass horses, or two-humped camels... Hunting is something you should reserve for expendable dwarfs, not one of your starting seven!<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> BUTCHER<br /> <br /> Not for hunted animals, that's for sure. But you can butcher your tame animals in the beginning to get hides that you can tan to leather, and have a leatherworker produce some bags. But pig tails and an cloth industry are much better for this, since early on you won't have many animals at all, and slaughtering those will inhibit your breeding. Keep this in mind for immigrants, when your animals have had time to breed... and get on your nerves.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> TANNER<br /> <br /> Only if you have a Butcher, which you usually don't.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> LEATHERWORKER<br /> <br /> This is very useful. Leather can be made into all sorts of useful items: Clothing, bags, armor...<br /> <br /> NO LEATHERWORKER:<br /> <br /> But, of course, you can keep this in mind for your first immigrants. If you don't have a Butcher or Tanner planned in, you can still use traded-for leather, but that will take some time to get anyway. Bags can be made out of cloth. Quivers, backpacks and armor cannot, but they can wait for your first immigrant wave, which is the earliest point to build up a dedicated military who would need those.<br /> <br /> NOVICE LEATHERWORKER:<br /> <br /> But this is probably a bit more sensible than Butcher or Tanner, since you'll get your first leather by autumn most of the time, earlier than the first immigrant wave. Still, you want a dedicated Leatherworker later, so don't put more into this.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> FISH CLEANER<br /> <br /> Get Novice Fish Cleaner if you have a Fisherdwarf - it doesn't take up much time, just queue up a repeated Clean Fish task at the Fishery occasionally. Without Fisherdwarf, getting Fish Cleaner would be just nutty. If you like, you can have a dabbling guy do this job, too.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ANIMAL TRAINER<br /> <br /> Get Novice if you like, beyond is a waste of skill points. You can also have dabbling animal trainers working on your starting dogs. I usually give this to my mason.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> GLASSMAKER<br /> <br /> First of all, you need a map with sand for this choice to make any sense. Beyond that, if your map has magma, think about getting a dedicated Glassmaker to churn out large parts of your furniture in green glass form; you have infinite sand and infinite fuel! Of course, stone is never exactly sparse and Magma Glass Furnaces take some time to set up.<br /> <br /> NO GLASSMAKER:<br /> <br /> No sand. Or, sand and no magma. A glass industry without magma is of highly doubtful use and can definitely wait for immigrants.<br /> <br /> NOVICE GLASSMAKER OR MAYBE UP TO COMPETENT:<br /> <br /> Sand and magma... It might be of use. Most stuff that can be made out of glass can be made out of stone too, but this guy can somewhat relieve your mason of some of his stress.<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT GLASSMAKER:<br /> <br /> This is if you go all out and make ALL your furniture out of glass, possibly even replace your mason. This is actually an excellent course of action you have on maps that contain magma, sand AND an aquifer, so very few stone is available if at all. You might even be able to forget about a mason entirely!<br /> <br /> PROFICIENT GLASSMAKER/PROFICIENT GLASSMAKER:<br /> <br /> Same conditions, enormous building projects planned... If you want to make a glass-themed fortress, this certainly is in style!<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> WRESTLER<br /> <br /> Unarmed Combat skill. Whether you want combat skills at all depends on the type of map you embark on and the level of paranoia you display. This has the advantage that you don't need to give your wrestler dwarf any weapons, and is a good defensive choice for dwarves that do not carry a weapon-like item at work...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> AXEDWARF<br /> <br /> While this is the most logical choice for your Woodcutter. If you want only one dwarf with at least a semblance of military skill to protect the others, make it this.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> SWORDSDWARF<br /> MACEDWARF<br /> HAMMERDWARF<br /> <br /> You'll have to bring extra weapons for these guys, so consider with care. Hammers and Maces are probably the best to use against skeletal entities in terrifying biomes... Remember that there is no way to have your dwarves still carry these weapons while they are civilians. Giving them Wrestling will benefit them more in emergency situations; this is if you plan on having them stand watch or something.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> SPEARDWARF<br /> <br /> The skill your miner uses in combat with your pick, if I remember right, so sensible to use those instead of Wrestling. Apart from that, see swords, maces and hammers.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> MARKSDWARF<br /> <br /> Crossbows have the advantage that they need only wood to make on-site, and that they are the least risky weapon for your dwarfs. So you might give this to one of your guys. If you give him the Hunting labor, he'll still carry this as a civilian - but of course, he'll go out to hunt and do nothing else. Not a good thing. So like the other non-axe, non-pick weapons, hardly useful in an emergency.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> SHIELD USER<br /> ARMOR USER<br /> <br /> Consider these for terrifying biomes where well-rounded soldiers have a much greater influence on survivability than most other things. Remember that these make no sense if you don't also get armor and shields. Expensive.