User:Calite/Gloss Guide

This guide hopefully helps one get into Dwarf Fortress and get a fort going without imposing any particular way to play. The notes below don't tell you how to carry out actions within the game, instead they give you an overview of DF's crucial elements.

Prior Consideration

Before playing, realize you will need these for success:

• Time and patience
  • You will fail (repeatedly) at first, and a good fortress takes a long time to build
• Planning and long-term thinking
  • You will want to decide the layout of your fortress before digging/building randomly
• Open-Mindedness
  • Whether it's because Dwarf Fortress often does impossible and absurd things, or because there's a better way to accomplish your goals, you need to be willing to learn new rules and new ways of thinking.

This may seem like work, but a game that requires a lot of thinking is very rewarding in the long run.

Warm-Ups

• Play some adventurer mode.
  • It's very different from Dwarf Fortress, but at least gets you used to the default tileset and the complexity of the game.
• Don't be afraid of the wiki
  • Read about anything in the game you don't understand or are confused about.
  • This guide is designed to be modular, that is, you are expected to read the wiki pages it links to as you please.

Fortress Survival

No matter your location and your goals, there are a few things that must be taken care of

• Food
• Drinks
• Safety
• Happiness

Food

Food is necessary to keep dwarves alive.

There are several ways to obtain food, I'll outline each here.

• Fishing
  • Very simple, requires only one dwarf assigned to fish, a fishery, and one dwarf assigned to fish cleaning.
  • The stability of this source of food depends on how much water is on the map, how many dwarves you need to feed, and luck (sometimes it seems like none of your water sources have fish, sometimes it seems like they never end)
  • Fishing requires no oversight or extra resources after you have the fishery, it may not be the best choice for a main food source but it is a great source of extra food, and some things that can be caught (such as turtles) drop shells or bones, which are useful.

• Hunting
  • Perhaps the most complicated source of food, requiring a hunter with a quiver, arrows, and a bow, and a butcher's workshop and a kitchen.
  • This food source's stability depends on the amount of animals on the map and the skill of your hunter(a bad hunter will just waste arrows for a few seasons before killing something)
  • A great plus of hunting is that almost everything your hunter brings back will drop bones and other things besides meat.
    • Since bones can be made into arrows, hunting can become self-sufficient.

• Farming
  • Somewhere between fishing and hunting in complexity, it requires a farm plot, seeds and a dwarf assigned to farming.
  • Stability is variable depending on what plant(s) you are growing.
    • Some plants grow outside, while others grow inside
      • Indoor farms require mud on stone floors. Soil, clay and sandy floors are immediately viable for farming.
    • Indoor plants have different growing seasons and growing rates whilst all outdoor crops can be grown all year around.
    • Some plants produce food immediately, some must be cooked or processed, and others don't produce any food. See crops
  • Farming has several additional benefits.
    • Seeds come from the usage of the product of the plant. This means that eating, processing or brewing a plant product will provide the seeds needed to grow more. (WARNING: Cooking does not leave seeds!)
    • Many plants can be brewed into alcohol. More on the importance of this in the drinks section.

• Plant Gathering
  • A very simple way to get food, it requires a dwarf with Plant Gathering assigned and an area designated for plant gathering.
  • Plants grow slowly naturally, and an unskilled dwarf won't even get anything from most of the plants it picks (but still destroys the plant).
  • Gathering provides food from outdoor plants. When brewed or eaten, this food will provide seeds that you can use to start outdoor farms.

• Trading
  • Trading requires a trade depot, things you want to trade to the traders, and a dwarf assigned to trade (a broker, usually).
  • The stability of trading for food depends entirely on the caravans.
    • A caravan from each civilization that can reach your location (and is not at war with you) will come in a specific season (at most one civilization per season).
    • Additionally, the caravans may bring a lot of food or a little. This can be influenced by requesting that they bring food next time (when you meet with their representative), but you cannot influence this for the first time you trade with them.
  • Traders often bring plants and seeds you cannot obtain from your environment through plant gathering.

• Cooking
  • Preparing Meals requires someone assigned to cook and a kitchen, as well as 2 or more pieces of food.
  • Cooking uses more food than it provides, making it completely counter-productive to providing more food, cooking makes a stack of the sum of all its ingredients.
  • Prepared meals have a much higher value than the food used to make them, especially if the cook is highly skilled
    • Eating a prepared meal gives a dwarf a happy thought, making them great for morale (Only if the meal contains a food the dwarf likes)
    • This also makes it great for trading to caravans for other things.

Drinks

Dwarves drink two (and only two) types of substances - alcohol and water. Remember these drink-related rules:

• Dwarves are alcohol-dependent
  • Lack of alcohol will make a dwarf work and move slower; on a large scale, this can bring a fortress to a virtual halt
  • Dwarves don't want to drink the same thing forever, and will become upset if they must.
• An injured dwarf cannot drink alcohol
  • They must have water, or they will die.
• Dwarves always prioritize alcohol over water
  • If all other rules are met, then a dwarf will not go out of his way to obtain water (unless he is bringing it to an injured dwarf)

There aren't nearly as many ways to obtain alcohol as food:

• Brewing
  • Alcohol can be brewed from plant products, which can be obtained via plant gathering or farming
    • Brewing produces seeds

• Trading
  • The rules for this are exactly the same as the rules for trading for food.

