Quickstart guide

!!UNKNOWN!!  · xTATTEREDx  · +FINE+  · *SUPERIOR*  · ≡EXCEPTIONAL≡  · ☼MASTERWORK☼

v53.08 · v0.47.05 This article is about the current version of DF. Note that some content may still need to be updated. More Info · V

For installation instructions, see Installation.

This is a quickstart guide for dwarf fortress mode for those who have never played before and quickly want to jump in head-first. If you are looking to learn adventure mode instead, see the Adventure mode quick start guide.

Also see Tutorials for more detailed tutorials that people have submitted.

Before you get started...

Always remember that losing is fun! Be prepared to lose a few fortresses before you get all the way through this guide – it can be easy to accidentally kill the entire fortress while learning. But remember: losing means that next time, you'll remember how you lost. In a big way, Dwarf Fortress uses the principle of learning from one's mistakes.

So, you want to play Dwarf Fortress, but you have no idea what to do. That's understandable; in Dwarf Fortress you can really do anything you like. It is a huge, complex, and totally open-ended game. But in order to do anything, first you need a sustainable fortress. It turns out that this is not as hard as you might think.

From Caravan to Happy Dwarves - This is a flowchart showing approximately what sequence of actions players usually take when starting up a new fort. Feel free to ignore it if you want. It's not necessary to refer to this to understand the rest of the guide, but by the time you finish the guide it will probably all make sense.

Common UI Concepts

Keeping Up

While the guide contains many links, you may still need to look something up. Refer to the Fortress Mode Reference Guide or use the wiki search function. Also, don't hesitate to ask for help if you can't find answers on the wiki.

This is just the Quickstart Guide, so we skip lots of details on the UI. If you're looking for more UI help as you get deeper into your first fortress, you may also want to read this section in the Fortress Mode Guide.

About key symbols

This wiki uses symbols that look like t or t to indicate what keys or interface buttons are used for an operation. Note that keys are case sensitive and to save space, Shift+t is shown as T. So t means "press the 't' key without the shift key" and T means "hold down shift and press the 't' key". Lowercase and uppercase keys will often perform different functions, so it is important to use the correct key. Sequences of keys will be in separate boxes, so abC means "press 'a', then press 'b', then hold shift and press 'c'"; while bT means "press 'b', then hold shift and press 'T'. A plus sign '+' between the boxes means to press them all together, so Shift+Enter means to hold shift and press 'Enter'. Other separators, such as ',' or '-', might be used but mean the same as no separator: to press the keys in sequence.

Keybindings can be seen and changed on the Keybindings tab in the Settings menu.

Menu navigation and selection

Esc or right mouse	Go back to the previous screen/menu
Mouse wheel	Scroll menu one line
Shift+mouse wheel	Scroll menu one page
Left mouse	Select menu option

Esc or right mouse will almost always return to the previous screen until you get to the top level of the UI, at which point Esc will display the options menu.

Options menu

Most basic game-related tasks (saving, keybindings, sound, etc.) are performed through the options menu, which can be reached with Esc from the main screen.

To save and quit back to the main menu, select Save Game. Unless you know what you are doing, do not select either Retire the Fortress (for the time being) or Abandon the Fortress to Ruin! These will essentially cause you to lose your save.

World Generation

First, generate a new world. Dwarf Fortress worlds are always procedurally randomly generated - there is no "default" or "standard" world. Luckily, the basic version of this process is simple, and with these suggested settings won't take too long. Wait until the game shows that the world has been generated, since stopping history too soon can limit material availability for embark and trade.

Starting World

For your first game, generate a new world using the Create new world option in the main menu with the following options:

• World size is Medium

• History length is 100 years

• Number of Civilizations is Medium

• Number of Sites is Medium

• Number of Beasts is Low

• Natural Savagery is Very Low

• Mineral Occurrence is Everywhere

Embark

Embarking is the process of choosing a site, outfitting your initial dwarves, and sending them on their way.

