Dwarf Fortress Wiki - User contributions [en]

Template:Starting FAQ

2008-10-04T18:58:00Z

Yanlin:

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! colspan="2" style="border: 1px solid #aaa; font-weight:bold; background-color: #ccf; padding-left: 1em; padding-right: 1em;" | '''Beginner's guide FAQ'''

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| [[Your first fortress|Quick launch]]<br><small>The bare minimum you need to know to get you from installation, to playing.</small>
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| [[How to correctly start fortress mode]]
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| [[How do I get my dwarves to do stuff|How do I get my dwarves to do stuff?]]
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| [[Location|Where in the world should I settle?]]
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| [[Where in my area should I build my fort|Where in my area should I build my fort?]]
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| [[What should I build first|What should I build first?]]
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| [[Starting_builds|What skills and items should I equip my dwarves with?]]
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| [[How do I assign tasks to specific dwarves|How do I assign tasks to specific dwarves?]]
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| [[Immigration|How do I get more dwarves?]]

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Template:Starting FAQ

2008-09-21T13:16:10Z

Yanlin:

40d:How to safely start fortress mode

2008-09-21T13:14:26Z

Yanlin: /* Production and efficiency */

This guide was compiled by Yanlin (And the users) for the users. Basically it contains Yanlin's personal advice with the advice of others taking a higher rank.

The page has not yet been completely made wiki friendly and it is a WIP.

=The guide=

All advice in the replies will be summed up here in user friendly bits.

==Dwarf jobs and happiness==

Don't try to take one of everything at the start. All jobs that will be run almost constantly can just be done by an [[Immigration|immigrant]]. For example, start with one [[mason]] working like a madman churning out [[door]]s and such. Then when you get your first wave, start at least 4 mason [[workshop]]s and make them churn out standard [[room]]s. If you can make an apartment complex instead of a huge [[Barracks|barracks]] room, you get yourself a good [[Thought|happy bonus]]. -Yanlin
* Legendary dining room is all you need. It is so useful it makes rooms better than barracks merely a roleplay thing. Also, dabbling masons should work on blocks, not furniture. -Someone-else

Legendary [[dining room]]s: Any room that's about 5x5, fully engraved and has maybe 4 tables and chairs will be legendary from my experience. I usually take a proficient [[engraver]] with me on the start to speed it up and it also helps if he is the only one doing the engravings. Legendary dining rooms can make dwarves forget even the most horrible things! Even death. -Yanlin
* Average artifact in a small plain room with crappy tables and thrones counts as legendary dining room too. -Someone-else

A fort divided does not stand. Make sure your dwarves don't run around like idiots. -Yanlin

[[Cave adaptation]]: I set up a simple system. There is only one exit out of my apartment complex. My apartment complex spans multiple [[Z-axis|floors]] and each one has the entire entrance in light state. How? Well light passes through [[Floor#Construction|floors]]! Go figure. This is how I do it. I [[channel[[ out the entire entrance from the top to the level I am currently building in. I [[Wall#Construction|wall]] it in on the top to prevent [[goblin]]s and other nasty stuff from jumping or firing in. I create a small "maintenance" tunnel going near the channeling area so that the channelers have access to it. It's simple really. When the channeling grinds to a halt, pave all the channeled areas with floors. I never tested [[wood]] floors. (What kind of idiot wastes wood on anything but [[bin]]s, [[bucket]]s, [[barrel]]s and [[bed]]s?) -Yanlin

[[Stone]] [[stockpile]]s: NO! NOT A CHANCE! But if you set up a special workshop for churning out expensive items, set up a stockpile that accepts only that one kind of expensive rock. Setting up a small stone stockpile under your masonry workshop is a good idea though. -Yanlin

[[Hauling|Haulers]]: Have at least 5-10 free peasants for hauling. Usually my fortress can run on just my 7 starting dwarves. I can easily supply 60 dwarves worth of [[food]] and [[Alcohol|booze]] while the rest do the odd job here and there. -Yanlin

Micromanagement: Only your core dwarves need it. The rest can just do anything they want. -Yanlin

[[Fishing]]: Not worth it. Only the [[shell]]s are worth it. -Yanlin

* However, fishing can give you lots and lots of fishbones, which can then be made into bone bolts that Dwarves use for practice. Very useful on maps without trees. - HisMajestyBOB

[[Ambusher|Hunting]]: Worth it. But at least give your [[hunter]] some [[armor]]. -Yanlin
* Do not waste starting dwarf on it. This is job for immigrants. -Someone-else

[[Farm plot|Farm]] size: 10x10 of [[plump helmet]]s without fertilizing will feed 500 dwarves. A 5x5 field WITH fertilizing will feed about 500 dwarves. Do the math. (Rough estimates. Untested.) -Yanlin

[[Cloth]]: [[Pig tail]]s will provide you all the cloth you need and booze too. -Yanlin

Buying your first [[anvil]]: Mugging. No not robbing the [[Trading|merchant]]. Making tons and tons of stone [[Goblet|mugs]]! You'd be amazed how much you can buy with a few bins worth of mugs. Each stone gives 3 mugs and a skilled mason can make enough to... Well... Buy anything you need. Remember, [[Craftsdwarf|craftsdwarves]] are GOOD! -Yanlin
* Mechanic is the way to go. Not only are mechanisms single items (less hauling) but also aren't useless. Prepared food is very good too, though it needs 3 dwarves working (planter, brewer and cook. Combining them into one dwarf is bad thing). Craftdwarves aren't really useful at start and are almost totally useless after that. -Someone-else
* Scrape up enough to buy at least 2 cheese then cook the cheese. Use the cooked cheese to buy the rest of the cheese. Cook the rest of the cheese. Buy out the rest of the caravan with the new meal. -Ikko

[[Nobles]]: Give them a huge [[bedroom]], huge [[office]] and cram it up with some decorations and [[engraving]]s. That should keep em happy for a while. -Yanlin
* If you happen to have artifact furniture just build one room of average size, but few beds, tables and thrones in it and make it a "noble room". Artifact will boost its value enough for all dwarves who aren't kings unless it's made from one log, stone, bone, shell or the like. -Someone-else

==Pets and food animals==

[[Cat|Cats]]. DO NOT DO IT! IT IS NOT WORTH IT! -Yanlin
* Wrong. Having one cat will not only boost dwarves' mood (no [[vermin|rats]] and other ugly crap) but will also make your food safer. -Someone-else

[[Dog|Dogs]]. DO IT! IT IS WORTH IT! -Yanlin

Shamelessly kill off any newborn pets to prevent overpopulation. Especially useful on cats. -HisMajestyBOB
* Or put them in a [[cage]] as an [[butchering|emergency food source]]. Caged animals do not breed, block paths or waste CPU power on pathfinding. -Someone-else

Dogs give a lot of bang for your buck.
They are a good source of [[food|meat]]. You just pay 16 bucks for them upon embark, if I remember correctly. This might be a little bit more than the price of 5 meat (which is 10 bucks) but you have to take into account that they get offspring, son that 20 dogs of the first year might turn into 30 dogs or more in the second year.
when you slaughter them each dog gives you 5 meat, 5 [[bones]], a [[skin|hide]] and a [[skull]]. This as well as the fact that dogs, in contrast to meat don't rot, makes it useful to buy at least some of them upon start. -Proteus

Dogs are better than cats. Dogs breed just as fast and you can have an army of wardogs slaughtering everything, not to mention they make an incredible [[thief]] defense. Simply put a meeting zone across the entrance to your fort, then you'll have all eleventy billion dogs wandering around in that meeting zone. Any thief is instantly turned into [[kobold]] kibble, and they're quite handly at dealing with smaller sieges too.
Also you can slaughter dogs at whim, whereas you can't slaughter an owned pet. -Hyndis

==Defense==

An army of peasants is a good thing if you think about it. Churn out a few [[crossbow|crossbows]] and [[ammo|bolts]]. Even copper weapons can take down most sieges you will probably get. -Yanlin

[[Goblin]] babysnatchers and Kobold thieves. One dog on a [[chain]] will kill them on contact. Especially a war dog. I usually buy a few chains at the embarkment. -Yanlin

Security. [[traps|Stonefall traps]] at the entrance help. After you need more than that, you probably have more than that. Make weapon traps that shoot or better yet, station [[marksdwarf|marksdwarves]] in [[fortifications]] outside your fort. Make sure to put them in a [[tower]]. -Yanlin

You might want to bring along a rope and then wall in your fortress entrance so there is only one path. Then set a dog on the rope (Not a cat, those are more useful against vermin) beside the door to stop the sneaky sorts. -Gamerofthegame

Weapon traps and marksdwarves = survival for for most -wendigo

==Production and efficiency==

[[Glass]]. You want [[sand]] on your map. It is awesome advice to have sand on your map. Remember. Glass is EASY to make especially if you can get a source of [[fuel]] for your forge. You can make almost everything out of glass. If you can get a [[magma glass furnace]], you win. -Yanlin

[[Iron]]. You want it. If you didn't find iron, I suggest just starting over in another location or if you feel determined, buy it. But it can get costly. -Yanlin

Common [[barrel]] exploit. Each piece of meat and [[alcohol|booze]] you bring with you, will give you one free barrel. 5 of each can fit in a barrel and if you take 6 of something, you get 2 barrels. Etc. -Flok Speargrabber

[[turtle|Turtles]] are AWESOME! -Flok Speargrabber
* Be sure to disable bones and [[shells]] in your early outdoor refuse [[stockpile]] so you don't waste turtles' awesomeness. -Someone-else

Bringing a few [[seeds]] of everything along with you is wise. (I suggest bringing plenty of [[plump helmet]] and [[pig tail]] seeds.) -Flok Speargrabber
* The second advice is bad. Just start your [[farm plot|farm]] soon and brew what you can and you will have more seeds than need. As for bringing everything: 1 seed each is enough. [[Rock nuts]] are useless before you have food chain and plenty of bags. -Someone-else

[[immigration|Immigrants]] are good for [[fishing]] that pesky [[carp]]. (Well not really. But they are good for fishing nonetheless.) -blakyoshi7

Farming. The best source of food. If you don't want to "Cheat" you can just plant a big plump helmet farm. Make sure you don't cook it all though. Make sure at least some goes into booze. Booze and eating raw returns seeds. [[Cooking]] destroys them. Alternatively you can cook the booze. That creates a cheatish infinate supply of food. -Yanlin

[[Wood]]. You don't really NEED a heavily forested map. Assuming you will make about 100 [[beds]] during 3 years and some barrels, [[bucket|buckets]] and [[bins]], you only need about 500 [[tree|trees]]. Might sound like not enough on a non heavily forested map right? Well wrong. Trees DO grow back. Even a lightly forested map has at least 200 trees from what I could tell. -Yanlin
* If you plan on doing a lot of metalsmithing on a map with no magma, or a lot of clear glass or soap, you will need a lot of wood for charcoal and ash. -Bouchart

Pig tails are good to bring, as a source of booze that your dwarfs won't accidentally eat up before it's turned into it's sweet elixir of happiness. -Overdose

Pigtail makes great booze. It helps keep your dwarves happy and avoid the "Tired of same booze" unhappy thought. -motorbitch

You need [[cloth]] only for [[strange mood|strange moods]]. You can easily buy all the cloth you need and have your [[farmer|farmers]] do more useful work. -motorbitch
* Wrong. Glass industry requires many bags. -Someone-else

Two humped camels are good for farming as they yield a lot. Consider this option to diversify your meals. Also helps if you want to avoid the booze food exploit.- motorbitch

Lopped off body parts create small bones that are rather useless. (Training bolts are never really useless as you should have too many bins anyway.) -motorbitch

You should only put a priority on [[Magma]] if you have the ability to make glass with it. If so, it should be one of your first things. -Gamerofthegame

Have your [[carpenter]](s) craft a steady flow of beds/barrels/bins -wendigo

Run a [[still]] nonstop. Get those seeds, distill that booze. -wendigo
* If you have many barrels filled with booze and no free ones just cook some beer biscuits. Not only they will make your dwarves happier but also will train your cook and let your brewer continue his work. Don't do this if you have no plants to brew. -Someone-else

Metalworking is desirable, but not crucial. -wendigo

I set every dwarf in the fortress to [[butcher]] and [[skin|tan]]. Its a very high priority job since the corpses and skins will rapidly decay, and by setting every single dwarf to be able to perform this task (skill doesn't matter, a dabbling dwarf does just as well as a legendary dwarf) there's a very high probability it will get done in time. If you have a lot of corpses to process, simply build a bunch of butcher and tanner workshops. -Hyndis

===Wood is useful for:===
[[Beds]] - [[Bins]] - [[Barrels]] - [[spike|Spikes]] - [[Screw pump|Pump parts]] - [[Windmill|Windmills]] and [[water]] wheels

-Flok Speargrabber

===Stone is good for:===

[[Statues]] - [[chest|Coffers]] - [[cabinet|Cabinets]] - [[Coffins]] - [[trade|Trade goods]] - [[Doors]] - [[Floodgates]] - [[chair|Chairs]] - [[table|Tables]] - [[Blocks]] for [[road|roads]] and [[floor|floors]] (More brick-y than block-y)

-Flok Speargrabber

===Metal is good for:===
[[Weapons]] - [[Armor ]] - Magma-safe pumps - Expensive statues - Noble orders, usually, unless they don't want a special metal item

-Flok Speargrabber

==Performance==

Cats are not as bad as they used to be. Now slaughtering the newborns is easy enough and with the new partial print feature, they are not the huge FPS problem they used to be. They are also, like dogs: a good source of meat and such. -Vaftrudner

Don't bother with clothes. They don't really do anything and lag your FPS because they get checked every moment. Your dwarves wont mind walking around nude and no one is going to judge them about it. (Politically it does not matter.) -motorbitch

Bring a cage. Just one. You can use it to stuff your excess creatures. Mainly anything outside two cats and maybe two dogs. -Gamerofthegame

==Special conditions==

You could bring five picks and 300 logs if you're on a treeless map. Just don't make stuff from wood if you can make them from something else. (Stockpile = bad) -Ashery

=Adding your own advice=

If you wish to add your own advice, do so in a grammatically correct manner. Links are not mandatory but desired. Remember to sign it with one space, a dash and then your name.

-NameHere

If you think the advice is poor, do not add it. The last thing Yanlin needs is more pruning of bad advice.

==Formatting==

Keep two lines of space after the advice above yours. Do not add it into the middle of the section.
Big advices deserve their own subcategory. But don't just sprinkle them around like an idiot.

Keep 3 lines of space under your advice to the next category.

All this formatting is needed so the guide does not become a hard to read wall of text.

=WIP=

This page still needs links to other articles. If you see a word or sentence that should be linked to a particular page, please add it. Make sure to tick the "This is a minor edit" button if you are not doing a big overhaul of the links.

