Masterwork:Orcish Quickstart guide

This article is about a mod. More Info · V

MDF: v1.31

Before you get started...

Always remember that losing is fun! If you're a Dwarf. Orcs are out to win. Remember folks, winning is fun.

Orc Fortress is a mode of the Masterwork mod. Orcs are powerful warriors, but they will need all their skills to survive relentless attacks from the Elves, Dwarves, and Humans. Orcs are equally at home in surface settlements or in deep strongholds. Orcish workshops include tribal and artisinal crafting, mass production factories and pits of industry, and mystical places of power. There are also a wide assortment of buildings that Orcs can only access after trading for the technology, or pillaging it from their enemies.

If you are an experienced Dwarf Fortress player, this guide will hopefully tell you all you need to know to get started successfully leading the Orcs. See also Ghoshash Snazaga, <<Perplexing-complexity the Cleaver of Ignorance>>, an Orcish tutorial community fort.

Choosing Masterwork & World Settings

With friends like these...

WARLOCKS don't always make good allies, due to their unstable ethics and dangerous relationship with magic. Be warned, when visiting they are likely to attack other traders or diplomats!

The first thing you will need to do is choose some Orc friendly settings in the Masterwork launcher.

Masterwork Settings which affect only the Dwarven entity or creature won't have an effect on Orc Fortress; this includes most of the Workshop settings, and Castes. Masterwork settings which affect the World or non-Dwarf animals *will* impact Orc Fortress: this includes Harder Farming, Mining, Aquifers, Grazing, Weather, all Materials, all Creatures, all Cavern settings, etc. Therapist also works fine with Orcs.

The Orc Fortress custom workshops and reactions are generally balanced assumed Harder Farming and Harder Smithing being both ON. Other than that most any combinations should work fine. Orc fortress has it's own implementation of slag (only at the Molten pit) so you might want to turn off the Slag option, but either way is OK.

When it comes to other civilizations, Humans, Dwarves, Elves and Drow, and Automatons will all be powerful enemies. The cavern civs and Fortress Defense races will attack you too; note that the "medium" tier are about a match in raw size and strength.

If enabled, Deep-drow, Chaos-dwarves, Human Bandits, and Ashland Elf rebels are potentially friendly and will have unique crates and blueprints to sell you, along with a nice selection of other goods. Goblins, Wild Orcs and Frost Giants can be trade partners too, although they have less unique stuff. Just like in dwarf mode, if you choose a lot of allies in a given world, the game will be a lot easier.

There are no particular recommended parameters for world gen, Masterwork Advanced world gens are great if you like them, but default or other custom world gens work fine as well.

Embark

Above ground & Aquifer forts

Don't be afraid of aquifer embarks! Orcs have lots of tools for above ground forts, starting with the Tribal Warcrafter and Fletcher for arms, and Boneyard for mechanisms. Trade for cheap raw materials from the Goblins. Use the Drydock to raid the Elves for wood, the Dwarves for metal, or the Merchant's Guild to found a caravanserai. Use the Orcish Factory or Goblin Sawmill to stretch your supplies of clay and wood.

The Taiga Orcs are survivors of hostile frontier lands, and can cultivate special Orcish plants. They grow in autumn and winter months. These plants are a bit expensive to take on embark but it is worth considering; they do grow in tundra as well as other boreal biomes. In taiga or temperate woodlands, you can plant in an annual rotation along with another spring/summer crop.

Orcs have some unique animals: the orcish dire wolf is a good value for a hunting/war pet to embark with. Other orcish pets include taiga sabrecats, which are powerful war beasts. Arctic condors are useful for hunting, vermin control, or simply patrolling the skies for ambushes. Steppe aurochs are an extra large cattle.