After generating a world, select Play now then choose fortress mode. The game will load and update the world, then show the world map.

Mouse over the map to inspect it. Left-click to zoom in, where you can then click the Embark button to choose an embark site.

Choosing a Good Site

Choosing a good embark site is crucial for beginners. Highly skilled players can run a fortress on an evil glacier, but for now, stick to friendly environments. Look for features in an embark site that will make your first fort easier to manage.

Starting Site

An example of a good starting site.

For your first game, find a site with the following properties:

• NO Aquifer (or at least no heavy or varied aquifers. Light is interesting on later embarks, but heavy guarantees Fun!)
• Trees: Woodland or Heavily Forested (or, at the very least, sparsely forested)
• Surroundings: Serene, calm, or at least not any evil or savage biome.
• A River

The following are also good to have, but focus on getting a decent site, not a perfect one.

• Temperature: Warm
• Clay or Soil makes farming easier when starting out
• Flux stone layer For your steel industry
• Also avoid sites containing towers, goblins, or other groups at war with you.

See Starting site for more info on why these characteristics are important.

Initial finder criteria

While finding a site is not as simple as world generation, the Find embark location button at the bottom of the screen can help.

Finder partial match missing Good surroundings

Once the find tool has finished searching with matches found, press Esc to look at the results. Any region in which it found a match will be indicated by a green X on the map.

Additionally, when placing the embark area you can resize it using the buttons on-screen. A 4x4 embark (the default) is usually reasonable, but you may want to change the size to avoid an undesirable biome or match your finder criteria.

If you are unable to find a site that you are willing to embark on, you could always create a new world. Otherwise, move onto the next step.

Skills and Equipment

Optional: Preparing Carefully

If, at this point, you'd like to get into all of the details of picking individual skills and equipment for your expedition, select Prepare for the journey carefully and see Preparing carefully for instructions. This is completely optional. And preparing carefully makes little difference in the long run, especially without experience as to what to change.

Now the Prepare for the Journey screen should appear. You will be given the choice to either:

• Play Now!
• Prepare for the journey carefully.

Selecting Play Now! will start you out with a default set of equipment that is reasonably safe, allowing you to skip having to set up your skills and equipment. If you'd like to get going now, just select that option.

A Minimal Fortress

Starting out. In this example, the dwarves will be digging out an entrance tunnel in the sandy cliff on the right. (You can use Tab to show or hide the overview map.)

At this point, you have embarked, and your dwarves have arrived at their destination. You will see your dwarves clustered around their wagonful of supplies, somewhere near the center of your map. Immediately hit Space to pause the game unless it is already paused.

Getting your bearings

Do not unpause the game just yet. Take a look around with wasd. Look up and down a few z-levels with the scroll wheel. Place the cursor on various tiles to familiarize yourself with what the symbols mean. If you get lost, you can press F1 (or Fn-F1 on some systems) to return to the wagon. (You can define more hotkeys later, to jump quickly to other sites of interest.) Notice the terrain features, the vegetation, and any minerals visible. If you chose a site with flowing water, where is it? What about pools of water? The more carefully you examine your site before breaking ground, the better off you will be.

In the bottom left, click the citizens information button to see a list of your dwarves. In the Others tab, you can see any wild animals that may be nearby.

The Stocks button at the top of the screen will show the items owned by your fortress.

On the left, there are buttons for various message logs.

Your wagon serves as the initial meeting area for your dwarves. Since you should have started in a non-freezing, calm (low savagery), non-evil biome, you shouldn't face any immediate danger, but if for some reason the area around your wagon proves to be unsafe, immediately designate another meeting zone (see Temporary Meeting Area below).

Controlling Your Dwarves

The first thing to keep in mind is that, for the most part, you can't directly control your dwarves the way you control characters in a typical fantasy RPG. Instead, you designate things that need to be done and then dwarves with the appropriate labor assignments will decide what to do.

