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| − | Ah, excellent! Everything's securely inside, behind a stout wagon-wood barrier, so it's time for a leisurely exploration of the dwarven cheese-making industry, no?
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| − | No.
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| − | Unfortunately, wooden hatch covers will stop neither troll nor kobold thief. Stone is better, but merely a speedbump to the more fun variety of building destroyers. Bridges are the answer, which means stone blocks and mechanisms, which means workshops, which means digging. We also really begin to get to grips with the complexities of stockpile, material and workshop management.
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| − | ==Stone industry==
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| − | NB: You may or may not have hit stone by now - both scenarios have their benefits and drawbacks in terms of food industries (soil lets you farm without water) vs. stone industries. This guide assumes that by level -10 you're digging through stone, but if it's soil, you should probably continue the spiral ramp pattern until you ''hit'' stone and start your fortress there. Your other alternative is to keep your fortress on level -10 (in the soil, which is faster), but alternate those excavations with deeper quarrying activities. Just be aware that there may need to be some renovation of the quarry layers later.
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| − | From your level -10 storage room, designate a digging pattern like so:
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| − | [[File: 1_first_quadrant.png]]
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| − | Where <tt>X</tt> indicates an up/down staircase.
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| − | This might seem perverse, but I promise there's method to the madness.
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| − | While your miners are digging it out, your other dwarves won't have an awful lot to do; your carpenter/woodcutter should continue to make bins, then fell another round of trees when they run out of wood (with a bias towards tree-felling); your herbalist/woodcrafter should continue to gather plants and make wood pots. We're not bothering with barrels for now because they're heavier and slow to haul.
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| − | As soon as there's room, build two workshops from loose stone, like so:
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| − | [[File: 2_mechanic_mason.png]]
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| − | You will have noticed that carrying raw stone is quite slow. It's not so terrible yet, but as your fortress expands your dwarves will travel to the furthest reaches in search of freshly-mined stone. This is because job prioritisation in Dwarf Fortress is currently rather crude: it's just a long queue of jobs, and new jobs get added to the top, pushing everything else down the list. That preference for the newest thing has several implications. For now, what matters is that dwarves using a workshop will seek out the raw materials which were most recently produced - in a growing fort, that usually means that old, close stone is ignored in favour of new, distant stone. That slows things down a ''lot'', because your mason spends much longer hauling stone than doing masonry.
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| − | The fix is simple: we'll create a stone stockpile in this large room and restrict these workshops to using only stone from that stockpile. In addition, we'll use wheelbarrows to fill the stockpile much faster. Go ahead and make a stone stockpile surrounding the workshops, set the number of wheelbarrows to 3, queue up three wooden wheelbarrows at your carpenter's workshop, and set the stone stockpile to give to both workshops. The stockpile should be located like so:
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| − | [[File: 3_stone_stockpile.png]]
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| − | Easy, right?
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| − | Well, a ''proper'' overseer would know there's a lot more to stone than that…
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| − | ===A subtle appreciation of stone===
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| − | Not all stones are appropriate for crafting in these workshops. Have a look at all the different types of [[Stone]] your miners have encountered, and individually look them up on the wiki to learn more about them. In addition, read [[The Non-Dwarf's Guide to Rock]].
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| − | Disable these categories in the stockpile:
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| − | * [[Ore|Metal ores]]: later, we'll smelt these into metal bars.
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| − | * [[Economic Stone]]: this category includes [[Flux]] stones such as marble (required for making steel), fuel sources such as lignite, kaolinite which best used to make valuable [[Porcelain]], and stones which can produce [[Gypsum plaster]].
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| − | * Clay, because it is better used in the [[Ceramic industry]]
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| − | In addition, certain stones in the "Other Stone" category are too heavy for regular use: cinnabar, pitchblende and cobaltite probably fall above this approximate "practical density threshold". You can find a use for them later, when hauling labour is more plentiful: themed projects, satisfying material or colour preferences, catapult or stone-fall trap ammo, or just general using-up. You don't, however, want to use these for trade goods, because the trade wagons won't be able to carry much, and for Armok's sake don't use them for stone pots.
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| − | At the other end of the spectrum is jet, which at a solid density of only 1320 is the lightest stone in the game. We're using wooden pots instead because wood should be fairly plentiful on this embark and wood usually has a density of only 600, but if wood is scarce, jet is best reserved for lightweight stone pots (earthenware is another good choice but requires fuel to kiln and glaze). If you have plenty of wood, you needn't worry too much about saving jet for anything in particular. In any case, the actual weight difference of wood vs. stone pots is not, on average, going to make a large difference to hauling, so if you don't have many trees on your embark then you should have no qualms about using stone pots.