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> SIEGE ENGINEER<br /> <br /> Like Weaponsmith and Armorsmith, you might want this at maximum level for later - siege engines definitely only make sense if you have skilled operators working them, so you need immigrants anyway. High quality siege engines are important though, and Siege engine parts consume materials like crazy...<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> SWIMMER<br /> <br /> A reserve skill for your Fisherdwarf just in case? I dunno. More of an adventure mode skill I suppose. Maybe if you want your miner to make some really crazy mining stunts. In that case, go as high as you can afford (Novice skill is no guarantee for survival), or grow some brains.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> PERSUADER<br /> NEGOTIATOR<br /> LIAR<br /> INTIMIDATOR<br /> CONVERSATIONALIST<br /> COMEDIAN<br /> FLATTERER<br /> <br /> Social skills to choose from. Doesn't make much difference. Novice level is all you need if you ever choose one.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> JUDGE OF INTENT<br /> <br /> Useful for your Broker, as it displays the attitude of the people you trade with. Since it is also a social skill like the above, it's more useful than the others - slightly, of course. Novice level is all you need.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> APPRAISER<br /> <br /> Your broker needs this to properly calculate prices. Novice level is all you need.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> ORGANIZER<br /> <br /> This does not have to be a skill of your brokerdwarf, as it doesn't need social skills to work. It trains very fast, you putting this above Novice is probably not required. If you do not have an Organizer at all, you can't use the job manager to issue work orders, but have to queue up items in the workshops by hand. There's enough micromanagement in Dwarf Fortress even without that. Still, you can have an immigrant in your first wave become Organizer and save this skill point for other things.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> RECORD KEEPER<br /> <br /> You need SOME dwarf with bookkeeper skill to get even the roughest estimate of your stocks beyond counting it all yourself. For accurate counts, you also need to give him an office and have him work. You can have a dabbler do all this though - he'll get Novice in the shortest time, and if you set him to Highest Precision (not recommended for a starting dwarf, since that will require most of his attention) he'll reach legendary status very quick.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> CONSOLER<br /> PACIFIER<br /> <br /> These skills are useful for your leaderdwarf, and you might choose this in favor of other social skills. Consolers will have a positive influence on sad dwarves, Pacifiers will be able to calm those that have snapped and thrown a tantrum.<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> With all these in mind, this is my current build, for a map that contains a magma pipe, no aquifer, a river and sand:<br /> <br /> 5 MINER/1 JUDGE OF INTENT/1 APPRAISER/1 NEGOTIATOR/1 ORGANIZER/1 BONE CARVER (The Guy. Yup, I decided against having him keep records like is usually recommended. The reason for this is I can't control when the bugger goes off keeping his damn records, but I can EASILY control when he goes carving some bolts out of bone. The fact that I have to set up a second office if I want both Organizing and Record Keeping done doesn't faze me in the slightest - one more chair and table doesn't make much of a difference, and Organizing isn't that helpful in an early game fortress anyway. Yeah, I can just have him stop keeping records when I want to by putting out his chair under him or something, but that would be mean.)<br /> <br /> 5 MINER/4 STONE CRAFTER/1 CLOTHIER (Mine, Produce vendor trash and occasionally bags)<br /> <br /> 5 MASON/1 ANIMAL TRAINER/1 BUILDING DESIGNER/3 HERBALIST (The key is being moderate with the herbalism. You only need to do enough herbalism to get some of every crop that groves in your biomes. Then you switch off cooking for them and set up a brewery, supply it with barrels, brew, and boom, outdoor farming. By this time, he should be able to get to work producing doors. If not, he can train my two starting dogs, and THEN produce doors.)<br /> <br /> 5 WEAPONSMITH/4 CARPENTER/1 WOODCUTTER (First thing: set him to shop some assloads of wood. Second, have him start carpentry. Much, much later he can produce some kickass weapons on the side while he carpents stuff as his main job. Some other schmuck should eventually do the woodcutting for him.)<br /> <br /> 5 ARMORSMITH/4 GROWER/1 FISH CLEANER (He's going to plant stuff and clean fish while he doesn't plant stuff, and haul if he ever has no stuff to plant or fish to clean. Once the metal industry starts, he's going to make armor, armor, armor, and have others pick up the slack for his other skills. Maybe keep Grower enabled for the rare cases when he doesn't have armor to forge.)<br /> <br /> 5 GROWER/3 BREWER/2 COOK (Everybody loves this guy! He plants, produces most of the seeds to plant by making the much-coveted alcoholic beverages, and occasionally makes some prepared meals out of the meat, flour, sugar, leaves and expendable fish I produce. I don't do cooking drinks; It's a waste of good alcohol.)<br /> <br /> 3 FISHERDWARF/3 MECHANIC/1 THRESHER/1 WEAVER/1 METALSMITH/1 RECORD KEEPING (I like to think of this guy as the bitch who has to all sorts of menial work for the other guys who bully him. In truth, he would like nothing more than just being kept alone with his mechanisms and traps. The only other thing he really enjoys is to go out fishing to be alone sometimes. He will get a LOT of relief once the immigrant wave hits and other guys can do his threshing, weaving, metalsmithing and record keeping. He'll always stay a Fisherdwarf/Mechanic though.)<br /> <br /> <br /> <br /> Finished! Hope this doesn't waste too much server space.</div>