Skills and Equipment

It's pretty safe to embark without an anvil if you choose. The tribal warcrafter and fletcher can make fine weapons without one, if needed, enough to get by for a year or two until the forges (or raiding docks) are online. Picks, axes, food, and perhaps a bit of cloth or rope are still key to embark with, but don't stress too much about bringing lots of extra booze -- orcs don't generally need alcohol to get through the working day.

Check your castes! Common Orcs, Uruks, and Snaga can all handle most jobs interchangeably although you probably want to reserve any melee gear or skills for the Uruks. If you happen to get a specialist orc or two in your embark crew, you might want to tailor your skill selection to their aptitudes: Dreamwalker (medical skills), Corsair (trade skills), Artisan (leather/bone/smithing), Olog (stone).

A New Camp

Food and Shelter

The set up of basic dormitories, dining, gathering and workshops is pretty similar to a new dwarven camp. Orcs can do a lot with leather, bone, and blood at the Tribal Craftsorc and Fletcher, so you might want to get Ranchers or Hunters industry going early. Embarking with some birds or ranching animals is a more efficient use of embark points than paying for leather or quivers directly.

Orcish leaders are organised a bit differently. The scribe performs the job of both bookkeeper and manager, while the shaman performs the job of chief medical officer and psychologist. They do expect fairly nice rooms for their trouble, and can issue mandates. You can appoint extra orcs to these positions as the fort grows.

Security

Know the enemy!

Elves and Drow will strike from ambush, while Dwarves and Humans may siege and wait you out for several months at a time. Also, Dwarves and Drow are fairly likely to bring building-destroying monsters from the depths.

Assuming your world has all of Dwarves, Humans, Elves and Drow enabled, your Orcish stronghold should prepare for serious attacks that could begin in the early part of Year Two! At a bare minimum you should have some orcs prepared to join a warband, shields, and any fighting pets trained. Some kind of palisade is useful even if it doesn't completely enclose your stronghold, to break the line of sight of enemy ranged units. If your base is in the low ground beneath a hill or ridge, be sure that you have a plan to survive if elvish archers gain the high ground on you.

If you happen to have goblin allies in your world, you can easily craft a few trinkets and trade with the runts for some rusty iron shivs or other cheap weapons. These are basically trash, but may be better than nothing if elvish assassins strike before the camp is really prepared.

Get some decent weapons for your warchief and any other valuable orcs. Besides the normal path of smelting and forging metal, you can get the tribal warcrafter (along with an ashery and tanner) and make a few ironbone or bloodsteel weapons. Uruks are strong enough to do damage even with a crude stone club, in a tight spot. Shields and a bit of defensive skill are invaluable, so try to get your key warriors paired up and sparring a bit.

The fletcher workshop is also a good choice if you have some snaga, or other skilled archers. This shop can make powerful composite bows and save on fuel by crafting arrows in batches. Orcs have a variety of weapons that can be used in both a melee and a ranged mode. Early on you can make some thrown weapons: Tomahawks (with throwing tomahawks as ammo) or bola throwers (with bola). These weapons are inferior to regular axes or bows, but give some flexibility in how you deploy a small warband. They're good as melee sidearms too, for a civilian militia who might occasionally defend themselves from thieves or animals.

A Growing Stronghold

Orcish Industry

Assuming you defended your camp in suitably orky fashion, you should now have some new resources: a pile of elf or drow corpses, and some quality arms and armor that may or not actually fit. This is a great time to add on extra butcher shops, tanners, kitchen' and tribal warcrafters. Use a couple tribal crafters shops to harden and laminate leather. Lamellar leather is a quality material and can be made into armor at either the warcrafter or standard leatherworker. From ash, bone, and (optionally) blood you can keep crafting ironbone tribal weapons, or use a Boneyard to make bars and bone furniture too.