{{Starting FAQ}}

40d:How to safely start fortress mode

2008-09-21T13:13:20Z

Yanlin: /* Stone is good for: */

This guide was compiled by Yanlin (And the users) for the users. Basically it contains Yanlin's personal advice with the advice of others taking a higher rank.

The page has not yet been completely made wiki friendly and it is a WIP.

=The guide=

All advice in the replies will be summed up here in user friendly bits.

==Dwarf jobs and happiness==

Don't try to take one of everything at the start. All jobs that will be run almost constantly can just be done by an [[Immigration|immigrant]]. For example, start with one [[mason]] working like a madman churning out [[door]]s and such. Then when you get your first wave, start at least 4 mason [[workshop]]s and make them churn out standard [[room]]s. If you can make an apartment complex instead of a huge [[Barracks|barracks]] room, you get yourself a good [[Thought|happy bonus]]. -Yanlin
* Legendary dining room is all you need. It is so useful it makes rooms better than barracks merely a roleplay thing. Also, dabbling masons should work on blocks, not furniture. -Someone-else

Legendary [[dining room]]s: Any room that's about 5x5, fully engraved and has maybe 4 tables and chairs will be legendary from my experience. I usually take a proficient [[engraver]] with me on the start to speed it up and it also helps if he is the only one doing the engravings. Legendary dining rooms can make dwarves forget even the most horrible things! Even death. -Yanlin
* Average artifact in a small plain room with crappy tables and thrones counts as legendary dining room too. -Someone-else

A fort divided does not stand. Make sure your dwarves don't run around like idiots. -Yanlin

[[Cave adaptation]]: I set up a simple system. There is only one exit out of my apartment complex. My apartment complex spans multiple [[Z-axis|floors]] and each one has the entire entrance in light state. How? Well light passes through [[Floor#Construction|floors]]! Go figure. This is how I do it. I [[channel[[ out the entire entrance from the top to the level I am currently building in. I [[Wall#Construction|wall]] it in on the top to prevent [[goblin]]s and other nasty stuff from jumping or firing in. I create a small "maintenance" tunnel going near the channeling area so that the channelers have access to it. It's simple really. When the channeling grinds to a halt, pave all the channeled areas with floors. I never tested [[wood]] floors. (What kind of idiot wastes wood on anything but [[bin]]s, [[bucket]]s, [[barrel]]s and [[bed]]s?) -Yanlin

[[Stone]] [[stockpile]]s: NO! NOT A CHANCE! But if you set up a special workshop for churning out expensive items, set up a stockpile that accepts only that one kind of expensive rock. Setting up a small stone stockpile under your masonry workshop is a good idea though. -Yanlin

[[Hauling|Haulers]]: Have at least 5-10 free peasants for hauling. Usually my fortress can run on just my 7 starting dwarves. I can easily supply 60 dwarves worth of [[food]] and [[Alcohol|booze]] while the rest do the odd job here and there. -Yanlin

Micromanagement: Only your core dwarves need it. The rest can just do anything they want. -Yanlin

[[Fishing]]: Not worth it. Only the [[shell]]s are worth it. -Yanlin

* However, fishing can give you lots and lots of fishbones, which can then be made into bone bolts that Dwarves use for practice. Very useful on maps without trees. - HisMajestyBOB

[[Ambusher|Hunting]]: Worth it. But at least give your [[hunter]] some [[armor]]. -Yanlin
* Do not waste starting dwarf on it. This is job for immigrants. -Someone-else

[[Farm plot|Farm]] size: 10x10 of [[plump helmet]]s without fertilizing will feed 500 dwarves. A 5x5 field WITH fertilizing will feed about 500 dwarves. Do the math. (Rough estimates. Untested.) -Yanlin

[[Cloth]]: [[Pig tail]]s will provide you all the cloth you need and booze too. -Yanlin

Buying your first [[anvil]]: Mugging. No not robbing the [[Trading|merchant]]. Making tons and tons of stone [[Goblet|mugs]]! You'd be amazed how much you can buy with a few bins worth of mugs. Each stone gives 3 mugs and a skilled mason can make enough to... Well... Buy anything you need. Remember, [[Craftsdwarf|craftsdwarves]] are GOOD! -Yanlin
* Mechanic is the way to go. Not only are mechanisms single items (less hauling) but also aren't useless. Prepared food is very good too, though it needs 3 dwarves working (planter, brewer and cook. Combining them into one dwarf is bad thing). Craftdwarves aren't really useful at start and are almost totally useless after that. -Someone-else
* Scrape up enough to buy at least 2 cheese then cook the cheese. Use the cooked cheese to buy the rest of the cheese. Cook the rest of the cheese. Buy out the rest of the caravan with the new meal. -Ikko

[[Nobles]]: Give them a huge [[bedroom]], huge [[office]] and cram it up with some decorations and [[engraving]]s. That should keep em happy for a while. -Yanlin
* If you happen to have artifact furniture just build one room of average size, but few beds, tables and thrones in it and make it a "noble room". Artifact will boost its value enough for all dwarves who aren't kings unless it's made from one log, stone, bone, shell or the like. -Someone-else

==Pets and food animals==

[[Cat|Cats]]. DO NOT DO IT! IT IS NOT WORTH IT! -Yanlin
* Wrong. Having one cat will not only boost dwarves' mood (no [[vermin|rats]] and other ugly crap) but will also make your food safer. -Someone-else

[[Dog|Dogs]]. DO IT! IT IS WORTH IT! -Yanlin

Shamelessly kill off any newborn pets to prevent overpopulation. Especially useful on cats. -HisMajestyBOB
* Or put them in a [[cage]] as an [[butchering|emergency food source]]. Caged animals do not breed, block paths or waste CPU power on pathfinding. -Someone-else

Dogs give a lot of bang for your buck.
They are a good source of [[food|meat]]. You just pay 16 bucks for them upon embark, if I remember correctly. This might be a little bit more than the price of 5 meat (which is 10 bucks) but you have to take into account that they get offspring, son that 20 dogs of the first year might turn into 30 dogs or more in the second year.
when you slaughter them each dog gives you 5 meat, 5 [[bones]], a [[skin|hide]] and a [[skull]]. This as well as the fact that dogs, in contrast to meat don't rot, makes it useful to buy at least some of them upon start. -Proteus

Dogs are better than cats. Dogs breed just as fast and you can have an army of wardogs slaughtering everything, not to mention they make an incredible [[thief]] defense. Simply put a meeting zone across the entrance to your fort, then you'll have all eleventy billion dogs wandering around in that meeting zone. Any thief is instantly turned into [[kobold]] kibble, and they're quite handly at dealing with smaller sieges too.
Also you can slaughter dogs at whim, whereas you can't slaughter an owned pet. -Hyndis

==Defense==

An army of peasants is a good thing if you think about it. Churn out a few [[crossbow|crossbows]] and [[ammo|bolts]]. Even copper weapons can take down most sieges you will probably get. -Yanlin

[[Goblin]] babysnatchers and Kobold thieves. One dog on a [[chain]] will kill them on contact. Especially a war dog. I usually buy a few chains at the embarkment. -Yanlin

Security. [[traps|Stonefall traps]] at the entrance help. After you need more than that, you probably have more than that. Make weapon traps that shoot or better yet, station [[marksdwarf|marksdwarves]] in [[fortifications]] outside your fort. Make sure to put them in a [[tower]]. -Yanlin

You might want to bring along a rope and then wall in your fortress entrance so there is only one path. Then set a dog on the rope (Not a cat, those are more useful against vermin) beside the door to stop the sneaky sorts. -Gamerofthegame

Weapon traps and marksdwarves = survival for for most -wendigo

==Production and efficiency==

[[Glass]]. You want [[sand]] on your map. It is awesome advice to have sand on your map. Remember. Glass is EASY to make especially if you can get a source of [[fuel]] for your forge. You can make almost everything out of glass. If you can get a [[magma glass furnace]], you win. -Yanlin

[[Iron]]. You want it. If you didn't find iron, I suggest just starting over in another location or if you feel determined, buy it. But it can get costly. -Yanlin

Common [[barrel]] exploit. Each piece of meat and [[alcohol|booze]] you bring with you, will give you one free barrel. 5 of each can fit in a barrel and if you take 6 of something, you get 2 barrels. Etc. -Flok Speargrabber

[[turtle|Turtles]] are AWESOME! -Flok Speargrabber
* Be sure to disable bones and [[shells]] in your early outdoor refuse [[stockpile]] so you don't waste turtles' awesomeness. -Someone-else

Bringing a few [[seeds]] of everything along with you is wise. (I suggest bringing plenty of [[plump helmet]] and [[pig tail]] seeds.) -Flok Speargrabber
* The second advice is bad. Just start your [[farm plot|farm]] soon and brew what you can and you will have more seeds than need. As for bringing everything: 1 seed each is enough. [[Rock nuts]] are useless before you have food chain and plenty of bags. -Someone-else

[[immigration|Immigrants]] are good for [[fishing]] that pesky [[carp]]. (Well not really. But they are good for fishing nonetheless.) -blakyoshi7

Farming. The best source of food. If you don't want to "Cheat" you can just plant a big plump helmet farm. Make sure you don't cook it all though. Make sure at least some goes into booze. Booze and eating raw returns seeds. [[Cooking]] destroys them. Alternatively you can cook the booze. That creates a cheatish infinate supply of food. -Yanlin

[[Wood]]. You don't really NEED a heavily forested map. Assuming you will make about 100 [[beds]] during 3 years and some barrels, [[bucket|buckets]] and [[bins]], you only need about 500 [[tree|trees]]. Might sound like not enough on a non heavily forested map right? Well wrong. Trees DO grow back. Even a lightly forested map has at least 200 trees from what I could tell. -Yanlin
* If you plan on doing a lot of metalsmithing on a map with no magma, or a lot of clear glass or soap, you will need a lot of wood for charcoal and ash. -Bouchart

Pig tails are good to bring, as a source of booze that your dwarfs won't accidentally eat up before it's turned into it's sweet elixir of happiness. -Overdose

Pigtail makes great booze. It helps keep your dwarves happy and avoid the "Tired of same booze" unhappy thought. -motorbitch

You need [[cloth]] only for [[strange mood|strange moods]]. You can easily buy all the cloth you need and have your [[farmer|farmers]] do more useful work. -motorbitch
* Wrong. Glass industry requires many bags. -Someone-else

Two humped camels are good for farming as they yield a lot. Consider this option to diversify your meals. Also helps if you want to avoid the booze food exploit.- motorbitch

Lopped off body parts create small bones that are rather useless. (Training bolts are never really useless as you should have too many bins anyway.) -motorbitch

You should only put a priority on [[Magma]] if you have the ability to make glass with it. If so, it should be one of your first things. -Gamerofthegame

Have your [[carpenter]](s) craft a steady flow of beds/barrels/bins -wendigo

Run a [[still]] nonstop. Get those seeds, distill that booze. -wendigo
* If you have many barrels filled with booze and no free ones just cook some beer biscuits. Not only they will make your dwarves happier but also will train your cook and let your brewer continue his work. Don't do this if you have no plants to brew. -Someone-else

Metalworking is desirable, but not crucial. -wendigo

I set every dwarf in the fortress to [[butcher]] and [[tanning|tan]]. Its a very high priority job since the corpses and skins will rapidly decay, and by setting every single dwarf to be able to perform this task (skill doesn't matter, a dabbling dwarf does just as well as a legendary dwarf) there's a very high probability it will get done in time. If you have a lot of corpses to process, simply build a bunch of butcher and tanner workshops. -Hyndis

===Wood is useful for:===
[[Beds]] - [[Bins]] - [[Barrels]] - [[spike|Spikes]] - [[Screw pump|Pump parts]] - [[Windmill|Windmills]] and [[water]] wheels

-Flok Speargrabber

===Stone is good for:===

[[Statues]] - [[chest|Coffers]] - [[cabinet|Cabinets]] - [[Coffins]] - [[trade|Trade goods]] - [[Doors]] - [[Floodgates]] - [[chair|Chairs]] - [[table|Tables]] - [[Blocks]] for [[road|roads]] and [[floor|floors]] (More brick-y than block-y)

-Flok Speargrabber

===Metal is good for:===
[[Weapons]] - [[Armor ]] - Magma-safe pumps - Expensive statues - Noble orders, usually, unless they don't want a special metal item

-Flok Speargrabber

==Performance==

Cats are not as bad as they used to be. Now slaughtering the newborns is easy enough and with the new partial print feature, they are not the huge FPS problem they used to be. They are also, like dogs: a good source of meat and such. -Vaftrudner

Don't bother with clothes. They don't really do anything and lag your FPS because they get checked every moment. Your dwarves wont mind walking around nude and no one is going to judge them about it. (Politically it does not matter.) -motorbitch

Bring a cage. Just one. You can use it to stuff your excess creatures. Mainly anything outside two cats and maybe two dogs. -Gamerofthegame

==Special conditions==

You could bring five picks and 300 logs if you're on a treeless map. Just don't make stuff from wood if you can make them from something else. (Stockpile = bad) -Ashery

=Adding your own advice=

If you wish to add your own advice, do so in a grammatically correct manner. Links are not mandatory but desired. Remember to sign it with one space, a dash and then your name.

-NameHere

If you think the advice is poor, do not add it. The last thing Yanlin needs is more pruning of bad advice.

==Formatting==

Keep two lines of space after the advice above yours. Do not add it into the middle of the section.
Big advices deserve their own subcategory. But don't just sprinkle them around like an idiot.

Keep 3 lines of space under your advice to the next category.

All this formatting is needed so the guide does not become a hard to read wall of text.

=WIP=

This page still needs links to other articles. If you see a word or sentence that should be linked to a particular page, please add it. Make sure to tick the "This is a minor edit" button if you are not doing a big overhaul of the links.

{{Starting FAQ}}

40d:How to safely start fortress mode

2008-09-21T13:12:23Z

Yanlin: /* Wood is useful for: */

This guide was compiled by Yanlin (And the users) for the users. Basically it contains Yanlin's personal advice with the advice of others taking a higher rank.

The page has not yet been completely made wiki friendly and it is a WIP.

=The guide=

All advice in the replies will be summed up here in user friendly bits.