Silfir https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=User_talk:Silfir&diff=45736 2008-11-05T11:34:02Z

<p>Silfir: New page: I hope no one kills me for updating the obsidian articles. It's just that I love obsidian so goddamn much. :Boy you were not kidding about loving obsidian! :) --[[User:Ehertlein|Ehertl...</p> <hr /> <div>I hope no one kills me for updating the [[obsidian]] articles. It's just that I love obsidian so goddamn much.<br /> :Boy you were not kidding about loving obsidian! :) --[[User:Ehertlein|Ehertlein]] 23:01, 22 August 2008 (EDT)<br /> ::Moved this here to make room for my useless drivel. --[[User:Silfir|Silfir]] 06:34, 5 November 2008 (EST)</div>

Silfir https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=40d:Obsidian&diff=16649 2008-08-23T01:41:19Z

<p>Silfir: </p> <hr /> <div>{{Stone_layer|name=Obsidian|tile=▒|color=#888|basic_color=#888|color2=#CCC<br /> |uses=<br /> * [[Sword]]s<br /> |properties=<br /> * [[Economic stone]]<br /> * [[Igneous extrusive layer]]<br /> * [[Material value]] 3<br /> |contains=<br /> * [[Hematite]]<br /> * [[Native gold]]<br /> * [[Native copper]]<br /> * [[Tetrahedrite]]<br /> * [[Native aluminum]]<br /> * Brimstone<br /> * Realgar<br /> * Orpiment<br /> * Stibnite<br /> * Rutile<br /> * Hornblende<br /> * Alunite<br /> * Microline<br /> }}<br /> <br /> Obsidian is produced by cooling [[magma]] and is typically present in large quantities on maps with magma. [[Magma man|Magma men]] also drop an obsidian rock when killed. [[Goblin]] towers are made of obsidian and can be mined to produce large quantities of it.<br /> <br /> Obsidian is the only stone that can be used to make swords (also requires a [[wood]] log) at a [[craftsdwarf's workshop]]. The [[damage]] of an obsidian weapon is the same as for a [[steel]] weapon of the same [[quality]].{{v|0.23.130.23a}}<br /> <br /> Obsidian, an economic stone{{v|0.28.181.40a}} only for the swords, is more valuable than [[flux]] and will yield high-[[value]] [[furniture]] and [[finished goods]].<br /> <br /> [[Category:Stone]]<br /> [[Category:Igneous Extrusive Stone Layers]]</div>