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| − | Finally, some stones have completely unremarkable properties but are rather rare, occurring only in [[Vein|small clusters]]. These should be reserved for satisfying the material preferences of fussy dwarves, when you have highly-skilled artisans who can do the material justice. These include (apart from the heavy minerals already excluded) brimstone, cryolite, graphite, hornblende, ilmenite, marcasite, orpiment, periclase, petrified wood, pyrolusite, realgar, rutile, saltpeter, serpentine, and stibnite. [[Stone#Other Stone|Other stones]] which occur in veins or large clusters should be sufficiently plentiful that we needn't conserve them. There's a wider choice of materials for satisfying [[Color|colour]] preferences, but I'll point out that cobaltite is the [[Color#Material By Colour|only dark blue material]] in the game, and microcline is the only practical light cyan material. Fortunately, these are not rare.
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| − | With so many exceptions, honestly it's easier to disable all kinds of stone and then re-enable just the appropriate types as your miners unearth them, as long as they don't fall into any of the above categories. If your stockpile is running out of stone but there still seems to be plenty lying around, check to make sure you've enabled all the appropriate types in the stockpile (but you might just have a hauling backlog).
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| − | This seems like an awful lot to think about and a lot of work, I know, but trust me. For one thing, this is important education in game mechanics - Dwarf Fortress is a game of ''detail'', and although it’s a lot to take in all at once you're going to need to get this fine-grained sooner or later. Secondly, we can better understand and control the complex interplay of materials, stockpiles, workshops, products, and individual dwarven quirks by making each area as specific as possible and therefore as simple as possible. Another reason this approach works well is because of the sheer amount of z-space you have to play with in Dwarf Fortress. When you come across a new resource or bring a new part of your industry online, there's no reason not to set up a dedicated area.
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| − | ===Build a literal bridge===
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| − | Soon, your idle dwarves will begin filling the stone stockpile with the appropriate rocks, at which point you can make some goods. The first order of business is to upgrade our security barriers.
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| − | Make a stone hatch cover at the mason's workshop, and replace the wooden one when that's ready. Then queue up a stone block. Meanwhile, queue up three mechanisms at the mechanic's workshop. When both are these are done, build a bridge from stone blocks located in the level -1 ramp like so:
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| − | [[File: 4_rampway_bridge.png]]
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| − | The bridge should be 3 tiles in the y-axis (north-south), 1 tile in the x-axis, and raise to the west. Your mason/architect needs to build this, so make sure they're free.
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| − | Next, build a lever near the centre of your fortress, like so (you'll need to remove one tile of the stockpile first):
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| − | [[File: 5_bridge_lever.png]]
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| − | Then connect the lever to the bridge. Your stonecrafter/mechanic needs to do these jobs, so, again, make sure they're free. It's ''essential'' to make a habit of labelling levers using the {{K|N}}otes function. You only have one to remember now, but a mature fortress may have dozens. Create a note on the lever and title it something like "level -1 ramp bridge".
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| − | Congratulations! You now have a bridge which you can raise to exclude every manner of creature (except ghosts). Even [[Dragonfire]] won't be able to melt the (''raised'') bridge, since it won't be able to access the tile upon which the bridge is built. Just be aware that there's a significant delay between flicking the lever and the bridge actually being raised. It's actually quite tricky to get everyone inside in time, but still raise it before the invaders can step over the threshold…
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| − | ===Busy work===
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| − | After this, you can keep your mechanic/stonecrafter making stone mechanisms whenever they're not busy with something else, and similarly your mason/architect should continue making stone blocks - you should enable "bars and blocks" in the central rampway stockpile to hold these. It's alright if your workshops begin to accumulate a few items because your central stockpile fills up - we'll continue digging out storage for all these items as we go.