==Dwarf jobs and happiness==

Don't try to take one of everything at the start. All jobs that will be run almost constantly can just be done by an [[Immigration|immigrant]]. For example, start with one [[mason]] working like a madman churning out [[door]]s and such. Then when you get your first wave, start at least 4 mason [[workshop]]s and make them churn out standard [[room]]s. If you can make an apartment complex instead of a huge [[Barracks|barracks]] room, you get yourself a good [[Thought|happy bonus]]. -Yanlin
* Legendary dining room is all you need. It is so useful it makes rooms better than barracks merely a roleplay thing. Also, dabbling masons should work on blocks, not furniture. -Someone-else

Legendary [[dining room]]s: Any room that's about 5x5, fully engraved and has maybe 4 tables and chairs will be legendary from my experience. I usually take a proficient [[engraver]] with me on the start to speed it up and it also helps if he is the only one doing the engravings. Legendary dining rooms can make dwarves forget even the most horrible things! Even death. -Yanlin
* Average artifact in a small plain room with crappy tables and thrones counts as legendary dining room too. -Someone-else

A fort divided does not stand. Make sure your dwarves don't run around like idiots. -Yanlin

[[Cave adaptation]]: I set up a simple system. There is only one exit out of my apartment complex. My apartment complex spans multiple [[Z-axis|floors]] and each one has the entire entrance in light state. How? Well light passes through [[Floor#Construction|floors]]! Go figure. This is how I do it. I [[channel[[ out the entire entrance from the top to the level I am currently building in. I [[Wall#Construction|wall]] it in on the top to prevent [[goblin]]s and other nasty stuff from jumping or firing in. I create a small "maintenance" tunnel going near the channeling area so that the channelers have access to it. It's simple really. When the channeling grinds to a halt, pave all the channeled areas with floors. I never tested [[wood]] floors. (What kind of idiot wastes wood on anything but [[bin]]s, [[bucket]]s, [[barrel]]s and [[bed]]s?) -Yanlin

[[Stone]] [[stockpile]]s: NO! NOT A CHANCE! But if you set up a special workshop for churning out expensive items, set up a stockpile that accepts only that one kind of expensive rock. Setting up a small stone stockpile under your masonry workshop is a good idea though. -Yanlin

[[Hauling|Haulers]]: Have at least 5-10 free peasants for hauling. Usually my fortress can run on just my 7 starting dwarves. I can easily supply 60 dwarves worth of [[food]] and [[Alcohol|booze]] while the rest do the odd job here and there. -Yanlin

Micromanagement: Only your core dwarves need it. The rest can just do anything they want. -Yanlin

[[Fishing]]: Not worth it. Only the [[shell]]s are worth it. -Yanlin

* However, fishing can give you lots and lots of fishbones, which can then be made into bone bolts that Dwarves use for practice. Very useful on maps without trees. - HisMajestyBOB

[[Ambusher|Hunting]]: Worth it. But at least give your [[hunter]] some [[armor]]. -Yanlin
* Do not waste starting dwarf on it. This is job for immigrants. -Someone-else

[[Farm plot|Farm]] size: 10x10 of [[plump helmet]]s without fertilizing will feed 500 dwarves. A 5x5 field WITH fertilizing will feed about 500 dwarves. Do the math. (Rough estimates. Untested.) -Yanlin

[[Cloth]]: [[Pig tail]]s will provide you all the cloth you need and booze too. -Yanlin

Buying your first [[anvil]]: Mugging. No not robbing the [[Trading|merchant]]. Making tons and tons of stone [[Goblet|mugs]]! You'd be amazed how much you can buy with a few bins worth of mugs. Each stone gives 3 mugs and a skilled mason can make enough to... Well... Buy anything you need. Remember, [[Craftsdwarf|craftsdwarves]] are GOOD! -Yanlin
* Mechanic is the way to go. Not only are mechanisms single items (less hauling) but also aren't useless. Prepared food is very good too, though it needs 3 dwarves working (planter, brewer and cook. Combining them into one dwarf is bad thing). Craftdwarves aren't really useful at start and are almost totally useless after that. -Someone-else
* Scrape up enough to buy at least 2 cheese then cook the cheese. Use the cooked cheese to buy the rest of the cheese. Cook the rest of the cheese. Buy out the rest of the caravan with the new meal. -Ikko

[[Nobles]]: Give them a huge [[bedroom]], huge [[office]] and cram it up with some decorations and [[engraving]]s. That should keep em happy for a while. -Yanlin
* If you happen to have artifact furniture just build one room of average size, but few beds, tables and thrones in it and make it a "noble room". Artifact will boost its value enough for all dwarves who aren't kings unless it's made from one log, stone, bone, shell or the like. -Someone-else

==Pets and food animals==

[[Cat|Cats]]. DO NOT DO IT! IT IS NOT WORTH IT! -Yanlin
* Wrong. Having one cat will not only boost dwarves' mood (no [[vermin|rats]] and other ugly crap) but will also make your food safer. -Someone-else

[[Dog|Dogs]]. DO IT! IT IS WORTH IT! -Yanlin

Shamelessly kill off any newborn pets to prevent overpopulation. Especially useful on cats. -HisMajestyBOB
* Or put them in a [[cage]] as an [[butchering|emergency food source]]. Caged animals do not breed, block paths or waste CPU power on pathfinding. -Someone-else

Dogs give a lot of bang for your buck.
They are a good source of [[food|meat]]. You just pay 16 bucks for them upon embark, if I remember correctly. This might be a little bit more than the price of 5 meat (which is 10 bucks) but you have to take into account that they get offspring, son that 20 dogs of the first year might turn into 30 dogs or more in the second year.
when you slaughter them each dog gives you 5 meat, 5 [[bones]], a [[skin|hide]] and a [[skull]]. This as well as the fact that dogs, in contrast to meat don't rot, makes it useful to buy at least some of them upon start. -Proteus

Dogs are better than cats. Dogs breed just as fast and you can have an army of wardogs slaughtering everything, not to mention they make an incredible [[thief]] defense. Simply put a meeting zone across the entrance to your fort, then you'll have all eleventy billion dogs wandering around in that meeting zone. Any thief is instantly turned into [[kobold]] kibble, and they're quite handly at dealing with smaller sieges too.
Also you can slaughter dogs at whim, whereas you can't slaughter an owned pet. -Hyndis

==Defense==

An army of peasants is a good thing if you think about it. Churn out a few [[crossbow|crossbows]] and [[ammo|bolts]]. Even copper weapons can take down most sieges you will probably get. -Yanlin

[[Goblin]] babysnatchers and Kobold thieves. One dog on a [[chain]] will kill them on contact. Especially a war dog. I usually buy a few chains at the embarkment. -Yanlin

Security. [[traps|Stonefall traps]] at the entrance help. After you need more than that, you probably have more than that. Make weapon traps that shoot or better yet, station [[marksdwarf|marksdwarves]] in [[fortifications]] outside your fort. Make sure to put them in a [[tower]]. -Yanlin

You might want to bring along a rope and then wall in your fortress entrance so there is only one path. Then set a dog on the rope (Not a cat, those are more useful against vermin) beside the door to stop the sneaky sorts. -Gamerofthegame

Weapon traps and marksdwarves = survival for for most -wendigo

==Production and efficiency==

[[Glass]]. You want [[sand]] on your map. It is awesome advice to have sand on your map. Remember. Glass is EASY to make especially if you can get a source of [[fuel]] for your forge. You can make almost everything out of glass. If you can get a [[magma glass furnace]], you win. -Yanlin

[[Iron]]. You want it. If you didn't find iron, I suggest just starting over in another location or if you feel determined, buy it. But it can get costly. -Yanlin

Common [[barrel]] exploit. Each piece of meat and [[alcohol|booze]] you bring with you, will give you one free barrel. 5 of each can fit in a barrel and if you take 6 of something, you get 2 barrels. Etc. -Flok Speargrabber

[[turtle|Turtles]] are AWESOME! -Flok Speargrabber
* Be sure to disable bones and [[shells]] in your early outdoor refuse [[stockpile]] so you don't waste turtles' awesomeness. -Someone-else

Bringing a few [[seeds]] of everything along with you is wise. (I suggest bringing plenty of [[plump helmet]] and [[pig tail]] seeds.) -Flok Speargrabber
* The second advice is bad. Just start your [[farm plot|farm]] soon and brew what you can and you will have more seeds than need. As for bringing everything: 1 seed each is enough. [[Rock nuts]] are useless before you have food chain and plenty of bags. -Someone-else

[[immigration|Immigrants]] are good for [[fishing]] that pesky [[carp]]. (Well not really. But they are good for fishing nonetheless.) -blakyoshi7

Farming. The best source of food. If you don't want to "Cheat" you can just plant a big plump helmet farm. Make sure you don't cook it all though. Make sure at least some goes into booze. Booze and eating raw returns seeds. [[Cooking]] destroys them. Alternatively you can cook the booze. That creates a cheatish infinate supply of food. -Yanlin

[[Wood]]. You don't really NEED a heavily forested map. Assuming you will make about 100 [[beds]] during 3 years and some barrels, [[bucket|buckets]] and [[bins]], you only need about 500 [[tree|trees]]. Might sound like not enough on a non heavily forested map right? Well wrong. Trees DO grow back. Even a lightly forested map has at least 200 trees from what I could tell. -Yanlin
* If you plan on doing a lot of metalsmithing on a map with no magma, or a lot of clear glass or soap, you will need a lot of wood for charcoal and ash. -Bouchart

Pig tails are good to bring, as a source of booze that your dwarfs won't accidentally eat up before it's turned into it's sweet elixir of happiness. -Overdose

Pigtail makes great booze. It helps keep your dwarves happy and avoid the "Tired of same booze" unhappy thought. -motorbitch

You need [[cloth]] only for [[strange mood|strange moods]]. You can easily buy all the cloth you need and have your [[farmer|farmers]] do more useful work. -motorbitch
* Wrong. Glass industry requires many bags. -Someone-else

Two humped camels are good for farming as they yield a lot. Consider this option to diversify your meals. Also helps if you want to avoid the booze food exploit.- motorbitch

Lopped off body parts create small bones that are rather useless. (Training bolts are never really useless as you should have too many bins anyway.) -motorbitch

You should only put a priority on [[Magma]] if you have the ability to make glass with it. If so, it should be one of your first things. -Gamerofthegame

Have your [[carpenter]](s) craft a steady flow of beds/barrels/bins -wendigo

Run a [[still]] nonstop. Get those seeds, distill that booze. -wendigo
* If you have many barrels filled with booze and no free ones just cook some beer biscuits. Not only they will make your dwarves happier but also will train your cook and let your brewer continue his work. Don't do this if you have no plants to brew. -Someone-else

Metalworking is desirable, but not crucial. -wendigo

I set every dwarf in the fortress to [[butcher]] and [[tanning|tan]]. Its a very high priority job since the corpses and skins will rapidly decay, and by setting every single dwarf to be able to perform this task (skill doesn't matter, a dabbling dwarf does just as well as a legendary dwarf) there's a very high probability it will get done in time. If you have a lot of corpses to process, simply build a bunch of butcher and tanner workshops. -Hyndis

===Wood is useful for:===
[[Beds]] - [[Bins]] - [[Barrels]] - [[spike|Spikes]] - [[Screw pump|Pump parts]] - [[Windmill|Windmills]] and [[water]] wheels

-Flok Speargrabber

===Stone is good for:===

[[Statues]] - [[chest|Coffers]] - [[cabinet|Cabinets]] - [[Coffins]] - Trade goods - [[Doors]] - [[Floodgates]] - [[chair|Chairs]] - [[table|Tables]] - [[Blocks]] for roads and floors (More brick-y than block-y)

-Flok Speargrabber

===Metal is good for:===
[[Weapons]] - [[Armor ]] - Magma-safe pumps - Expensive statues - Noble orders, usually, unless they don't want a special metal item

-Flok Speargrabber

==Performance==

Cats are not as bad as they used to be. Now slaughtering the newborns is easy enough and with the new partial print feature, they are not the huge FPS problem they used to be. They are also, like dogs: a good source of meat and such. -Vaftrudner

Don't bother with clothes. They don't really do anything and lag your FPS because they get checked every moment. Your dwarves wont mind walking around nude and no one is going to judge them about it. (Politically it does not matter.) -motorbitch

Bring a cage. Just one. You can use it to stuff your excess creatures. Mainly anything outside two cats and maybe two dogs. -Gamerofthegame

==Special conditions==

You could bring five picks and 300 logs if you're on a treeless map. Just don't make stuff from wood if you can make them from something else. (Stockpile = bad) -Ashery

=Adding your own advice=

If you wish to add your own advice, do so in a grammatically correct manner. Links are not mandatory but desired. Remember to sign it with one space, a dash and then your name.

-NameHere

If you think the advice is poor, do not add it. The last thing Yanlin needs is more pruning of bad advice.

==Formatting==

Keep two lines of space after the advice above yours. Do not add it into the middle of the section.
Big advices deserve their own subcategory. But don't just sprinkle them around like an idiot.

Keep 3 lines of space under your advice to the next category.

All this formatting is needed so the guide does not become a hard to read wall of text.

=WIP=

This page still needs links to other articles. If you see a word or sentence that should be linked to a particular page, please add it. Make sure to tick the "This is a minor edit" button if you are not doing a big overhaul of the links.

{{Starting FAQ}}

User talk:Juckto

2008-09-14T19:53:04Z

Yanlin:

Welcome to this wiki! Dwarf Fortress rapidly becomes more complicated, and we're always glad to have new writers.<br>
Since we prefer that you try to follow our wiki's standards, we've made a list of basic guidelines. Note that this is an impersonal template, so some may not apply to you.
* To let us know who you are, please sign your posts on discussion pages by typing <code><nowiki>--~~~~</nowiki></code> after your posts. This can also be inserted with the [[Image:Button sig756222.png]] button if JavaScript is enabled.
* Avoid making many small edits to a page. Instead, try to make one large edit. This makes the history of the page a lot easier to read.
* When making comments on a talk page, use one more colon before each line in your comment than was used in the comment you reply to. Put an empty line between comments by different users but do not use blank lines inside of a comment. If your comment has no indents, use <code><nowiki><br></nowiki></code> after each line.
* Never, ever, put a question mark in the title of a page. This is not an undoable mistake. The rule list elaborates.
* Most importantly, [[DwarfFortressWiki:Community_Portal#We_are_doing_this.21_Let_us_do_it_right.|read and follow the rules.]] Really. Read them.
<div align=center><div style="width: 28em; padding: 0.5em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-top: 0.5em; border: 1px solid #ccc; background: #eee; text-align: center">''"You have been processed! Go forth, now, and edit!" --[[User:Savok|Savok]]''</div></div>
Try to follow the wikipedia manual of style when adding to an article. Since the articles are about common knowledge rather than individual's experiences, try to avoid writing in the first person (the word '''I''' should be avoided). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Avoid_first-person_pronouns]

[[User:VengefulDonut|VengefulDonut]] 11:11, 6 December 2007 (EST)

----

In response to your query, use <nowiki>{{del}}</nowiki> to mark pages for deletion. (I inserted an invisible ascii char so you can actually read it here) --[[User:Chrispy|Chrispy]] 17:42, 3 April 2008 (EDT)

:Or, you could just type <code><nowiki><nowiki>{{del}}</nowiki></nowiki></code>, Chrispy, which turns into "<nowiki>{{del}}</nowiki>". Note that we generally use <code><nowiki><code></nowiki></code> tags around bits of code, so that should be <code><nowiki><code></nowiki><nowiki><nowiki></nowiki><nowiki>{{del}}</nowiki><nowiki></nowiki></nowiki><nowiki></code></nowiki></code>, which turns into <code><nowiki>{{del}}</nowiki></code>. --[[User:Savok|Savok]]

----

Dogs adopt like cats? Not in my experience. --[[User:Savok|Savok]] 22:45, 30 May 2008 (EDT)

Not sure if this is the right section but if not then simply remove this, I am new and I only joined to post that one page so that is the reason it was "broken" or whatever you told me and I apologize. -- GreenLeafNation

== You wouldn't be the same Yanlin that used to play a game called Allegiance, would you? --Juckto 07:00, 14 September 2008 (EDT) ==

Yes. I am.