Silfir https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=40d:Native_gold&diff=8396 2008-08-21T19:06:08Z

<p>Silfir: </p> <hr /> <div>{{Ore|name=Native gold|tile=£|color=#FF0<br /> |uses = <br /> * Make [[gold]] bars at [[smelter]]<br /> * Make [[electrum]] bars at [[smelter]] (with [[silver nuggets]], [[horn silver]], [[galena]], or [[tetrahedrite]])<br /> |location =<br /> * [[Igneous intrusive layer]]s<br /> * [[Igneous extrusive layer]]s<br /> * [[Soil]]<br /> * Found as veins<br /> |properties =<br /> * [[Material value]] 30<br /> }}<br /> <br /> It is possible to make [[Craft]]s or [[Mechanisms]] with Gold nuggets if it's enabled in the z-status stone menu, resulting in quite valuable items, good for export early in the game. This method also works for furniture, while costing only a single ore.<br /> <br /> [[Category:Ore]]<br /> [[Category:Stone]]<br /> [[Category:Economic Stone]]<br /> [[Category:Igneous Intrusive Stone Layers]]<br /> [[Category:Igneous Extrusive Stone Layers]]</div>

Silfir https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=40d:Economic_stone&diff=3365 2008-08-21T19:04:09Z

<p>Silfir: </p> <hr /> <div>Economic [[stone]]s have special uses as [[ore]], [[fuel]] or [[flux]], or other uses like making special items. You can use the {{K|z}}&amp;nbsp;:&amp;nbsp;&lt;tt&gt;Stone&lt;/tt&gt; menu to restrict or un-restrict their use in items and buildings. In technical terms, an economic stone is any stone which can be used as a reagent in any form of [[reaction]]. [[Obsidian]] is an exception, having been made an economic stone{{v|0.28.181.40a}} even though it is not used in any reaction - its specialty is that it can be used to craft swords.<br /> <br /> The Stone menu will also show what each stone can be used for--very useful for figuring out what you need to mine to make that obscure [[metal]] your [[noble]] is whining about.<br /> <br /> {| class=&quot;wikitable&quot;<br /> |-<br /> ! Stone name<br /> ! Found in<br /> ! Found how<br /> ! Use<br /> ! Value<br /> ! Icons<br /> |-<br /> |[[Calcite]]||Limestone, Marble||Small clusters||[[Flux]]||2||{{Raw Tile|&quot;|#fff|#aaa}}<br /> |-<br /> |[[Limestone]]||[[:Category:Sedimentary Stone Layers|Sedimentary]] Layer||Full Layers||[[Flux]]||2||{{Raw Tile|▓|#fff|#aaa}}<br /> |-<br /> |[[Dolomite]]||[[:Category:Sedimentary Stone Layers|Sedimentary]] Layer||Full Layers||[[Flux]]||2||{{Raw Tile|`|#fff|#aaa}}<br /> |-<br /> |[[Chalk]]||[[:Category:Sedimentary Stone Layers|Sedimentary]] Layer||Full Layers||[[Flux]]||2||{{Raw Tile|░|#fff|#aaa}}<br /> |-<br /> |[[Marble]]||[[:Category:Metamorphic Stone Layers|Metamorphic]] Layer||Full Layers||[[Flux]]||2||{{Raw Tile|▓|#fff|#aaa}}<br /> |-<br /> |[[Lignite]]||All [[:Category:Sedimentary Stone Layers|Sedimentary]]||Veins||2 [[Coke]]||1||{{Raw Tile|*|#888|#aaa}}<br /> |-<br /> |[[Bituminous coal]]||All [[:Category:Sedimentary Stone Layers|Sedimentary]]||Veins||3 [[Coke]]||1||{{Raw Tile|☼|#888|#aaa}}<br /> |-<br /> |[[Obsidian]]||[[:Category:Igneous Extrusive Stone Layers|Igneous extrusive]]||Full Layers||Swords||3||{{Raw Tile|▓|#aaa|#aaa}}<br /> |}<br /> <br /> [[Category:Economic Stone]]</div>

Silfir https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=User:Silfir&diff=44507 2008-08-21T18:53:18Z