If you have some quality but wrong-sized gear, like Elven small mithril armor, use the Molten Pit to resize it into wearable makeshift mail. This processing is very material efficient, but the makeshift gear doesn't provide 100% coverage so you might want to layer it with some other armor. If you have weapons made from heavy but soft material like a gold dagger, you can also refit it into a maybe more useful flail. The Molten Pit also gives options for batch smelting ore and destroying unwanted junk. The molten pit wastes some material relative to Dwarven batch furnaces, but is still fuel-efficient and recovers some useable scrap too: rusty iron, malachite, and dolomite.

An Orcish Factory is useful for production once you have some metal or clay industry starting up. Churn out great masses of blocks for above ground building, decent gear to arm and armor the grunts, or even masses of cheap weapons to use at the Raiders drydock. The Factory can also support your growing metal industry too, by burning farmed or harvested tree saplings to charcoal.

Corsair Raiders

Economizing on Raiders' Gear

Exchanging bounties at the Freelancer's guild is usually the best source of coins, but you might also mint coins from rusty iron bars you get from Molten Pit or Goblin trading partners. If you are short on wood but have plenty of cloth and pulleys, consider sail-powered Xebecs instead of regular Longboats. If you don't have junk weapons laying around, forge weapons with the smallest materials requirement like daggers, or save on materials by batch production at the Orcish Factory.

The Raiders Drydock is an important building for a thriving Orcish base. It is used not only to strike back at the Free Peoples and grab some loot, but also to round up goblin laborers, steal blueprints and codexes -- all things that unlock more powerful buildings or abilities for your Orcs. To support the Drydock you'll need a source of rusty iron coins (usually from exchanging totems, booze, or other bounties at the Freelancers Guild), ballista parts from a Siege Workshop, plenty of wood, and also weapons.

A good first mission for your Raiders is to Round up some Goblins. These missions are cheap and have a high chance of success. The goblin migrant will be stored as a "tool" until you're ready to deploy him as one of the Shanty workshops.

Once you have a few weapon kits, longboats, and coins saved up you can start hitting more dangerous targets. The dwarves are a good choice, as from a successful raid you can score weapons grade metal, solid weapons, and other useful wargear. Or raid merchant shipping to acquire gold and silver, caravanserai blueprints so that you can establish your own trade bazaars locally, and valuable captives. Target different enemies for other various goods.

Depending on how organized your raiding materials stockpiles are, If you plan to use raiding as a major part of your economy, you might want to add a second drydock and Freelancer's guild to especially to speed up crafting new ships. Try storing coins in stockpiles without bins to avoid job cancellation.

Migrant Camps

Discuss from a macro view what the camps do

Stone, Sawmill, Textile, Tracker: Convenience/mass production

Tinkerer & Poisoner: new capabilities

Labor camps: turn food into raw mats

Warband

Once you have your basic set up above is a branch point where you could choose to branch off in a lot of different directions. This could be decided by the raw materials you have on hand, the skills of your warriors, or the prevalence of different castes in your Fortress.

Choose a strategy to gear up.

• Plenty of bronze and iron -> Mass production at factory?
• Plenty of gold/agriculture -> Mass mint or sell at Caravanserai for bronze/iron/weapons?
• Plenty of food/hunting -> Labor camp for other raw mats?
• Plenty of wood for ships -> Double down on raid docks?
• Mithril or wolfram and the alloy mats -> hurry for Damasc forge?
• Lots of Dreamwalkers -> Build places of Power and Arcane Forge; trade for spellbooks?
• Lots of Corsairs -> Get guns and ammo?
• Short on metal, but silver, volcanic, or cavern mats? -> Trade for Outlander tech?

Midgame Clanholding

Artisan Crafting

Damasc (mithril, wolfram, cobalt); Tinkerer (brass, lead)

Caravanserai

Decluttering the fort. Mostly at the farmers' and arms bazaar.

Actually buying stuff! Expensive but useful. Anvils, foreign weapons, basic supplies especially useful for metal-poor or aquifer embarks. Convenience items like pulleys and ballista ammo.

Ransoming Captives.

Orichalcum.

Seeds.