Safety

There are way too many facets of safety, so I'll just gloss over it:

• Dangers
  • Cave-Ins: If an area of rock is no longer connected to the rock below it, it will fall, killing or hurting anyone nearby.
  • Fire: Dwarves don't understand the dangers of fire, so things can go downhill awfully fast.
  • Flooding: Water quickly becomes your worst enemy when it fills your dwellings. Do all water related projects carefully
  • Magma: Destroys most things, and catches stuff on fire.
  • Snatchers and Thieves: Barely more than minor nuisances, but nonetheless problematic
  • Wild Animals: Some will steal anything they can get to (despite its weight!), some will attack and even kill dwarves, many more will simply cause job cancellations.
  • Ambushes: Very dangerous and problematic, though rarely life threatening
  • Sieges: Very possibly capable of completely destroying your fortress
  • Ghosts: Can pull levers and bother dwarves
  • Vampires: Difficult to catch, can do a lot of damage overtime, and can take out an entire fortress if they berserk
  • Hidden Fun Stuff: There are things worse than other civilizations

• Passive Defense
  • Traps are your best friends. Some creatures are sneaky and avoid traps very well.

• Active Defense
  • Army: A well trained, well equipped, well managed army will take care of almost all potential assailants before they cause problems
  • Animals: Some domestic animals attack enemies, and all can see them and alert others of them

Happiness

Happiness, or more accurately a lack of sadness, is important to keeping a fortress stable and preventing Tantrums.

Things That Upset Dwarves

• Death
  • Somewhat mitigated by coffins and slabs
• Lack of Alcohol
  • This also makes them slower!
• Lack of Food
  • They will starve to death if they don't get enough.
• In-Fighting
  • Most often caused by another dwarf's tantrum.
• Seeing melancholy, insane, or berserk dwarves
  • Caused by failed moods or being upset
• Vermin
  • Common in areas that are not sealed off well
  • Cats can mitigate vermin problems.
• Dwarves they dislike
• Lack of food/alcohol variety
• Rain
• The sun, if they have Cave Adaptation

Things That Cheer-Up Dwarves

• High Quality Furniture
• Dwarves They Like
• Parties
• Waterfalls
• High Quality Alcohol and Food
• Owning High Quality Items

Resources

After covering your basic survival, you will want resources to accomplish various tasks.

Core

These two will normally be most of your backbone early on

• Wood
  • Barrels, buckets, and bins can only be made of wood or metal. As metal is rarer and heavier, wood is almost always preferable.
  • Beds can only be made of wood.
  • Otherwise, it can replace stone for most constructions.
  • Note that excessive logging will anger elves.
• Stone
  • Often the most abundant and most used resource, stone is useful for construction and crafts.

Additional

A growing fortress will have an industry involving some of these, but probably not all of them.

• Clay
  • About as useful as wood or stone, but a bit more involved to produce
• Glass
  • Not very important, but not without use and value
• Shell
  • Mostly for crafts and decoration, sometimes abundant with fishing
• Bone
  • Useful for high-volume, low quality arrows
  • Otherwise similar to shells
• Cloth and Thread
  • Needed for hospitals and basic clothes
• Leather
  • Often abundant with hunting, useful for basic armor, quivers, and decoration
• Gems
  • Valuable when cut and good at adding value when encrusted
  • Common byproduct of mining
  • Vary from cheap gems to the extremely rare and valuable

Valuable

A stable, older fortress often has these.

• Metal
  • This will be your most important resource later in
• Obsidian
  • Similar to Glass
• Adamantine
  • The most valuable substance known to dwarfkind.

Mining & Construction

A large part of Dwarf Fortress is reshaping your environment to fit your needs.

Mining

The majority of forts are built in a mountainside or underground. This is because mining is much easier than construction, in most cases.

• provides stone, metal, and gems
• uses no resources besides having a miner with a pickaxe
• provides space built exactly as you intended (excluding fun surprises)

Construction

Construction is anything as simple as putting walls, doors, and floodgates in a dug-out fort to anything as complex as building a castle from nothing.

Problems

• Requires resources
  • Wood or stone mostly, though metal and glass can be used too.
• Requires more planning than digging
• Constructed walls cannot be engraved like natural stone walls

Benefits

• Extremely complicated things are often easier to construct than to dig out.
• Constructed areas are easier to rearrange than dug-out areas.

Industry

Most forts have one or more industries going. These provide anything from food to tools to weapons to crafts.

Crafting

At a craftsdwarves' workshop, one can turn various resources into crafts, or improve existing items with raw resources.

Most products of crafting are only useful for trading, but improving existing and useful items can improve dwarves' mood.

Metalsmithing

Metalsmithing is a more complicated but very rewarding and practical industry. Metal can be used for construction, weaponry, statues, buckets/bins/barrels, and crafts.

Ambition

After getting a stable fortress, one can feel free to enjoy themselves in many ways.

The following articles are about different ways players entertain themselves.

• Megaprojects - Massive projects done by mega construction
• Stupid Dwarf Tricks - Silly and neat things
• Style Projects - Projects to add more realism or detail to a fort
• Computing - The more technical-minded players have found ways to create both simple and complex machines