Some tasks receive a higher priority. For example, if a dwarf needs to eat, then he will go eat, and only get around to digging a tunnel once he is done eating. It is also possible to designate things that no dwarf is able to do. For example, if you designate an area to mine, but no dwarf has mining as one of his allowed labors, or no dwarf has a pick, then the mining will never get done, and the game will not always advise you of why.

So, what you are doing throughout the game is essentially giving your dwarves a detailed group-wide to-do list, but it's up to them to figure out which one of them will execute any given task if the task is even possible. Often many of the details of how a task is performed (such as exactly which rock will be used to make crafts) are left up to them (though you can specify the details of tasks, such as the material or design, in the details menus in workshops).

Stout Labor

Easier menus on a laptop

If you're on a laptop (or using a restricted keyboard), you may notice that using + to scroll upward on some menus is inconvenient, since it requires the Shift key.

Fortunately, this is easy to change to =:

1. Press Esc to access the options menu and select Key Bindings
2. Select General, scroll down to Move secondary selector down (using the arrow keys), move right, and select Add binding
3. Press = and select either option that appears.
4. Press Esc and select Save and exit

See Key bindings for more info.

Utilities

You may have noticed that the UI for managing dwarves is a bit difficult to use. There are a few utilities available for this purpose (for Windows, Mac OS X, and most Linux systems):

• Dwarf Therapist can make labor management considerably easier, especially when you're dealing with twenty times the number of dwarves you have now. It can group and sort dwarves by multiple attributes and display their preferences, mood, and more.
• DFHack includes "Dwarf Manipulator", a UI for managing labors. It has fewer features than Dwarf Therapist, but displays much of the same information and is adequate for normal use. In addition, it is accessible from within DF via u-l, eliminating the need to constantly switch between applications.

Labors are how you control what types of tasks a dwarf will do. For example, if the Fishing labor is enabled for a dwarf, that dwarf is allowed to engage in fishing. When dwarves are idle, it could be because you haven't given them anything to do, or it could be because none of the idle dwarves have been told that they're allowed to do the types of tasks you've designated. For example, if you designate an area to mine, but none of the dwarves have the mining labor enabled, they will all just sit around ignoring your mining designation, thinking that it isn't their job. Dwarves will automatically have some labors enabled if they start out with skill in those labors, and some labors (such as hauling and cleaning) are enabled for all dwarves by default. This is why you didn't need to enable any labors on dwarves to get them to haul and mine, but later you may need a labor that no dwarf is currently capable of. Look over your dwarves' assigned labors: Press v (View Units) then place the cursor on a dwarf. Now, press p-l for "preferences: labors". You will see a list of labor categories that you can navigate using - and +. You can enter each category with Enter (except for mining, which is a single labor), toggle each labor off and on with Enter, and get back out with Esc. After exiting the View Units menu, you can use u (the units screen) to help you locate dwarves. Hit u, select a dwarf, hit z for "zoom to creature" and you'll automatically be placed in view mode on that dwarf. (Then use p-l to get to the labor configuration menu if necessary.)

Even if no dwarves have the corresponding skills, ensure the following labors are set as specified:

Category	Labor	Dwarves Assigned
Woodworking	Wood Cutting	1 or more
Stoneworking	Stone Detailing	1 or more
Hunting/Related	Hunting	0 (disabled for all)
Farming/Related	Wood Burning	1 or more
Farming/Related	Plant Gathering	1 or more
Fishing/Related	Fishing	0 (disabled for all)
Metalsmithing	Furnace Operating	1 or more
Metalsmithing	Armoring	1 or more
Metalsmithing	Weaponsmithing	1 or more
Metalsmithing	Blacksmithing	1 or more
Metalsmithing	Metalcrafting	1 or more
Jewelry	Gem Cutting	1 or more

It's important to disable fishing and hunting until you have your initial fort completed — dwarves with these labors enabled will constantly be outside attempting to perform them. When you're first starting out you don't want dwarves wandering around alone where they can get killed (in addition, they won't be doing anything useful, like hauling). Note that any unskilled dwarf can perform any labor given the necessary equipment and materials. Dwarves with no skill will simply be slow and produce a smaller quantity of lower-quality goods in a given time period, but they will gain skill points as they do so.