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| − | That brings us neatly back to the topic of job management. Repeating tasks at workshops create significant hauling overhead: the raw materials consumed from stockpiles need to be replaced, and the products need to be hauled out of the workshop. Repeating tasks therefore should be used carefully, and should be temporarily suspended if you notice your dwarves aren't keeping up with the hauling backlog and are never going idle. Due to the way jobs are scheduled, repeating workshop jobs also tend to monopolise a dwarf's time. When a dwarf completes a repeating workshop job, a new replacement job is immediately created. Since new tasks go to the top of the priority pile, that new job now becomes priority number one for the dwarf, and they go back to the workshop. This is fine if you ''want'' that dwarf to focus on the repeating workshop job, but if you've also ordered other work for them to do - build a lever, say, or a bridge - they will essentially ''never'' get around to it as long as there's a repeating workshop job active, because the other tasks are old and constantly at the bottom of the pile. ''That's'' why it's important not to create too much overhead. If you're not regularly clearing your hauling backlog and having dwarves go idle, your fortress is probably running too hot and there are tasks you've requested in the queue which will simply never get done as more and more new jobs get piled on top of the queue. As an overseer, it's easy to get carried away with all the things you can schedule at once, but take it easy.
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| − | This gets a lot easier later when we have a manager and bookkeeper. For now, your mason/architect and stonecrafter/mechanic should be occupied as just described; your herbalist/woodcrafter should be alternately making wooden pots and gathering plants; and your woodcutter/carpenter should be alternately felling trees and making bins in the carpenter's workshop. Alongside the wooden bins, mix in an equal number of wooden cage jobs in the carpentry workshop. We'll be making some cage traps soon.
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| − | ==Food, glorious food==
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| − | Next, we need a still for alcohol and a kitchen for food. We'll cram them into the same room as your stone workshops like so (make sure you build all workshops and constructions going forward from stone blocks, unless otherwise noted):
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| − | [[File: 6_kitchen_still.png]]
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| − | Surround the still with a f{{K|u}}rniture stockpile, which is set to only accept "large pots/food storage" and "barrels", and to only accept wooden materials (if you're making stone pots due to lack of wood, you'll also need to enable the appropriate stone types). Then create a large {{K|f}}ood stockpile to fill the remaining space in the room, like so:
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| − | [[File: 7_food_pot_stockpiles.png]]
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| − | Don't worry, even when stockpiles obscure stairs they're still usable.
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| − | Set both stockpiles to take from the main stockpile in the centre of your fortress. As we expand our industries, we'll continue slowly moving items out of that stockpile until there's nothing left and we can get rid of it. Then set them both to give to the still, and the food stockpile to give to the kitchen. Now your brewer and cook should have everything near to hand.
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| − | [[Stockpile]]s and [[Stockpile design]] are complex topics, and we'll be getting much, much more granular soon, but this is good as a rough-and-ready start for a frontier outpost.
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| − | Queue up a "brew drink from plant" job on repeat at the still. Your herbalist/woodcrafter/brewer now has three tasks to juggle: collecting plants, brewing them into booze, and making wooden vessels for more booze. As they gather new varieties of plants, keep checking the [[Status#Kitchen Status Screen]], where you can tell your dwarves what is allowed to be cooked and/or brewed. For now, I'd recommend brewing everything, and only cooking surface plants which can't be brewed. Brewing generates plenty of seeds which can be cooked into meals anyway - just make sure you don't cook the seeds of your below-ground crops! We'll be farming those.
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| − | As seeds become available from brewing, queue up some "prepare lavish meal" jobs on repeat. Your cook will level up faster if you prepare simple meals, but lavish meals use up materials faster. In addition, [[Kitchen#Types of meals|meals with more ingredients]] are more likely to contain an item a dwarf [[Preferences|prefers]], which makes them happy.
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| − | In general, if workshops get a little cluttered - either because of insufficient hauling labour or because stockpiles are full - it won't do you much harm at this point. You can check how many items are sitting in a workshop by pressing {{K|t}} and moving over the workshop. Items with <tt>TSK</tt> next to them are either about to be used in the workshop or hauled away, but the others might sit around for a while. However, you should be ''very'' concerned if food is sitting around outside of a food stockpile for a while, because it'll rot, and at this early stage you can ill afford that. Make a temporary overflow food stockpile somewhere if this is happening - just remember it has to "give" to the kitchen and still if you want to cook or brew its contents.
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| − | ==What's next?==
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| − | Well done! To recap, you now have a completely airtight fortress (when the bridge is raised) fledgling stone and wood industries, and facilities to turn raw ingredients into food and booze. However, everything's still pretty disorganised; it's time to start putting things in their proper places and digging more storage to set the fortress up for the long term. In the next section, we'll continue excavations so these three industries can settle into their more permanent layouts. While we're working on that, we'll continue stockpiling supplies and resources for the expansion of the fortress.
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