<p>Silfir: </p> <hr /> <div>I hope no one kills me for updating the [[obsidian]] articles. It's just that I love obsidian so goddamn much.</div>

Silfir https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=40d:Economic_stone&diff=3364 2008-08-21T18:52:10Z

<p>Silfir: </p> <hr /> <div>Economic [[stone]]s have special uses as [[ore]], [[fuel]] or [[flux]], or other uses like making special items. You can use the {{K|z}}&amp;nbsp;:&amp;nbsp;&lt;tt&gt;Stone&lt;/tt&gt; menu to restrict or un-restrict their use in items and buildings. In technical terms, an economic stone is any stone which can be used as a reagent in any form of [[reaction]]. [[Obsidian]] is an exception, having been made an economic stone{{v|0.28.181.40a}} even though it is not used in any reaction - its specialty is that it can be used to craft swords.<br /> <br /> The Stone menu will also show what each stone can be used for--very useful for figuring out what you need to mine to make that obscure [[metal]] your [[noble]] is whining about.<br /> <br /> {| class=&quot;wikitable&quot;<br /> |-<br /> ! Stone name<br /> ! Found in<br /> ! Found how<br /> ! Use<br /> ! Value<br /> ! Icons<br /> |-<br /> |[[Calcite]]||Limestone, Marble||Small clusters||[[Flux]]||2||{{Raw Tile|&quot;|#fff|#aaa}}<br /> |-<br /> |[[Limestone]]||[[:Category:Sedimentary Stone Layers|Sedimentary]] Layer||Full Layers||[[Flux]]||2||{{Raw Tile|▓|#fff|#aaa}}<br /> |-<br /> |[[Dolomite]]||[[:Category:Sedimentary Stone Layers|Sedimentary]] Layer||Full Layers||[[Flux]]||2||{{Raw Tile|`|#fff|#aaa}}<br /> |-<br /> |[[Chalk]]||[[:Category:Sedimentary Stone Layers|Sedimentary]] Layer||Full Layers||[[Flux]]||2||{{Raw Tile|░|#fff|#aaa}}<br /> |-<br /> |[[Marble]]||[[:Category:Metamorphic Stone Layers|Metamorphic]] Layer||Full Layers||[[Flux]]||2||{{Raw Tile|▓|#fff|#aaa}}<br /> |-<br /> |[[Lignite]]||All [[:Category:Sedimentary Stone Layers|Sedimentary]]||Veins||2 [[Coke]]||1||{{Raw Tile|*|#888|#aaa}}<br /> |-<br /> |[[Bituminous coal]]||All [[:Category:Sedimentary Stone Layers|Sedimentary]]||Veins||3 [[Coke]]||1||{{Raw Tile|☼|#888|#aaa}}<br /> |-<br /> |[[Obsidian]]||[[:Category:Igneous Extrusive Stone Layers|Igneous extrusive]]||Full Layers||Swords||1||{{Raw Tile|▓|#aaa|#aaa}}<br /> |}<br /> <br /> [[Category:Economic Stone]]</div>

Silfir https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=40d:Obsidian&diff=16648 2008-08-21T18:40:23Z

<p>Silfir: </p> <hr /> <div>{{Stone_layer|name=Obsidian|tile=▒|color=#888|basic_color=#888|color2=#CCC<br /> |uses=<br /> * [[Sword]]s<br /> |properties=<br /> * [[Economic stone]]<br /> * [[Igneous extrusive layer]]<br /> * [[Material value]] 3<br /> |contains=<br /> * [[Hematite]]<br /> * [[Native gold]]<br /> * [[Native copper]]<br /> * [[Tetrahedrite]]<br /> * [[Native aluminum]]<br /> * Brimstone<br /> * Realgar<br /> * Orpiment<br /> * Stibnite<br /> * Rutile<br /> * Hornblende<br /> * Alunite<br /> * Microline<br /> }}<br /> <br /> Obsidian is produced by cooling [[magma]] and is typically present in large quantities on maps with magma. [[Magma man|Magma men]] also drop an obsidian rock when killed. [[Goblin]] towers are made of obsidian and can be mined to produce large quantities of it.<br /> <br /> Obsidian is the only stone that can be used to make swords (consumes [[wood]]) at a [[craftsdwarf's workshop]]. The [[damage]] of an obsidian weapon is the same as for a [[steel]] weapon of the same [[quality]].{{v|0.23.130.23a}}<br /> <br /> Obsidian, an economic stone{{v|0.28.181.40a}} only for the swords, is more valuable than [[flux]] and will yield high-[[value]] [[furniture]] and [[finished goods]].<br /> <br /> [[Category:Stone]]<br /> [[Category:Igneous Extrusive Stone Layers]]</div>