Strike The Earth!

Getting your dwarves to safety

As you now know, you can't control your dwarves directly. So how do you tell them to get inside your newly dug rooms?

• Meeting Area You can designate a Meeting Area zone inside the new rooms. Press i, then draw the rectangle to create a zone. Afterwards make it a Meeting Area. See also the zone page for more information.
• Stockpiles (see below) Stockpiles tell your dwarves where to put things. Create a stockpile for everything, and dwarves will start to haul all your items there.

Decide where you will build your main entrance. Generally, you will want to get all your dwarves and supplies inside a protected area as quickly as possible. The best strategy is to put the entrance near your wagon to speed up the process of hauling all of your supplies inside.

The designations menu allows you to select areas to dig. There are multiple methods of digging:

• Mining removes solid, floor-to-ceiling terrain (natural 'walls') on the z-level selected, leaving behind a rock or soil surface (also referred to as a natural floor). This does not do anything in areas without natural walls (for example, the surface or previously-mined areas).
• Channeling removes natural (rock/soil) floors (either created naturally or by mining) and creates a ramp (▲) on the z-level below. Note that you will see a down arrow (▼) on the current z-level, indicating a ramp on the level below. (For best results, ensure that the area below is unrevealed, i.e. black).

To designate an area for digging:

1. Hit d to bring up the Designations Menu.
2. Hit d to mine or h to channel (see above)
3. Place the cursor on one corner of the rectangular area you want to designate and press Enter.
4. Move the cursor to the other corner of the rectangle and press Enter. A rectangle will be highlighted and a miner will start to dig out this area once you exit the menu (with Esc) and unpause the game with Space.

This is basically how all of the designation commands work. Everything has to be designated one rectangle at a time, but rectangles can be many tiles wide. After you press d to designate, make sure it's set to "Standard" in the settings at the bottom, rather than "Marker only." You can set this with m. If it's set to "Marker only", the designation will not be carried out.

Demonstrating the difference between mining and channeling. Mining creates empty space on the same level where it is designated. Channeling creates empty space in the level below, clearing the floor. The levels are connected by up/down ramps.

Channeling

Note that channeling can be dangerous. Unless you know what you're doing, you should only ever make a pit one z-level deep. If you dig a pit multiple z-levels deep, only the lowest level will have an upward ramp, which is not enough for dwarves to leave the pit. (Dwarves can climb out in some circumstances, but this is unreliable.)

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This diagram shows the cross-section (side view) of 1x1 pits channeled 1 z-level deep, 2 z-levels deep and the correct way to do a 2 z-level deep ramp. The appearance of "downward ramps" can be confusing as there is no such thing - the down arrow indicates a ramp on the level below. Dwarves in the first pit can walk up the ramp to ground level and escape, while dwarves in the second pit cannot use the ramp at all. The third pit lets dwarves walk back to the surface again since the two ramps are offset to produce a continued slope. In short, channels (particularly channels multiple z-levels deep) can be dangerous. Digging an entryway from the surface level is one of the few times you'll ever need to channel.

Stairs can also be used for an entryway, but channels allow wagons entry to your fortress.

If your wagon is near a cliff or hill (generally speaking, any difference in levels, usually shown by the existence of natural ramps), you can just designate a tunnel to mine (d-d) into the cliff to create an entryway. If the wagon is surrounded by flat terrain, channel out a 3x3 rectangle on the surface with d-h to create a sort of pit with ramps on the edges, then go down one z-level with > and tunnel into one wall of the pit (with d-d) to create your entry.

Dig a hallway one tile wide and at least 10 long, ideally more like 20 (Shift moves 10 tiles when digging, so this can be easily accomplished by pressing Shift+an arrow key twice). This will be your entryway.