I used to know a Yanlin too. Until my computer refused to run allegiance. I'd love to return and that game is awesome. But it runs at a horribly low FPS. This all began happening on my new machine which has a dual core and an Nvidia 8600 GT. The last one had a 2.3GHz single core and an ATI x1950 PRO.

[[User:Yanlin|Yanlin]] 15:53, 14 September 2008 (EDT)

User talk:Juckto

2008-09-14T12:11:11Z

Yanlin: You wouldn't be the same Yanlin that used to play a game called Allegiance, would you? --Juckto 07:00, 14 September 2008 (EDT)

40d:How to safely start fortress mode

2008-09-12T16:13:51Z

Yanlin: /* WIP */

This guide was compiled by Yanlin (And the users) for the users. Basically it contains Yanlin's personal advice with the advice of others taking a higher rank.

The page has not yet been completely made wiki friendly and it is a WIP.

=The guide=

All advice in the replies will be summed up here in user friendly bits.

==Dwarf jobs and happiness==

Don't try to take one of everything at the start. All jobs that will be run almost constantly can just be done by an [[Immigration|immigrant]]. For example, start with one [[mason]] working like a madman churning out [[door]]s and such. Then when you get your first wave, start at least 4 mason [[workshop]]s and make them churn out standard [[room]]s. If you can make an apartment complex instead of a huge [[Barracks|barracks]] room, you get yourself a good [[Thought|happy bonus]]. -Yanlin

Legendary [[dining room]]s: Any room that's about 5x5, fully engraved and has maybe 4 tables and chairs will be legendary from my experience. I usually take a proficient [[engraver]] with me on the start to speed it up and it also helps if he is the only one doing the engravings. Legendary dining rooms can make dwarves forget even the most horrible things! Even death. -Yanlin

A fort divided does not stand. Make sure your dwarves don't run around like idiots. -Yanlin

[[Cave adaptation]]: I set up a simple system. There is only one exit out of my apartment complex. My apartment complex spans multiple [[Z-axis|floors]] and each one has the entire entrance in light state. How? Well light passes through [[Floor#Construction|floors]]! Go figure. This is how I do it. I [[channel[[ out the entire entrance from the top to the level I am currently building in. I [[Wall#Construction|wall]] it in on the top to prevent [[goblin]]s and other nasty stuff from jumping or firing in. I create a small "maintenance" tunnel going near the channeling area so that the channelers have access to it. It's simple really. When the channeling grinds to a halt, pave all the channeled areas with floors. I never tested [[wood]] floors. (What kind of idiot wastes wood on anything but [[bin]]s, [[bucket]]s, [[barrel]]s and [[bed]]s?) -Yanlin

[[Stone]] [[stockpile]]s: NO! NOT A CHANCE! But if you set up a special workshop for churning out expensive items, set up a stockpile that accepts only that one kind of expensive rock. Setting up a small stone stockpile under your masonry workshop is a good idea though. -Yanlin

[[Hauling|Haulers]]: Have at least 5-10 free peasants for hauling. Usually my fortress can run on just my 7 starting dwarves. I can easily supply 60 dwarves worth of [[food]] and [[Alcohol|booze]] while the rest do the odd job here and there. -Yanlin

Micromanagement: Only your core dwarves need it. The rest can just do anything they want. -Yanlin

[[Fishing]]: Not worth it. Only the [[shell]]s are worth it. -Yanlin

[[Ambusher|Hunting]]: Worth it. But at least give your [[hunter]] some [[armor]]. -Yanlin

[[Farm plot|Farm]] size: 10x10 of [[plump helmet]]s without fertilizing will feed 500 dwarves. A 5x5 field WITH fertilizing will feed about 500 dwarves. Do the math. (Rough estimates. Untested.) -Yanlin

[[Cloth]]: [[Pig tail]]s will provide you all the cloth you need and booze too. -Yanlin

Buying your first [[anvil]]: Mugging. No not robbing the [[Trading|merchant]]. Making tons and tons of stone [[Goblet|mugs]]! You'd be amazed how much you can buy with a few bins worth of mugs. Each stone gives 3 mugs and a skilled mason can make enough to... Well... Buy anything you need. Remember, [[Craftsdwarf|craftsdwarves]] are GOOD! -Yanlin

[[Nobles]]: Give them a huge [[bedroom]], huge [[office]] and cram it up with some decorations and [[engraving]]s. That should keep em happy for a while. -Yanlin

==Pets and food animals==

Cats. DO NOT DO IT! IT IS NOT WORTH IT! -Yanlin

Dogs. DO IT! IT IS WORTH IT! -Yanlin

Shamelessly kill off any newborn pets to prevent overpopulation. Especially useful on cats. -HisMajestyBOB

Dogs give a lot of bang for your buck.
They are a good source of meat. You just pay 16 bucks for them upon embark, if I remember correctly. This might be a little bit more than the price of 5 meat (which is 10 bucks) but you have to take into account that they get offspring, son that 20 dogs of the first year might turn into 30 dogs or more in the second year.
when you slaughter them each dog gives you 5 meat, 5 bones, a hide and a skull. This as well as the fact that dogs, in contrast to meat don't rot, makes it useful to buy at least some of them upon start. -Proteus

Dogs are better than cats. Dogs breed just as fast and you can have an army of wardogs slaughtering everything, not to mention they make an incredible thief defense. Simply put a meeting zone across the entrance to your fort, then you'll have all eleventy billion dogs wandering around in that meeting zone. Any thief is instantly turned into kobold kibble, and they're quite handly at dealing with smaller sieges too.
Also you can slaughter dogs at whim, whereas you can't slaughter an owned pet. -Hyndis

==Defense==

An army of peasants is a good thing if you think about it. Churn out a few crossbows and bolts. Even copper weapons can take down most sieges you will probably get. -Yanlin

Goblin pedophiles and Kobold noobs. One dog on a chain will kill them on contact. Especially a war dog. I usually buy a few chains at the embarkment. -Yanlin

Security. Stonefall traps at the entrance help. After you need more than that, you probably have more than that. Make weapon traps that shoot or better yet, station marksdwarves in fortifications outside your fort. Make sure to put them in a tower. -Yanlin

You might want to bring along a rope and then wall in your fortress entrance so there is only one path. Then set a dog on the rope (Not a cat, those are more useful against vermin) beside the door to stop the sneaky sorts. -Gamerofthegame

Weapon traps and marksdwarves = survival for for most -wendigo

==Production and efficiency==

Glass. You want sand on your map. It is awesome advice to have sand on your map. Remember. Glass is EASY to make especially if you can get a source of fuel for your forge. You can make almost everything out of glass. If you can get a magma glass forge, you win. -Yanlin

Iron. You want it. If you didn't find iron, I suggest just starting over in another location or if you feel determined, buy it. But it can get costly. -Yanlin

Common barrel exploit. Each piece of meat and booze you bring with you, will give you one free barrel. 5 of each can fit in a barrel and if you take 6 of something, you get 2 barrels. Etc. -Flok Speargrabber

Turtles are AWESOME! -Flok Speargrabber

Bringing a few seeds of everything along with you is wise. (I suggest bringing plenty of plump helmet and pig tail seeds.) -Flok Speargrabber

Immigrants are good for fishing that pesky carp. (Well not really. But they are good for fishing nonetheless.) -blakyoshi7

Farming. The best source of food. If you don't want to "Cheat" you can just plant a big plump helmet farm. Make sure you don't cook it all though. Make sure at least some goes into booze. Booze and eating raw returns seeds. Cooking destroys them. Alternatively you can cook the booze. That creates a cheatish infinate supply of food. -Yanlin

Wood. You don't really NEED a heavily fortested map. Assuming you will make about 100 beds during 3 years and some barrels, buckets and bins, you only need about 500 trees. Might sound like not enough on a non heavily forested map right? Well wrong. Trees DO grow back. Even a lightly forested map has at least 200 trees from what I could tell. -Yanlin

Pig tails are good to bring, as a source of booze that your dwarfs won't accidentally eat up before it's turned into it's sweet elixir of happiness. -Overdose

Pigtail makes great booze. It helps keep your dwarves happy and avoid the "Tired of same booze" unhappy thought. -motorbitch

You need cloth only for strange moods. You can easily buy all the cloth you need and have your farmers do more useful work. -motorbitch

Two humped camels are good for farming as they yield a lot. Consider this option to diversify your meals. Also helps if you want to avoid the booze food exploit.- motorbitch

Lopped off body parts create small bones that are rather useless. (Training bolts are never really useless as you should have too many bins anyway.) -motorbitch

You should only put a priority on Magma if you have the ability to make glass with it. If so, it should be one of your first things. -Gamerofthegame

Have your carpenter(s) craft a steady flow of beds/barrels/bins -wendigo

Run a still nonstop. Get those seeds, distill that booze. -wendigo

Metalworking is desirable, but not crucial. -wendigo

I set every dwarf in the fortress to butcher and tan. Its a very high priority job since the corpses and skins will rapidly decay, and by setting every single dwarf to be able to perform this task (skill doesn't matter, a dabbling dwarf does just as well as a legendary dwarf) there's a very high probability it will get done in time. If you have a lot of corpses to process, simply build a bunch of butcher and tanner workshops. -Hyndis

===Wood is useful for:===
Beds - Bins - Barrels - Spikes - Pump parts - Windmills and water wheels

-Flok Speargrabber

===Stone is good for:===

Statues - Coffers - Cabinets - Coffins - Trade goods - Doors - Floodgates - Chairs - Tables - Statues (Cheaper though) - Blocks for roads and floors (More brick-y than block-y)

-Flok Speargrabber

===Metal is good for:===
Weapons - Armor - Magma-safe pumps - Expensive statues - Noble orders, usually, unless they don't want a special metal item

-Flok Speargrabber

==Performance==

Cats are not as bad as they used to be. Now slaughtering the newborns is easy enough and with the new partial print feature, they are not the huge FPS problem they used to be. They are also, like dogs: a good source of meat and such. -Vaftrudner

Don't bother with clothes. They don't really do anything and lag your FPS because they get checked every moment. Your dwarves wont mind walking around nude and no one is going to judge them about it. (Politically it does not matter.) -motorbitch

Bring a cage. Just one. You can use it to stuff your excess creatures. Mainly anything outside two cats and maybe two dogs. -Gamerofthegame

==Special conditions==

You could bring five picks and 300 logs if you're on a treeless map. Just don't make stuff from wood if you can make them from something else. (Stockpile = bad) -Ashery

=Adding your own advice=

If you wish to add your own advice, do so in a grammatically correct manner. Links are not mandatory but desired. Remember to sign it with one space, a dash and then your name.

-NameHere

If you think the advice is poor, do not add it. The last thing Yanlin needs is more pruning of bad advice.

==Formatting==

Keep two lines of space after the advice above yours. Do not add it into the middle of the section.
Big advices deserve their own subcategory. But don't just sprinkle them around like an idiot.

Keep 3 lines of space under your advice to the next category.

All this formatting is needed so the guide does not become a hard to read wall of text.

=WIP=

This page still needs links to other articles. If you see a word or sentence that should be linked to a particular page, please add it. Make sure to tick the "This is a minor edit" button if you are not doing a big overhaul of the links.

{{Starting FAQ}}

Template:Starting FAQ

2008-09-12T16:11:12Z

Yanlin:

<center>
{| class="collapsible collapsed infobox" style="background-color: #f9f9f9; border: 1px solid #aaa; font-size: 90%; margin: 1em 0em 0em; padding: 2px; text-align: center; width: 60%;"
! colspan="2" style="border: 1px solid #aaa; font-weight:bold; background-color: #ccf; padding-left: 1em; padding-right: 1em;" | '''Beginner's guide FAQ'''



|-
| [[Your first fortress|Quick launch]]<br><small>The bare minimum you need to know to get you from installation, to playing.</small>
|-
|height="10"|
|-
| [[How to correctly start fortress mode]]<br><small>A collection of advice from various Dwarf Fortress players. Very helpful and touches many subjects.</small>
|-
|height="10"|
|-
| [[How do I get my dwarves to do stuff|How do I get my dwarves to do stuff?]]
|-
| [[Location|Where in the world should I settle?]]
|-
| [[Where in my area should I build my fort|Where in my area should I build my fort?]]
|-
| [[What should I build first|What should I build first?]]
|-
| [[Starting_builds|What skills and items should I equip my dwarves with?]]
|-
| [[How do I assign tasks to specific dwarves|How do I assign tasks to specific dwarves?]]
|-
| [[Immigration|How do I get more dwarves?]]

|-
|height="10"|
|-
| {{Edit|Template:Starting_FAQ|Add a question to the Starting FAQ}}
|-
| [[Frequently Asked Questions|Back to the Main FAQ]]
|}

<includeonly>[[Category:FAQ - Starting]]</includeonly>
<noinclude>[[Category:FAQ templates]]</noinclude>

40d:How to safely start fortress mode

2008-09-11T16:31:32Z

Yanlin:

This guide was compiled by Yanlin (And the users) for the users. Basically it contains Yanlin's personal advice with the advice of others taking a higher rank.

The page has not yet been completely made wiki friendly and it is a WIP.

=The guide=

All advice in the replies will be summed up here in user friendly bits.