Silfir https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=User:Silfir&diff=44506 2008-08-21T12:19:01Z

<p>Silfir: New page: I hope no one kills me for updating the obsidian article. It's just that I love obsidian so goddamn much.</p> <hr /> <div>I hope no one kills me for updating the [[obsidian]] article. It's just that I love obsidian so goddamn much.</div>

Silfir https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=40d:Obsidian&diff=16647 2008-08-21T12:15:55Z

<p>Silfir: </p> <hr /> <div>{{Stone_layer|name=Obsidian|tile=▒|color=#888|basic_color=#888|color2=#CCC<br /> |uses=<br /> * [[Sword]]s<br /> |properties=<br /> * [[Economic stone]]<br /> * [[Igneous extrusive layer]]<br /> * [[Material value]] 3<br /> |contains=<br /> * [[Hematite]]<br /> * [[Native gold]]<br /> * [[Native copper]]<br /> * [[Tetrahedrite]]<br /> * [[Native aluminum]]<br /> * Brimstone<br /> * Realgar<br /> * Orpiment<br /> * Stibnite<br /> * Rutile<br /> * Hornblende<br /> * Alunite<br /> * Microline<br /> }}<br /> <br /> Obsidian is produced by cooling [[magma]] and is typically present in large quantities on maps with magma. [[Magma man|Magma men]] also drop an obsidian rock when killed. [[Goblin]] towers are made of obsidian and can be mined to produce large quantities of it.<br /> <br /> Obsidian is the only stone that can be used to make swords (consumes [[wood]]) at a [[craftsdwarf's workshop]]. The [[damage]] of an obsidian weapon is the same as for a [[steel]] weapon of the same [[quality]].{{v|0.23.130.23a}}<br /> <br /> Obsidian, an economic stone{{v|0.28.181.40a}} only for the swords, is more valuable than [[flux]] and will yield high-value [[furniture]] and [[finished goods]].<br /> <br /> [[Category:Stone]]<br /> [[Category:Igneous Extrusive Stone Layers]]</div>

Silfir https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php?title=40d:Obsidian&diff=16646 2008-08-21T12:13:06Z

<p>Silfir: </p> <hr /> <div>{{Stone_layer|name=Obsidian|tile=▒|color=#888|basic_color=#888|color2=#CCC<br /> |uses=<br /> * [[Sword]]s<br /> |properties=<br /> * [[Economic stone]]<br /> * [[Igneous extrusive layer]]<br /> * [[Material value]] 3<br /> |contains=<br /> * [[Hematite]]<br /> * [[Native gold]]<br /> * [[Native copper]]<br /> * [[Tetrahedrite]]<br /> * [[Native aluminum]]<br /> * Brimstone<br /> * Realgar<br /> * Orpiment<br /> * Stibnite<br /> * Rutile<br /> * Hornblende<br /> * Alunite<br /> * Microline<br /> }}<br /> <br /> Obsidian is produced by cooling [[magma]] and is typically present in large quantities on maps with magma. [[Magma man|Magma men]] also drop an obsidian rock when killed. [[Goblin]] towers are made of obsidian and can be mined to produce large quantities of it.<br /> <br /> Obsidian is the only stone that can be used to make swords (consumes [[wood]]) at a [[craftsdwarf's workshop]]. The [[damage]] of an obsidian weapon is the same as for a [[steel]] weapon of the same [[quality]].{{v|0.23.130.23a}}<br /> <br /> Obsidian, an economic stone{{v|0.28.181.40a}} only for the swords, is more valuable than [[flux]] and will generate high-value [[furniture]] and [[finished goods]].<br /> <br /> [[Category:Stone]]<br /> [[Category:Igneous Extrusive Stone Layers]]</div>

Silfir