Your entryway defines the boundary between your safe and protected inner fort, and the big, bad, outside world. You want this to be your only entrance, so that you only have to worry about defending this one opening. A somewhat-outdated video guide to starting a fortress can be found here. (Note that this applies to v0.34.11, not v53.08, so some parts may be inaccurate in the current version.)

Additional miners

Mining will go faster if you have more than one dwarf doing it. By default, only one dwarf has the Mining labor enabled, but this can be changed fairly easily:

• Choose a dwarf that isn't doing anything especially useful (the fish cleaner is a good choice for a beginning fortress, but you can always change your mind if you end up with a useless peasant later on)
• Press v, navigate to the dwarf, and press p-l
• Enable the "Mining" option (see Stout Labor above)
• Exit with Esc

The next time you designate an area for mining, both of your miners should start working (assuming they're not busy doing something else).

Notes:

• Each miner requires a pick. A standard embark comes with 2 picks. If you want more than two miners, you'll need to forge more picks (forging is covered later in this guide). Two miners should be adequate for most fortresses, but more miners can add reliability (for when a miner decides to sleep) and speed. For now, you'll almost never need more than two miners, but you'll want more once your fortress expands.
• If you're digging a one-tile-wide hallway, only one miner can work from an end.
• Mining, Wood Cutting, & Hunting labors are mutually exclusive - a dwarf can only have up to one of these professions active at a time. For this reason, it's not recommended to make your only woodcutter a miner, since they won't be able to cut wood anymore.

Delving Secure Lodgings

Near the middle of the entry tunnel, build a 5x5 room, and link it to the entrance tunnel with a 3-tile-wide passageway. Expand the main entry tunnel to three tiles wide from the entrance of the new room to the outside entry. At the end of the entry tunnel, dig a small room, which will later become your main stairwell. Two tiles past that, dig a larger room, which will later become your general stockpile, and connect it to the stairwell with a narrow passageway.

An example layout, as described in this section. Note the 3-tile wide passage - this allows merchants to access your depot, which will go in the 5x5 room. Note that the turn also needs to be 3 tiles wide; otherwise, wagons won't be able to access the room.

Room dimensions

Apart from wagon access (3 tiles wide), the trade depot (5x5), and other workshops (3x3), there are no fixed dimensions you need to worry about. The lower limiting factor is the traffic your tunnels receive (dwarves may have to start climbing over each other), and the space your rooms need (stockpiles, tables/chairs, livestock). The practical maximum size is limited by how long it takes your miners to dig the rooms out, especially if they're digging in stone instead of soil (digging through soil is much faster). Most sites have at least one level soil layer below ground level, which is where you're digging right now, but as you dig deeper you'll hit stone (if you haven't already), and digging will become slower. In most fortresses, even the main hallways never need to be wider than 3 tiles, and needing more than 3 tiles of stairs per floor is very rare. A 3x3 per floor staircase (9 stairs!) is absolute overkill for anything but 20-year-old 300-resident capitals. For most tunnels in your fortress, 2 tiles wide will be sufficient, and many will be fine at just 1 tile wide. 11x11 is a convenient size for stockpile rooms, as the Shift+arrow keys move the cursor 11 tiles. However, something smaller is perfectly fine for rarer stockpiles, offices, and small dining rooms. Commoners’ bedrooms need not be larger than the amount of furniture you want inside.

Mining safety

While mining, take care to avoid digging into water. Dwarves are usually poor swimmers, and are unlikely to escape from an underground flood. However, it is safe to mine next to underground water, as long as you leave at least one "wall" tile between them (see the picture to the right). You can also mine one z-level under a body of water (for example, mining under a river), but you will have to designate each tile individually because DF automatically cancels digging of newly-revealed "damp" tiles (tiles are considered damp when they are adjacent to a water tile, regardless of whether the water tile is on the same z-level or not).