==Dwarf jobs and happiness==

Don't try to take one of everything at the start. All jobs that will be run almost constantly can just be done by an immigrant. For example, start with one mason working like a madman churning out doors and such. Then when you get your first wave, start at least 4 mason workshops and make them churn out standard rooms. If you can make an apartment complex instead of a huge barracks room, you get yourself a good happy bonus. -Yanlin

Legendary dining rooms. Any room that's about 5x5, fully engraved and has maybe 4 tables and chairs will be legendary from my experience. I usually take a proficient engraver with me on the start to speed it up and it also helps if he is the only one doing the engravings. Legendary dining rooms can make dwarves forget even the most horrible things! Even death. -Yanlin

A fort divided does not stand. Make sure your dwarves don't run around like idiots. -Yanlin

Cave adaptation. I set up a simple system. There is only one exit out of my apartment complex. My apartment complex spans multiple floors and each one has the entire entrance in light state. How? Well light passes through floors! Go figure. This is how I do it. I channel out the entire entrance from the top to the level I am currently building in. I wall it in on the top to prevent goblins and other nasty stuff from jumping or firing in. I create a small "maintenance" tunnel going near the channeling area so that the channelers have access to it. It's simple really. When the channeling grinds to a halt, pave all the channeled areas with floors. I never tested wood floors. (What kind of idiot wastes wood on anything but bins, buckets, barrels and beds?) -Yanlin

Stone stockpiles. NO! NOT A CHANCE! But if you set up a special workshop for churning out expensive items, set up a stockpile that accepts only that one kind of expensive rock. Setting up a small stone stockpile under your masonry workshop is a good idea though. -Yanlin

Haulers. Have at least 5-10 free peasants for hauling. Usually my fortress can run on just my 7 starting dwarves. I can easily supply 60 dwarves worth of food and booze while the rest do the odd job here and there. -Yanlin

Micromanagement. Only your core dwarves need it. The rest can just do anything they want. -Yanlin

Fishing. Not worth it. Only the shells are worth it. -Yanlin

Hunting. Worth it. But at least give your hunter some armor. -Yanlin

Farm size. 10x10 of plump helmets without fertilizing will feed 500 dwarves. A 5x5 field WITH fertilizing will feed about 500 dwarves. Do the math. (Rough estimates. Untested.) -Yanlin

Cloth. Pig tails will provide you all the cloth you need and booze too. -Yanlin

Buying your first anvil. Mugging. No not robbing the merchant. Making tons and tons of stone mugs! You'd be amazed how much you can buy with a few bins worth of mugs. Each stone gives 3 mugs and a skilled mason can make enough to... Well... Buy anything you need. Remember, craftsdwarves are GOOD! -Yanlin

Nobles. Give them a huge bedroom, huge office and cram it up with some decorations and engravings. That should keep em happy for a while. -Yanlin

==Pets and food animals==

Cats. DO NOT DO IT! IT IS NOT WORTH IT! -Yanlin

Dogs. DO IT! IT IS WORTH IT! -Yanlin

Shamelessly kill off any newborn pets to prevent overpopulation. Especially useful on cats. -HisMajestyBOB

Dogs give a lot of bang for your buck.
They are a good source of meat. You just pay 16 bucks for them upon embark, if I remember correctly. This might be a little bit more than the price of 5 meat (which is 10 bucks) but you have to take into account that they get offspring, son that 20 dogs of the first year might turn into 30 dogs or more in the second year.
when you slaughter them each dog gives you 5 meat, 5 bones, a hide and a skull. This as well as the fact that dogs, in contrast to meat don't rot, makes it useful to buy at least some of them upon start. -Proteus

Dogs are better than cats. Dogs breed just as fast and you can have an army of wardogs slaughtering everything, not to mention they make an incredible thief defense. Simply put a meeting zone across the entrance to your fort, then you'll have all eleventy billion dogs wandering around in that meeting zone. Any thief is instantly turned into kobold kibble, and they're quite handly at dealing with smaller sieges too.
Also you can slaughter dogs at whim, whereas you can't slaughter an owned pet. -Hyndis

==Defense==

An army of peasants is a good thing if you think about it. Churn out a few crossbows and bolts. Even copper weapons can take down most sieges you will probably get. -Yanlin

Goblin pedophiles and Kobold noobs. One dog on a chain will kill them on contact. Especially a war dog. I usually buy a few chains at the embarkment. -Yanlin

Security. Stonefall traps at the entrance help. After you need more than that, you probably have more than that. Make weapon traps that shoot or better yet, station marksdwarves in fortifications outside your fort. Make sure to put them in a tower. -Yanlin

You might want to bring along a rope and then wall in your fortress entrance so there is only one path. Then set a dog on the rope (Not a cat, those are more useful against vermin) beside the door to stop the sneaky sorts. -Gamerofthegame

Weapon traps and marksdwarves = survival for for most -wendigo

==Production and efficiency==

Glass. You want sand on your map. It is awesome advice to have sand on your map. Remember. Glass is EASY to make especially if you can get a source of fuel for your forge. You can make almost everything out of glass. If you can get a magma glass forge, you win. -Yanlin

Iron. You want it. If you didn't find iron, I suggest just starting over in another location or if you feel determined, buy it. But it can get costly. -Yanlin

Common barrel exploit. Each piece of meat and booze you bring with you, will give you one free barrel. 5 of each can fit in a barrel and if you take 6 of something, you get 2 barrels. Etc. -Flok Speargrabber

Turtles are AWESOME! -Flok Speargrabber

Bringing a few seeds of everything along with you is wise. (I suggest bringing plenty of plump helmet and pig tail seeds.) -Flok Speargrabber

Immigrants are good for fishing that pesky carp. (Well not really. But they are good for fishing nonetheless.) -blakyoshi7

Farming. The best source of food. If you don't want to "Cheat" you can just plant a big plump helmet farm. Make sure you don't cook it all though. Make sure at least some goes into booze. Booze and eating raw returns seeds. Cooking destroys them. Alternatively you can cook the booze. That creates a cheatish infinate supply of food. -Yanlin

Wood. You don't really NEED a heavily fortested map. Assuming you will make about 100 beds during 3 years and some barrels, buckets and bins, you only need about 500 trees. Might sound like not enough on a non heavily forested map right? Well wrong. Trees DO grow back. Even a lightly forested map has at least 200 trees from what I could tell. -Yanlin

Pig tails are good to bring, as a source of booze that your dwarfs won't accidentally eat up before it's turned into it's sweet elixir of happiness. -Overdose

Pigtail makes great booze. It helps keep your dwarves happy and avoid the "Tired of same booze" unhappy thought. -motorbitch

You need cloth only for strange moods. You can easily buy all the cloth you need and have your farmers do more useful work. -motorbitch

Two humped camels are good for farming as they yield a lot. Consider this option to diversify your meals. Also helps if you want to avoid the booze food exploit.- motorbitch

Lopped off body parts create small bones that are rather useless. (Training bolts are never really useless as you should have too many bins anyway.) -motorbitch

You should only put a priority on Magma if you have the ability to make glass with it. If so, it should be one of your first things. -Gamerofthegame

Have your carpenter(s) craft a steady flow of beds/barrels/bins -wendigo

Run a still nonstop. Get those seeds, distill that booze. -wendigo

Metalworking is desirable, but not crucial. -wendigo

I set every dwarf in the fortress to butcher and tan. Its a very high priority job since the corpses and skins will rapidly decay, and by setting every single dwarf to be able to perform this task (skill doesn't matter, a dabbling dwarf does just as well as a legendary dwarf) there's a very high probability it will get done in time. If you have a lot of corpses to process, simply build a bunch of butcher and tanner workshops. -Hyndis

===Wood is useful for:===
Beds - Bins - Barrels - Spikes - Pump parts - Windmills and water wheels

-Flok Speargrabber

===Stone is good for:===

Statues - Coffers - Cabinets - Coffins - Trade goods - Doors - Floodgates - Chairs - Tables - Statues (Cheaper though) - Blocks for roads and floors (More brick-y than block-y)

-Flok Speargrabber

===Metal is good for:===
Weapons - Armor - Magma-safe pumps - Expensive statues - Noble orders, usually, unless they don't want a special metal item

-Flok Speargrabber

==Performance==

Cats are not as bad as they used to be. Now slaughtering the newborns is easy enough and with the new partial print feature, they are not the huge FPS problem they used to be. They are also, like dogs: a good source of meat and such. -Vaftrudner

Don't bother with clothes. They don't really do anything and lag your FPS because they get checked every moment. Your dwarves wont mind walking around nude and no one is going to judge them about it. (Politically it does not matter.) -motorbitch

Bring a cage. Just one. You can use it to stuff your excess creatures. Mainly anything outside two cats and maybe two dogs. -Gamerofthegame

==Special conditions==

You could bring five picks and 300 logs if you're on a treeless map. Just don't make stuff from wood if you can make them from something else. (Stockpile = bad) -Ashery

=Adding your own advice=

If you wish to add your own advice, do so in a grammatically correct manner. Links are not mandatory but desired. Remember to sign it with one space, a dash and then your name.

-NameHere

If you think the advice is poor, do not add it. The last thing Yanlin needs is more pruning of bad advice.

==Formatting==

Keep two lines of space after the advice above yours. Do not add it into the middle of the section.
Big advices deserve their own subcategory. But don't just sprinkle them around like an idiot.

Keep 3 lines of space under your advice to the next category.

All this formatting is needed so the guide does not become a hard to read wall of text.

=WIP=

This page still needs links to other articles. If you see a word or sentence that should be linked to a particular page, please add it. Make sure to tick the "This is a minor edit" button if you are not doing a big overhaul of the links.

40d:How to safely start fortress mode

2008-09-11T16:28:15Z

Yanlin:

This guide was compiled by Yanlin (And the users) for the users. Basically it contains Yanlin's personal advice with the advice of others taking a higher rank.

The page has not yet been completely made wiki friendly and it is a WIP.

=The guide=

All advice in the replies will be summed up here in user friendly bits.

==Dwarf jobs and happiness==

Don't try to take one of everything at the start. All jobs that will be run almost constantly can just be done by an immigrant. For example, start with one mason working like a madman churning out doors and such. Then when you get your first wave, start at least 4 mason workshops and make them churn out standard rooms. If you can make an apartment complex instead of a huge barracks room, you get yourself a good happy bonus. -Yanlin

Legendary dining rooms. Any room that's about 5x5, fully engraved and has maybe 4 tables and chairs will be legendary from my experience. I usually take a proficient engraver with me on the start to speed it up and it also helps if he is the only one doing the engravings. Legendary dining rooms can make dwarves forget even the most horrible things! Even death. -Yanlin

A fort divided does not stand. Make sure your dwarves don't run around like idiots. -Yanlin

Cave adaptation. I set up a simple system. There is only one exit out of my apartment complex. My apartment complex spans multiple floors and each one has the entire entrance in light state. How? Well light passes through floors! Go figure. This is how I do it. I channel out the entire entrance from the top to the level I am currently building in. I wall it in on the top to prevent goblins and other nasty stuff from jumping or firing in. I create a small "maintenance" tunnel going near the channeling area so that the channelers have access to it. It's simple really. When the channeling grinds to a halt, pave all the channeled areas with floors. I never tested wood floors. (What kind of idiot wastes wood on anything but bins, buckets, barrels and beds?) -Yanlin

Stone stockpiles. NO! NOT A CHANCE! But if you set up a special workshop for churning out expensive items, set up a stockpile that accepts only that one kind of expensive rock. Setting up a small stone stockpile under your masonry workshop is a good idea though. -Yanlin

Haulers. Have at least 5-10 free peasants for hauling. Usually my fortress can run on just my 7 starting dwarves. I can easily supply 60 dwarves worth of food and booze while the rest do the odd job here and there. -Yanlin

Micromanagement. Only your core dwarves need it. The rest can just do anything they want. -Yanlin

Fishing. Not worth it. Only the shells are worth it. -Yanlin

Hunting. Worth it. But at least give your hunter some armor. -Yanlin

Farm size. 10x10 of plump helmets without fertilizing will feed 500 dwarves. A 5x5 field WITH fertilizing will feed about 500 dwarves. Do the math. (Rough estimates. Untested.) -Yanlin

Cloth. Pig tails will provide you all the cloth you need and booze too. -Yanlin

Buying your first anvil. Mugging. No not robbing the merchant. Making tons and tons of stone mugs! You'd be amazed how much you can buy with a few bins worth of mugs. Each stone gives 3 mugs and a skilled mason can make enough to... Well... Buy anything you need. Remember, craftsdwarves are GOOD! -Yanlin

Nobles. Give them a huge bedroom, huge office and cram it up with some decorations and engravings. That should keep em happy for a while. -Yanlin

==Pets and food animals==

Cats. DO NOT DO IT! IT IS NOT WORTH IT! -Yanlin

Dogs. DO IT! IT IS WORTH IT! -Yanlin

Shamelessly kill off any newborn pets to prevent overpopulation. Especially useful on cats. -HisMajestyBOB

Dogs give a lot of bang for your buck.
They are a good source of meat. You just pay 16 bucks for them upon embark, if I remember correctly. This might be a little bit more than the price of 5 meat (which is 10 bucks) but you have to take into account that they get offspring, son that 20 dogs of the first year might turn into 30 dogs or more in the second year.
when you slaughter them each dog gives you 5 meat, 5 bones, a hide and a skull. This as well as the fact that dogs, in contrast to meat don't rot, makes it useful to buy at least some of them upon start. -Proteus

Dogs are better than cats. Dogs breed just as fast and you can have an army of wardogs slaughtering everything, not to mention they make an incredible thief defense. Simply put a meeting zone across the entrance to your fort, then you'll have all eleventy billion dogs wandering around in that meeting zone. Any thief is instantly turned into kobold kibble, and they're quite handly at dealing with smaller sieges too.
Also you can slaughter dogs at whim, whereas you can't slaughter an owned pet. -Hyndis

==Defense==

An army of peasants is a good thing if you think about it. Churn out a few crossbows and bolts. Even copper weapons can take down most sieges you will probably get. -Yanlin

Goblin pedophiles and Kobold noobs. One dog on a chain will kill them on contact. Especially a war dog. I usually buy a few chains at the embarkment. -Yanlin

Security. Stonefall traps at the entrance help. After you need more than that, you probably have more than that. Make weapon traps that shoot or better yet, station marksdwarves in fortifications outside your fort. Make sure to put them in a tower. -Yanlin

You might want to bring along a rope and then wall in your fortress entrance so there is only one path. Then set a dog on the rope (Not a cat, those are more useful against vermin) beside the door to stop the sneaky sorts. -Gamerofthegame

Weapon traps and marksdwarves = survival for for most -wendigo

==Production and efficiency==

Glass. You want sand on your map. It is awesome advice to have sand on your map. Remember. Glass is EASY to make especially if you can get a source of fuel for your forge. You can make almost everything out of glass. If you can get a magma glass forge, you win. -Yanlin

Iron. You want it. If you didn't find iron, I suggest just starting over in another location or if you feel determined, buy it. But it can get costly. -Yanlin

Common barrel exploit. Each piece of meat and booze you bring with you, will give you one free barrel. 5 of each can fit in a barrel and if you take 6 of something, you get 2 barrels. Etc. -Flok Speargrabber

Turtles are AWESOME! -Flok Speargrabber

Bringing a few seeds of everything along with you is wise. (I suggest bringing plenty of plump helmet and pig tail seeds.) -Flok Speargrabber

Immigrants are good for fishing that pesky carp. (Well not really. But they are good for fishing nonetheless.) -blakyoshi7

Farming. The best source of food. If you don't want to "Cheat" you can just plant a big plump helmet farm. Make sure you don't cook it all though. Make sure at least some goes into booze. Booze and eating raw returns seeds. Cooking destroys them. Alternatively you can cook the booze. That creates a cheatish infinate supply of food. -Yanlin

Wood. You don't really NEED a heavily fortested map. Assuming you will make about 100 beds during 3 years and some barrels, buckets and bins, you only need about 500 trees. Might sound like not enough on a non heavily forested map right? Well wrong. Trees DO grow back. Even a lightly forested map has at least 200 trees from what I could tell. -Yanlin

Pig tails are good to bring, as a source of booze that your dwarfs won't accidentally eat up before it's turned into it's sweet elixir of happiness. -Overdose

Pigtail makes great booze. It helps keep your dwarves happy and avoid the "Tired of same booze" unhappy thought. -motorbitch

You need cloth only for strange moods. You can easily buy all the cloth you need and have your farmers do more useful work. -motorbitch

Two humped camels are good for farming as they yield a lot. Consider this option to diversify your meals. Also helps if you want to avoid the booze food exploit.- motorbitch

Lopped off body parts create small bones that are rather useless. (Training bolts are never really useless as you should have too many bins anyway.) -motorbitch

You should only put a priority on Magma if you have the ability to make glass with it. If so, it should be one of your first things. -Gamerofthegame

Have your carpenter(s) craft a steady flow of beds/barrels/bins -wendigo

Run a still nonstop. Get those seeds, distill that booze. -wendigo

Metalworking is desirable, but not crucial. -wendigo

I set every dwarf in the fortress to butcher and tan. Its a very high priority job since the corpses and skins will rapidly decay, and by setting every single dwarf to be able to perform this task (skill doesn't matter, a dabbling dwarf does just as well as a legendary dwarf) there's a very high probability it will get done in time. If you have a lot of corpses to process, simply build a bunch of butcher and tanner workshops. -Hyndis

===Wood is useful for:===
Beds - Bins - Barrels - Spikes - Pump parts - Windmills and water wheels

-Flok Speargrabber

===Stone is good for:===

Statues - Coffers - Cabinets - Coffins - Trade goods - Doors - Floodgates - Chairs - Tables - Statues (Cheaper though) - Blocks for roads and floors (More brick-y than block-y)

-Flok Speargrabber

===Metal is good for:===
Weapons - Armor - Magma-safe pumps - Expensive statues - Noble orders, usually, unless they don't want a special metal item

-Flok Speargrabber

==Performance==

Cats are not as bad as they used to be. Now slaughtering the newborns is easy enough and with the new partial print feature, they are not the huge FPS problem they used to be. They are also, like dogs: a good source of meat and such. -Vaftrudner

Don't bother with clothes. They don't really do anything and lag your FPS because they get checked every moment. Your dwarves wont mind walking around nude and no one is going to judge them about it. (Politically it does not matter.) -motorbitch

Bring a cage. Just one. You can use it to stuff your excess creatures. Mainly anything outside two cats and maybe two dogs. -Gamerofthegame

==Special conditions==

You could bring five picks and 300 logs if you're on a treeless map. Just don't make stuff from wood if you can make them from something else. (Stockpile = bad) -Ashery

=Adding your own advice=

If you wish to add your own advice, do so in a grammatically correct manner. Links are not mandatory but desired. Remember to sign it with one space, a dash and then your name.

-NameHere

If you think the advice is poor, do not add it. The last thing Yanlin needs is more pruning of bad advice.

=WIP=

This page still needs links to other articles. If you see a word or sentence that should be linked to a particular page, please add it. Make sure to tick the "This is a minor edit" button if you are not doing a big overhaul of the links.

40d:How to safely start fortress mode

2008-09-10T19:02:24Z

Yanlin:

This guide was compiled by Yanlin (And the users) for the users. Basically it contains Yanlin's personal advice with the advice of others taking a higher rank.

The page has not yet been completely made wiki friendly and it is a WIP.

=The guide=

All advice in the replies will be summed up here in user friendly bits.

Firstly, my advice:

==Yanlin's tips:==

Don't try to take one of everything at the start. All jobs that will be run almost constantly can just be done by an immigrant. For example, start with one mason working like a madman churning out doors and such. Then when you get your first wave, start at least 4 mason workshops and make them churn out standard rooms. If you can make an apartment complex instead of a huge barracks room, you get yourself a good happy bonus.

Legendary dining rooms. Any room that's about 5x5, fully engraved and has maybe 4 tables and chairs will be legendary from my experience. I usually take a proficient engraver with me on the start to speed it up and it also helps if he is the only one doing the engravings. Legendary dining rooms can make dwarves forget even the most horrible things! Even death.

Cats. DO NOT DO IT! IT IS NOT WORTH IT!

Dogs. DO IT! IT IS WORTH IT!

An army of peasants is a good thing if you think about it. Churn out a few crossbows and bolts. Even copper weapons can take down most sieges you will probably get.

Glass. You want sand on your map. It is awesome advice to have sand on your map. Remember. Glass is EASY to make especially if you can get a source of fuel for your forge. You can make almost everything out of glass. If you can get a magma glass forge, you win.

A fort divided does not stand. Make sure your dwarves don't run around like idiots.

Cave adaptation. I set up a simple system. There is only one exit out of my apartment complex. My apartment complex spans multiple floors and each one has the entire entrance in light state. How? Well light passes through floors! Go figure. This is how I do it. I channel out the entire entrance from the top to the level I am currently building in. I wall it in on the top to prevent goblins and other nasty stuff from jumping or firing in. I create a small "maintenance" tunnel going near the channeling area so that the channelers have access to it. It's simple really. When the channeling grinds to a halt, pave all the channeled areas with floors. I never tested wood floors. (What kind of idiot wastes wood on anything but bins, buckets, barrels and beds?)

Wood. You don't really NEED a heavily fortested map. Assuming you will make about 100 beds during 3 years and some barrels, buckets and bins, you only need about 500 trees. Might sound like not enough on a non heavily forested map right? Well wrong. Trees DO grow back. Even a lightly forested map has at least 200 trees from what I could tell.

Stone stockpiles. NO! NOT A CHANCE! But if you set up a special workshop for churning out expensive items, set up a stockpile that accepts only that one kind of expensive rock. Setting up a small stone stockpile under your masonry workshop is a good idea though.

Haulers. Have at least 5-10 free peasants for hauling. Usually my fortress can run on just my 7 starting dwarves. I can easily supply 60 dwarves worth of food and booze while the rest do the odd job here and there.

Micromanagement. Only your core dwarves need it. The rest can just do anything they want.

Farming. The best source of food. If you don't want to "Cheat" you can just plant a big plump helmet farm. Make sure you don't cook it all though. Make sure at least some goes into booze. Booze and eating raw returns seeds. Cooking destroys them. Alternatively you can cook the booze. That creates a cheatish infinate supply of food.

Fishing. Not worth it.

Hunting. Worth it. But at least give your hunter some armor.

Farm size. 10x10 of plump helmets without fertilizing will feed 500 dwarves. A 5x5 field WITH fertilizing will feed about 500 dwarves. Do the math. (Rough estimates. Untested.)

Cloth. Pig tails can give you all the cloth you need.

Buying your first anvil. Mugging. No not robbing the merchant. Making tons and tons of stone mugs! You'd be amazed how much you can buy with a few bins worth of mugs. Each stone gives 3 mugs and a skilled mason can make enough to... Well... Buy anything you need. Remember, craftsdwarves are GOOD!

Goblin pedophiles and Kobold noobs. One dog on a chain will kill them on contact. Especially a war dog. I usually buy a few chains at the embarkment.

Iron. You want it. If you didn't find iron, I suggest just starting over in another location or if you feel determined, buy it. But it can get costly.

Nobles. Give them a huge bedroom, huge office and cram it up with some decorations and engravings. That should keep em happy for a while.

Security. Stonefall traps at the entrance help. After you need more than that, you probably have more than that. Make weapon traps that shoot or better yet, station marksdwarves in fortifications outside your fort. Make sure to put them in a tower.

==Advice from others:==

===Flok Speargrabber says:===

Dogs are not worth it FPS wise. (I say, put them in cages.)

He also mentions the common barrel exploit. Each piece of meat and booze you bring with you, will give you one free barrel. 5 of each can fit in a barrel and if you take 6 of something, you get 2 barrels. Etc.

Turtles are AWESOME!

Bringing a few seeds of everything along with you is wise. (I suggest bringing plenty of plump helmet and pig tail seeds.)

Wood is useful for:
- Beds
- Bins
- Barrels
- Spikes
- Pump parts
- Windmills and water wheels

Stone is good for:
- Statues
- Coffers
- Cabinets
- Coffins
- Trade goods
- Doors
- Floodgates
- Chairs
- Tables
- Statues (Cheaper though)
- Blocks for roads and floors (More brick-y than block-y)

Metal is good for:
- Weapons
- Armor
- Coins (HORRIBLE MISTAKE! THIS ADVICE WILL MAKE YOU SUICIDE!)
- Magma-safe pumps
- Expensive statues
- Noble orders, usually, unless they don't want a special metal item

===HisMajestyBOB says:===

Shamelessly kill off any newborn pets to prevent overpopulation. Especially useful on cats.

===blakyoshi7 says:===

Immigrants are good for fishing that pesky carp. (Well not really. But they are good for fishing nonetheless.)

===Proteus says:===

Dogs give a lot of bang for your buck.

They are a good source of meat.
You just pay 16 bucks for them upon embark, if I remember correctly.
This might be a little bit more than the price of 5 meat (which is 10 bucks)
but you have to take into account that they get offspring, son that 20 dogs of the first year might turn into 30 dogs or more in the second year.

when you slaughter them each dog gives you 5 meat, 5 bones, a hide and a skull. This as well as the fact that dogs, in contrast to meat don't rot, makes it useful to buy at least some of them upon start.

===Vaftrudner says:===

Cats are not as bad as they used to be. Now slaughtering the newborns is easy enough and with the new partial print feature, they are not the huge FPS problem they used to be. They are also, like dogs: a good source of meat and such.

He also suggests to abandon farming pig tail and just buy cloth. According to him that's a worthwhile method for saving work in your fortress. From what I understand he just claims it's not worth farming it. Maybe it's worth buying the grown pigtail and processing it yourself.

===Jude says:===

Don't bring dimple cup or pig tail seeds. They don't yield food and if you want a cloth or dye industry, you can import the seeds later. (Incorrect. As far as I know, seeds give you bags. Free bags = good)

===Overdose says:===

1 fisherdwarf is a good compliment to any map with a decent amount of water (with exception to rivers which get dwarfs killed). Particularly if you have an aquifer on said map, you can make an indoor fishery that produces upwards of 100 turtles or more a year with just a small one (you could make many of them or large ones if need be), and as we all know, turtles = food+free bones/shells.

Having an unlimited supply of bone bolts, shells for those moods, plus a food supplement isn't that bad at all.

Bringing more then 4 of each type of seed is usually a waste, since through brewing/processing or raw consumption, you'll easily start having overwhelming numbers of seeds.

Hunting isn't worth it unless you have dangerous animals lurking about, in which case the hunter is only providing security for your woodcutters and such. I'd treat them more like a patrolling watchman then for a food source.

Also, contrary to Jude saying, pig tails are good to bring, as a source of booze that your dwarfs won't accidentally eat up before it's turned into it's sweet elixir of happiness.

===motorbitch says:===

Pigtail makes great booze. It helps keep your dwarves happy and avoid the "Tired of same booze" unhappy thought.

Stonefall traps cause a lot of rearm jobs of they are triggered. If you wish to avoid that use weapon traps. Spiked balls are recommended. They have 3 hits and some crit chance. One of those can almost bring down a demon.

You need cloth only for strange moods. You can easily buy all the cloth you need and have your farmers do more useful work.

Don't bother with clothes. They don't really do anything and lag your FPS because they get checked every moment. Your dwarves wont mind walking around nude and no one is going to judge them about it. (Politically it does not matter.)

Coal. Bring it.

Two humped camels are good for farming as they yield a lot. Consider this option to diversify your meals. Also helps if you want to avoid the booze food exploit.

Lopped off body parts create small bones that are rather useless. (Training bolts are never really useless as you should have too many bins anyway.)

===kurisukun says:===

Forbid at least 2 of every kind of item.

Raw gems, Bones, metal bars, Shells, Cloth (Silk and Plant), shells, bones, etc.

You will be thankful that you didn't accidentally make all your cloth into bags when your weaponsmith starts asking for cloth as a fey mood item.

It may be worth forbidding 3, depending on the item type.

This thread has reached it's goal of becoming great. Now lets try to make this thread even better. One that Today one would be proud of.

===Gamerofthegame says:===

You should only put a priority on Magma if you have the ability to make glass with it. If so, it should be one of your first things.

Bring a cage. Just one. You can use it to stuff your excess creatures. Mainly anything outside two cats and maybe two dogs.

You might want to bring along a rope, too, and then wall in your fortress entrance so there is only one path. Then set a dog on the rope (Not a cat, those are more useful against vermin) beside the door to stop the sneaky sorts.

===Hyndis says:===

Dogs are better than cats. Dogs breed just as fast and you can have an army of wardogs slaughtering everything, not to mention they make an incredible thief defense. Simply put a meeting zone across the entrance to your fort, then you'll have all eleventy billion dogs wandering around in that meeting zone. Any thief is instantly turned into kobold kibble, and they're quite handly at dealing with smaller sieges too.

Also you can slaughter dogs at whim, whereas you can't slaughter an owned pet.

===Lord Dullard says:===

If I embark somewhere with little/no trees I usually bring along the anvil right away so that I can start making metal barrels when I hit a few veins of copper, lead, or another cheap metal. The best way to do this is to bring along the anvil, three bituminous coal, three non-economic stones of any kind, and 2-5 copper bars depending on how many dwarves you want mining. This way you can construct your smelter, wood furnace, and metalsmith's forge, burn the wood from your wagon, convert the coal to fuel, and make copper picks right away.

===Ashery says:===

You could bring five picks and 300 logs if you're on a treeless map. Just don't make stuff from wood if you can make them from something else. (Stockpile = bad)

===wendigo says:===

1: Learn to construct walls and other stone buildings.
2: Build a keep around your trade depot/entrance. Fortify with traps and war dogs. Have battlements with arrow slits and train your early armed forces to stand behind said slits raining crossbow death on ambushers and siegers.
3: Have your carpenter(s) craft a steady flow of beds/barrels/bins
4: Have a healthy farm operation going on, as near the surface as possible.
5. Run a still nonstop. Get those seeds, distill that booze.

Remember: Weapon traps and marksdwarves = survival for for most

Metalworking is desirable, but not crucial.

===Hyndis says again:===

I set every dwarf in the fortress to butcher and tan. Its a very high priority job since the corpses and skins will rapidly decay, and by setting every single dwarf to be able to perform this task (skill doesn't matter, a dabbling dwarf does just as well as a legendary dwarf) there's a very high probability it will get done in time. If you have a lot of corpses to process, simply build a bunch of butcher and tanner workshops.

=Adding your own advice=

The format is:

===YourNameHere says:===

That is to make sure your advice can easily be accessed from the top menu. This guide will eventually be categorized by advice category and not name. But that's for another time. (When Yanlin has enough spare time and will to help other people.)

Make sure you have three lines of space between your name and the last advice given.