Also note that water can flow diagonally:

≈	▓	.	▓				≈	▓	.	▓
▓	▓	.	▓				▓	.	.	▓
o	k						f	l	o	o	d

Stockpiles

Keep corpses, refuse, stone and wood out of general use stockpiles. You can come back and change the settings on this stockpile using q, selecting the stockpile, then pressing s. Try to remember to come back here to disable/forbid types of things as you create more specific stockpiles for them.

Stockpiles are very important. These areas are where your dwarves will drop things for storage when they aren't needed elsewhere. To create a general purpose stockpile for your first storage area:

1. Hit p to open the Stockpiles menu.
2. Use t to change the custom stockpile settings to enable everything but Corpses, Refuse, Stone, Gems, and Wood. Use directional keys, enable, disable to do this.
3. Esc out of that screen back to the stockpiles menu.
4. Hit c to select Custom Stockpile, if it isn't already selected.
5. Designate the whole 11x11 storage room as a custom stockpile. This works just like designating an area to dig: place the cursor on one corner of the room, hit Enter, move to the opposite corner, and hit Enter again.
6. Press Esc to get out of the Stockpiles menu.

Once you exit the stockpiles menu and unpause, you should see dwarves running off to haul everything from your wagon into the new stockpile area. Later, if you like, you can change what sort of things the stockpile accepts by hitting q (Set Building Tasks/Prefs), placing the cursor on the stockpile, then pressing s to get to the stockpile settings.

It is particularly important to keep wood, stone, refuse, and corpses out of your general purpose stockpile, so you may want to double check to make sure all of these things are disabled in the stockpile settings. Failure to keep these things out of this stockpile will rapidly fill it up, causing workshops to become cluttered when dwarves can't store things in the stockpile. Note: When assigning stockpiles, you should make sure they're in a vacant area (i.e. the tiles should not have any items already stored on them). Dwarves will not haul items to occupied tiles, so make sure the area is vacant (and already mined out) before assigning a stockpile.

Stairways

Up, Down, Up/Down: Types of Stairs

In Dwarf Fortress, every z-level is composed of a floor and a wall (or "space between floors"). The confusingly named "down" and "up" stairs have nothing to do with the direction creatures can move to; instead, down stairs penetrate floors, while up stairs penetrate walls. Up/down stairs penetrate the wall and the floor below. (note the picture to the left)

Consequently, you will normally use up/down stairs, and use down and up stairs only for the top and bottom-most level of your staircase respectively. If you're not sure whether you want to expand the staircase in the future, use up/down stairs at the end.

Designate a downward stairway in the room you dug out for the stairwell (not the 5x5 room that you dug out earlier) with d-j. Notice that after your miner digs the stairway, it doesn't automatically create another stairway on the z-level below. If you hit > to move the view down a z-level you'll see that there's no stairway below, but there is a revealed tile of rock/soil. Because of the down stairway that was dug, this tile is now accessible to miners. You can then designate an up/down stairway on it with d-i and the miner dwarf will dig it out. Below that you can then dig out another up/down stairway and so on. For now just dig down one level; we will deepen the stairwell later.

This is how the different stairs would look like from the side.

Temporary Meeting Area

An example meeting area. Note that this layer has a different type of soil than the layer above - this can happen often. Also note that the "north" side of this room is directly below the lake in the level above, but no water is present.

On the second z-level below ground (the one below the stockpile level, which you just reached with the staircase), dig a short, 3-tile wide passageway (this only needs to be 1-2 tiles long). Past that, dig out a room between 5x5 and 7x7, leaving room to enlarge it in at least one direction in the future. Using the i key, create an activity zone in the room you just created, filling the entire room (be careful not to make this too small lest your overcrowded animals start fighting). This works much like creating a stockpile except that you draw the rectangle before defining what the area is for. Draw the rectangle, filling the entire room, and set it to be a meeting area. Your idle dwarves will hang around in this area, hopefully keeping them inside the fort and out of trouble.

NOTE: Again, make sure your activity zone is already mined out before attempting to designate the meeting area.

Refuse

Avoiding Miasma

Outside your fort entrance, use