Try to keep the grammar correct. Yanlin will try to correct it himself but he usually leaves good enough grammar be.

This guide WILL be categorized by advice category and not names eventually. READ ABOVE!

=WIP=

This page still needs links to other articles. If you see a word or sentence that should be linked to a particular page, please add it. Make sure to tick the "This is a minor edit" button if you are not doing a big overhaul of the links.

40d:How to safely start fortress mode

2008-09-10T18:52:49Z

Yanlin:

This guide was compiled by Yanlin (And the users) for the users. Basically it contains Yanlin's personal advice with the advice of others taking a higher rank.

The page has not yet been completely made wiki friendly and it is a WIP.

=The guide=

So. I decided to compile another thread like this. This time I will do it right. Instead of asking it for myself I will ask it for every newbie out there that's afraid of us biting him. (Wikipedia reference. Bah. Sue me.) All advice in the replies will be summed up here in user friendly bits.

Firstly, my advice:

==Yanlin's tips:==

Don't try to take one of everything at the start. All jobs that will be run almost constantly can just be done by an immigrant. For example, start with one mason working like a madman churning out doors and such. Then when you get your first wave, start at least 4 mason workshops and make them churn out standard rooms. If you can make an apartment complex instead of a huge barracks room, you get yourself a good happy bonus.

Legendary dining rooms. Any room that's about 5x5, fully engraved and has maybe 4 tables and chairs will be legendary from my experience. I usually take a proficient engraver with me on the start to speed it up and it also helps if he is the only one doing the engravings. Legendary dining rooms can make dwarves forget even the most horrible things! Even death.

Cats. DO NOT DO IT! IT IS NOT WORTH IT!

Dogs. DO IT! IT IS WORTH IT!

An army of peasants is a good thing if you think about it. Churn out a few crossbows and bolts. Even copper weapons can take down most sieges you will probably get.

Glass. You want sand on your map. It is awesome advice to have sand on your map. Remember. Glass is EASY to make especially if you can get a source of fuel for your forge. You can make almost everything out of glass. If you can get a magma glass forge, you win.

A fort divided does not stand. Make sure your dwarves don't run around like idiots.

Cave adaptation. I set up a simple system. There is only one exit out of my apartment complex. My apartment complex spans multiple floors and each one has the entire entrance in light state. How? Well light passes through floors! Go figure. This is how I do it. I channel out the entire entrance from the top to the level I am currently building in. I wall it in on the top to prevent goblins and other nasty stuff from jumping or firing in. I create a small "maintenance" tunnel going near the channeling area so that the channelers have access to it. It's simple really. When the channeling grinds to a halt, pave all the channeled areas with floors. I never tested wood floors. (What kind of idiot wastes wood on anything but bins, buckets, barrels and beds?)

Wood. You don't really NEED a heavily fortested map. Assuming you will make about 100 beds during 3 years and some barrels, buckets and bins, you only need about 500 trees. Might sound like not enough on a non heavily forested map right? Well wrong. Trees DO grow back. Even a lightly forested map has at least 200 trees from what I could tell.

Stone stockpiles. NO! NOT A CHANCE! But if you set up a special workshop for churning out expensive items, set up a stockpile that accepts only that one kind of expensive rock. Setting up a small stone stockpile under your masonry workshop is a good idea though.

Haulers. Have at least 5-10 free peasants for hauling. Usually my fortress can run on just my 7 starting dwarves. I can easily supply 60 dwarves worth of food and booze while the rest do the odd job here and there.

Micromanagement. Only your core dwarves need it. The rest can just do anything they want.

Farming. The best source of food. If you don't want to "Cheat" you can just plant a big plump helmet farm. Make sure you don't cook it all though. Make sure at least some goes into booze. Booze and eating raw returns seeds. Cooking destroys them. Alternatively you can cook the booze. That creates a cheatish infinate supply of food.

Fishing. Not worth it.

Hunting. Worth it. But at least give your hunter some armor.

Farm size. 10x10 of plump helmets without fertilizing will feed 500 dwarves. A 5x5 field WITH fertilizing will feed about 500 dwarves. Do the math. (Rough estimates. Untested.)

Cloth. Pig tails can give you all the cloth you need.

Buying your first anvil. Mugging. No not robbing the merchant. Making tons and tons of stone mugs! You'd be amazed how much you can buy with a few bins worth of mugs. Each stone gives 3 mugs and a skilled mason can make enough to... Well... Buy anything you need. Remember, craftsdwarves are GOOD!

Goblin pedophiles and Kobold noobs. One dog on a chain will kill them on contact. Especially a war dog. I usually buy a few chains at the embarkment.

Iron. You want it. If you didn't find iron, I suggest just starting over in another location or if you feel determined, buy it. But it can get costly.

Nobles. Give them a huge bedroom, huge office and cram it up with some decorations and engravings. That should keep em happy for a while.

Security. Stonefall traps at the entrance help. After you need more than that, you probably have more than that. Make weapon traps that shoot or better yet, station marksdwarves in fortifications outside your fort. Make sure to put them in a tower.

==Advice from others:==

Flok Speargrabber says:

Dogs are not worth it FPS wise. (I say, put them in cages.)

He also mentions the common barrel exploit. Each piece of meat and booze you bring with you, will give you one free barrel. 5 of each can fit in a barrel and if you take 6 of something, you get 2 barrels. Etc.

Turtles are AWESOME!

Bringing a few seeds of everything along with you is wise. (I suggest bringing plenty of plump helmet and pig tail seeds.)

Wood is useful for:
- Beds
- Bins
- Barrels
- Spikes
- Pump parts
- Windmills and water wheels

Stone is good for:
- Statues
- Coffers
- Cabinets
- Coffins
- Trade goods
- Doors
- Floodgates
- Chairs
- Tables
- Statues (Cheaper though)
- Blocks for roads and floors (More brick-y than block-y)

Metal is good for:
- Weapons
- Armor
- Coins (HORRIBLE MISTAKE! THIS ADVICE WILL MAKE YOU SUICIDE!)
- Magma-safe pumps
- Expensive statues
- Noble orders, usually, unless they don't want a special metal item

HisMajestyBOB says:

Shamelessly kill off any newborn pets to prevent overpopulation. Especially useful on cats.

blakyoshi7 says:

Immigrants are good for fishing that pesky carp. (Well not really. But they are good for fishing nonetheless.)

Proteus says:

Dogs give a lot of bang for your buck.

They are a good source of meat.
You just pay 16 bucks for them upon embark, if I remember correctly.
This might be a little bit more than the price of 5 meat (which is 10 bucks)
but you have to take into account that they get offspring, son that 20 dogs of the first year might turn into 30 dogs or more in the second year.

when you slaughter them each dog gives you 5 meat, 5 bones, a hide and a skull. This as well as the fact that dogs, in contrast to meat don't rot, makes it useful to buy at least some of them upon start.

Vaftrudner says:

Cats are not as bad as they used to be. Now slaughtering the newborns is easy enough and with the new partial print feature, they are not the huge FPS problem they used to be. They are also, like dogs: a good source of meat and such.

He also suggests to abandon farming pig tail and just buy cloth. According to him that's a worthwhile method for saving work in your fortress. From what I understand he just claims it's not worth farming it. Maybe it's worth buying the grown pigtail and processing it yourself.

Jude says:

Don't bring dimple cup or pig tail seeds. They don't yield food and if you want a cloth or dye industry, you can import the seeds later. (Incorrect. As far as I know, seeds give you bags. Free bags = good)

Overdose says:

1 fisherdwarf is a good compliment to any map with a decent amount of water (with exception to rivers which get dwarfs killed). Particularly if you have an aquifer on said map, you can make an indoor fishery that produces upwards of 100 turtles or more a year with just a small one (you could make many of them or large ones if need be), and as we all know, turtles = food+free bones/shells.

Having an unlimited supply of bone bolts, shells for those moods, plus a food supplement isn't that bad at all.

Bringing more then 4 of each type of seed is usually a waste, since through brewing/processing or raw consumption, you'll easily start having overwhelming numbers of seeds.

Hunting isn't worth it unless you have dangerous animals lurking about, in which case the hunter is only providing security for your woodcutters and such. I'd treat them more like a patrolling watchman then for a food source.

Also, contrary to Jude saying, pig tails are good to bring, as a source of booze that your dwarfs won't accidentally eat up before it's turned into it's sweet elixir of happiness.

motorbitch says:

Pigtail makes great booze. It helps keep your dwarves happy and avoid the "Tired of same booze" unhappy thought.

Stonefall traps cause a lot of rearm jobs of they are triggered. If you wish to avoid that use weapon traps. Spiked balls are recommended. They have 3 hits and some crit chance. One of those can almost bring down a demon.

You need cloth only for strange moods. You can easily buy all the cloth you need and have your farmers do more useful work.

Don't bother with clothes. They don't really do anything and lag your FPS because they get checked every moment. Your dwarves wont mind walking around nude and no one is going to judge them about it. (Politically it does not matter.)

Coal. Bring it.

Two humped camels are good for farming as they yield a lot. Consider this option to diversify your meals. Also helps if you want to avoid the booze food exploit.

Lopped off body parts create small bones that are rather useless. (Training bolts are never really useless as you should have too many bins anyway.)

kurisukun says:

Forbid at least 2 of every kind of item.

Raw gems, Bones, metal bars, Shells, Cloth (Silk and Plant), shells, bones, etc.

You will be thankful that you didn't accidentally make all your cloth into bags when your weaponsmith starts asking for cloth as a fey mood item.

It may be worth forbidding 3, depending on the item type.

This thread has reached it's goal of becoming great. Now lets try to make this thread even better. One that Today one would be proud of.

Gamerofthegame says:

You should only put a priority on Magma if you have the ability to make glass with it. If so, it should be one of your first things.

Bring a cage. Just one. You can use it to stuff your excess creatures. Mainly anything outside two cats and maybe two dogs.

You might want to bring along a rope, too, and then wall in your fortress entrance so there is only one path. Then set a dog on the rope (Not a cat, those are more useful against vermin) beside the door to stop the sneaky sorts.

Hyndis says:

Dogs are better than cats. Dogs breed just as fast and you can have an army of wardogs slaughtering everything, not to mention they make an incredible thief defense. Simply put a meeting zone across the entrance to your fort, then you'll have all eleventy billion dogs wandering around in that meeting zone. Any thief is instantly turned into kobold kibble, and they're quite handly at dealing with smaller sieges too.

Also you can slaughter dogs at whim, whereas you can't slaughter an owned pet.

Lord Dullard says:

If I embark somewhere with little/no trees I usually bring along the anvil right away so that I can start making metal barrels when I hit a few veins of copper, lead, or another cheap metal. The best way to do this is to bring along the anvil, three bituminous coal, three non-economic stones of any kind, and 2-5 copper bars depending on how many dwarves you want mining. This way you can construct your smelter, wood furnace, and metalsmith's forge, burn the wood from your wagon, convert the coal to fuel, and make copper picks right away.

Ashery says:

You could bring five picks and 300 logs if you're on a treeless map. Just don't make stuff from wood if you can make them from something else. (Stockpile = bad)

wendigo says:

1: Learn to construct walls and other stone buildings.
2: Build a keep around your trade depot/entrance. Fortify with traps and war dogs. Have battlements with arrow slits and train your early armed forces to stand behind said slits raining crossbow death on ambushers and siegers.
3: Have your carpenter(s) craft a steady flow of beds/barrels/bins
4: Have a healthy farm operation going on, as near the surface as possible.
5. Run a still nonstop. Get those seeds, distill that booze.

Remember: Weapon traps and marksdwarves = survival for for most

Metalworking is desirable, but not crucial.

Hyndis says again:

I set every dwarf in the fortress to butcher and tan. Its a very high priority job since the corpses and skins will rapidly decay, and by setting every single dwarf to be able to perform this task (skill doesn't matter, a dabbling dwarf does just as well as a legendary dwarf) there's a very high probability it will get done in time. If you have a lot of corpses to process, simply build a bunch of butcher and tanner workshops.

=Adding your own advice=

Please do so in the correct format. Make sure there are 3 lines of space between your name and the last advice. Make sure it is YourNameHere says: or if you are adding advice, you could put it under your old name but many people who regularly visit don't notice that. It is not frowned upon to do it this way: YourNameHere says again:

Yanlin will be monitoring this page and saving the tidbits of information he finds helpful. After editing his personal backup, he will then put his backup over the current version to prevent vandalism Yanlin could not detect. That means if your advice is unhelpful, it will get deleted. Don't take it personally.

Try to make your name correspond to your forum name so I could easily PM you if need be.

=WIP=

This page still needs links to other articles. If you see a word or sentence that should be linked to a particular page, please add it. Make sure to tick the "This is a minor edit" button if you are not doing a big overhaul of the links.

40d:How to safely start fortress mode

2008-09-10T18:52:00Z

Yanlin: This page is a work in progress and will remain that way for a long time to come.

=How to correctly start fortress mode=

This guide was compiled by Yanlin (And the users) for the users. Basically it contains Yanlin's personal advice with the advice of others taking a higher rank.

===The page has not yet been completely made wiki friendly and it is a WIP.===

=The guide=

So. I decided to compile another thread like this. This time I will do it right. Instead of asking it for myself I will ask it for every newbie out there that's afraid of us biting him. (Wikipedia reference. Bah. Sue me.) All advice in the replies will be summed up here in user friendly bits.

Firstly, my advice:

==Yanlin's tips:==

Don't try to take one of everything at the start. All jobs that will be run almost constantly can just be done by an immigrant. For example, start with one mason working like a madman churning out doors and such. Then when you get your first wave, start at least 4 mason workshops and make them churn out standard rooms. If you can make an apartment complex instead of a huge barracks room, you get yourself a good happy bonus.

Legendary dining rooms. Any room that's about 5x5, fully engraved and has maybe 4 tables and chairs will be legendary from my experience. I usually take a proficient engraver with me on the start to speed it up and it also helps if he is the only one doing the engravings. Legendary dining rooms can make dwarves forget even the most horrible things! Even death.

Cats. DO NOT DO IT! IT IS NOT WORTH IT!

Dogs. DO IT! IT IS WORTH IT!

An army of peasants is a good thing if you think about it. Churn out a few crossbows and bolts. Even copper weapons can take down most sieges you will probably get.

Glass. You want sand on your map. It is awesome advice to have sand on your map. Remember. Glass is EASY to make especially if you can get a source of fuel for your forge. You can make almost everything out of glass. If you can get a magma glass forge, you win.

A fort divided does not stand. Make sure your dwarves don't run around like idiots.

Cave adaptation. I set up a simple system. There is only one exit out of my apartment complex. My apartment complex spans multiple floors and each one has the entire entrance in light state. How? Well light passes through floors! Go figure. This is how I do it. I channel out the entire entrance from the top to the level I am currently building in. I wall it in on the top to prevent goblins and other nasty stuff from jumping or firing in. I create a small "maintenance" tunnel going near the channeling area so that the channelers have access to it. It's simple really. When the channeling grinds to a halt, pave all the channeled areas with floors. I never tested wood floors. (What kind of idiot wastes wood on anything but bins, buckets, barrels and beds?)

Wood. You don't really NEED a heavily fortested map. Assuming you will make about 100 beds during 3 years and some barrels, buckets and bins, you only need about 500 trees. Might sound like not enough on a non heavily forested map right? Well wrong. Trees DO grow back. Even a lightly forested map has at least 200 trees from what I could tell.

Stone stockpiles. NO! NOT A CHANCE! But if you set up a special workshop for churning out expensive items, set up a stockpile that accepts only that one kind of expensive rock. Setting up a small stone stockpile under your masonry workshop is a good idea though.

Haulers. Have at least 5-10 free peasants for hauling. Usually my fortress can run on just my 7 starting dwarves. I can easily supply 60 dwarves worth of food and booze while the rest do the odd job here and there.

Micromanagement. Only your core dwarves need it. The rest can just do anything they want.

Farming. The best source of food. If you don't want to "Cheat" you can just plant a big plump helmet farm. Make sure you don't cook it all though. Make sure at least some goes into booze. Booze and eating raw returns seeds. Cooking destroys them. Alternatively you can cook the booze. That creates a cheatish infinate supply of food.

Fishing. Not worth it.

Hunting. Worth it. But at least give your hunter some armor.

Farm size. 10x10 of plump helmets without fertilizing will feed 500 dwarves. A 5x5 field WITH fertilizing will feed about 500 dwarves. Do the math. (Rough estimates. Untested.)

Cloth. Pig tails can give you all the cloth you need.

Buying your first anvil. Mugging. No not robbing the merchant. Making tons and tons of stone mugs! You'd be amazed how much you can buy with a few bins worth of mugs. Each stone gives 3 mugs and a skilled mason can make enough to... Well... Buy anything you need. Remember, craftsdwarves are GOOD!

Goblin pedophiles and Kobold noobs. One dog on a chain will kill them on contact. Especially a war dog. I usually buy a few chains at the embarkment.

Iron. You want it. If you didn't find iron, I suggest just starting over in another location or if you feel determined, buy it. But it can get costly.

Nobles. Give them a huge bedroom, huge office and cram it up with some decorations and engravings. That should keep em happy for a while.

Security. Stonefall traps at the entrance help. After you need more than that, you probably have more than that. Make weapon traps that shoot or better yet, station marksdwarves in fortifications outside your fort. Make sure to put them in a tower.

==Advice from others:==

Flok Speargrabber says:

Dogs are not worth it FPS wise. (I say, put them in cages.)

He also mentions the common barrel exploit. Each piece of meat and booze you bring with you, will give you one free barrel. 5 of each can fit in a barrel and if you take 6 of something, you get 2 barrels. Etc.

Turtles are AWESOME!

Bringing a few seeds of everything along with you is wise. (I suggest bringing plenty of plump helmet and pig tail seeds.)

Wood is useful for:
- Beds
- Bins
- Barrels
- Spikes
- Pump parts
- Windmills and water wheels

Stone is good for:
- Statues
- Coffers
- Cabinets
- Coffins
- Trade goods
- Doors
- Floodgates
- Chairs
- Tables
- Statues (Cheaper though)
- Blocks for roads and floors (More brick-y than block-y)

Metal is good for:
- Weapons
- Armor
- Coins (HORRIBLE MISTAKE! THIS ADVICE WILL MAKE YOU SUICIDE!)
- Magma-safe pumps
- Expensive statues
- Noble orders, usually, unless they don't want a special metal item

HisMajestyBOB says:

Shamelessly kill off any newborn pets to prevent overpopulation. Especially useful on cats.

blakyoshi7 says:

Immigrants are good for fishing that pesky carp. (Well not really. But they are good for fishing nonetheless.)

Proteus says:

Dogs give a lot of bang for your buck.

They are a good source of meat.
You just pay 16 bucks for them upon embark, if I remember correctly.
This might be a little bit more than the price of 5 meat (which is 10 bucks)
but you have to take into account that they get offspring, son that 20 dogs of the first year might turn into 30 dogs or more in the second year.

when you slaughter them each dog gives you 5 meat, 5 bones, a hide and a skull. This as well as the fact that dogs, in contrast to meat don't rot, makes it useful to buy at least some of them upon start.

Vaftrudner says:

Cats are not as bad as they used to be. Now slaughtering the newborns is easy enough and with the new partial print feature, they are not the huge FPS problem they used to be. They are also, like dogs: a good source of meat and such.

He also suggests to abandon farming pig tail and just buy cloth. According to him that's a worthwhile method for saving work in your fortress. From what I understand he just claims it's not worth farming it. Maybe it's worth buying the grown pigtail and processing it yourself.

Jude says:

Don't bring dimple cup or pig tail seeds. They don't yield food and if you want a cloth or dye industry, you can import the seeds later. (Incorrect. As far as I know, seeds give you bags. Free bags = good)

Overdose says:

1 fisherdwarf is a good compliment to any map with a decent amount of water (with exception to rivers which get dwarfs killed). Particularly if you have an aquifer on said map, you can make an indoor fishery that produces upwards of 100 turtles or more a year with just a small one (you could make many of them or large ones if need be), and as we all know, turtles = food+free bones/shells.

Having an unlimited supply of bone bolts, shells for those moods, plus a food supplement isn't that bad at all.

Bringing more then 4 of each type of seed is usually a waste, since through brewing/processing or raw consumption, you'll easily start having overwhelming numbers of seeds.

Hunting isn't worth it unless you have dangerous animals lurking about, in which case the hunter is only providing security for your woodcutters and such. I'd treat them more like a patrolling watchman then for a food source.

Also, contrary to Jude saying, pig tails are good to bring, as a source of booze that your dwarfs won't accidentally eat up before it's turned into it's sweet elixir of happiness.

motorbitch says:

Pigtail makes great booze. It helps keep your dwarves happy and avoid the "Tired of same booze" unhappy thought.

Stonefall traps cause a lot of rearm jobs of they are triggered. If you wish to avoid that use weapon traps. Spiked balls are recommended. They have 3 hits and some crit chance. One of those can almost bring down a demon.

You need cloth only for strange moods. You can easily buy all the cloth you need and have your farmers do more useful work.

Don't bother with clothes. They don't really do anything and lag your FPS because they get checked every moment. Your dwarves wont mind walking around nude and no one is going to judge them about it. (Politically it does not matter.)

Coal. Bring it.

Two humped camels are good for farming as they yield a lot. Consider this option to diversify your meals. Also helps if you want to avoid the booze food exploit.

Lopped off body parts create small bones that are rather useless. (Training bolts are never really useless as you should have too many bins anyway.)

kurisukun says:

Forbid at least 2 of every kind of item.

Raw gems, Bones, metal bars, Shells, Cloth (Silk and Plant), shells, bones, etc.

You will be thankful that you didn't accidentally make all your cloth into bags when your weaponsmith starts asking for cloth as a fey mood item.

It may be worth forbidding 3, depending on the item type.

This thread has reached it's goal of becoming great. Now lets try to make this thread even better. One that Today one would be proud of.

Gamerofthegame says:

You should only put a priority on Magma if you have the ability to make glass with it. If so, it should be one of your first things.

Bring a cage. Just one. You can use it to stuff your excess creatures. Mainly anything outside two cats and maybe two dogs.

You might want to bring along a rope, too, and then wall in your fortress entrance so there is only one path. Then set a dog on the rope (Not a cat, those are more useful against vermin) beside the door to stop the sneaky sorts.

Hyndis says:

Dogs are better than cats. Dogs breed just as fast and you can have an army of wardogs slaughtering everything, not to mention they make an incredible thief defense. Simply put a meeting zone across the entrance to your fort, then you'll have all eleventy billion dogs wandering around in that meeting zone. Any thief is instantly turned into kobold kibble, and they're quite handly at dealing with smaller sieges too.

Also you can slaughter dogs at whim, whereas you can't slaughter an owned pet.

Lord Dullard says:

If I embark somewhere with little/no trees I usually bring along the anvil right away so that I can start making metal barrels when I hit a few veins of copper, lead, or another cheap metal. The best way to do this is to bring along the anvil, three bituminous coal, three non-economic stones of any kind, and 2-5 copper bars depending on how many dwarves you want mining. This way you can construct your smelter, wood furnace, and metalsmith's forge, burn the wood from your wagon, convert the coal to fuel, and make copper picks right away.

Ashery says:

You could bring five picks and 300 logs if you're on a treeless map. Just don't make stuff from wood if you can make them from something else. (Stockpile = bad)

wendigo says:

1: Learn to construct walls and other stone buildings.
2: Build a keep around your trade depot/entrance. Fortify with traps and war dogs. Have battlements with arrow slits and train your early armed forces to stand behind said slits raining crossbow death on ambushers and siegers.
3: Have your carpenter(s) craft a steady flow of beds/barrels/bins
4: Have a healthy farm operation going on, as near the surface as possible.
5. Run a still nonstop. Get those seeds, distill that booze.

Remember: Weapon traps and marksdwarves = survival for for most

Metalworking is desirable, but not crucial.

Hyndis says again:

I set every dwarf in the fortress to butcher and tan. Its a very high priority job since the corpses and skins will rapidly decay, and by setting every single dwarf to be able to perform this task (skill doesn't matter, a dabbling dwarf does just as well as a legendary dwarf) there's a very high probability it will get done in time. If you have a lot of corpses to process, simply build a bunch of butcher and tanner workshops.

=Adding your own advice=

Please do so in the correct format. Make sure there are 3 lines of space between your name and the last advice. Make sure it is YourNameHere says: or if you are adding advice, you could put it under your old name but many people who regularly visit don't notice that. It is not frowned upon to do it this way: YourNameHere says again:

Yanlin will be monitoring this page and saving the tidbits of information he finds helpful. After editing his personal backup, he will then put his backup over the current version to prevent vandalism Yanlin could not detect. That means if your advice is unhelpful, it will get deleted. Don't take it personally.

Try to make your name correspond to your forum name so I could easily PM you if need be.

=WIP=

This page still needs links to other articles. If you see a word or sentence that should be linked to a particular page, please add it. Make sure to tick the "This is a minor edit" button if you are not doing a big overhaul of the links.

Template:Starting FAQ

2008-08-17T19:46:25Z

Yanlin:

<center>
{| class="collapsible collapsed infobox" style="background-color: #f9f9f9; border: 1px solid #aaa; font-size: 90%; margin: 1em 0em 0em; padding: 2px; text-align: center; width: 60%;"
! colspan="2" style="border: 1px solid #aaa; font-weight:bold; background-color: #ccf; padding-left: 1em; padding-right: 1em;" | '''Beginner's guide FAQ'''


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| [[Your first fortress|Quick launch]]<br><small>The bare minimum you need to know to get you from installation, to playing</small>
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| [[Your first fortress|I'm confused. How do I even start a fortress!]]
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| [[How do I get my dwarves to do stuff|How do I get my dwarves to do stuff?]]
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| [[Location|Where in the world should I settle?]]
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| [[Where in my area should I build my fort|Where in my area should I build my fort?]]
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| [[What should I build first|What should I build first?]]
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| [[Starting_builds|What skills and items should I equip my dwarves with?]]
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| [[How do I assign tasks to specific dwarves|How do I assign tasks to specific dwarves?]]
|-
| [[Immigration|How do I get more dwarves?]]

|-
|height="10"|
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| {{Edit|Template:Starting_FAQ|Add a question to the Starting FAQ}}
|-
| [[Frequently Asked Questions|Back to the Main FAQ]]
|}

<includeonly>[[Category:FAQ - Starting]]</includeonly>
<noinclude>[[Category:FAQ templates]]</noinclude>

Color tiles

2008-08-17T19:41:34Z

Yanlin: New page: There are custom user made tilesets and characters. You can also make one yourself. If you're looking for the tileset and how to edit it yourself, go to Tilesets If you're looking fo...

There are custom user made tilesets and characters. You can also make one yourself.

If you're looking for the tileset and how to edit it yourself, go to [[Tilesets]]

If you're looking for user made tilesets and icons, go to [[List of user character sets]] and [[List of user graphics sets]] respectively.

Template:Game Basics FAQ

2008-08-17T19:34:45Z

Yanlin:

<center>
{| class="collapsible collapsed infobox" style="background-color: #f9f9f9; border: 1px solid #aaa; font-size: 90%; margin: 1em 0em 0em; padding: 2px; text-align: center; width: 60%;"
! colspan="2" style="border: 1px solid #aaa; font-weight:bold; background-color: #ccf; padding-left: 1em; padding-right: 1em;" | '''Game Basics FAQ'''
|-
| [[Z-axis|What is the Z-Axis?]]
|-
| [[Things to Do|What is the point of the game?]]

|-
| [[Losing|Fun]]

|-
|height="10"|
|-
| {{Edit|Template:Game_Basics_FAQ|Add a question to the Game Basics FAQ}}
|-
| [[Frequently Asked Questions|Back to the Main FAQ]]
|}
</center>

<includeonly>[[Category:FAQ – Game Basics]]</includeonly>
<noinclude>[[Category:FAQ templates]]</noinclude>

40d:What's the easiest way to check dwarves happiness

2008-08-17T19:10:14Z

Yanlin: /* The common method */

The most common way to check a dwarf's mood is to press {{key|u}} and find the dwarf in question. Then press {{key|c}} after highlighting the dwarf. That should zoom you in to the dwarf. Occasionally an animal maybe on the same tile and it selects the animal instead. Just unpause and wait for a moment.

After you zoomed into the dwarf and his panel is displayed, press {{key|z}} to view his possessions page. If that is not available you need to press {key|g}} and then press {{key|z}}

After you're in his possessions page, this should be obvious. Hit the {{key|Enter}} key to view his mood and recent thoughts. Also what he likes and dislikes.

Remember:

"Dwarves are strange creatures who balance out at "happy" because on one hand their wife was eaten by elephants and on the other they just ate in a REALLY NICE dining room."
-shadow_archmagi

{{Moods FAQ}}

40d:What's the easiest way to check dwarves happiness

2008-08-17T18:35:36Z

Yanlin:

== The common method ==

The most common way to check a dwarf's mood is to press v then highlight the dwarf you want to check.

Then g (if needed) and then press z. You should now be at a screen showing his possessions. Press enter to view his mood and thoughts.

Remember:

"Dwarves are strange creatures who balance out at "happy" because on one hand their wife was eaten by elephants and on the other they just ate in a REALLY NICE dining room."
-shadow_archmagi

{{Moods FAQ}}

40d:What's the easiest way to check dwarves happiness

2008-08-17T18:34:43Z

Yanlin: New page: == The common method == The most common way to check a dwarf's mood is to press v then highlight the dwarf you want to check. Then g (if needed) and then press z. You should now be at a ...