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==Pets and food animals== | ==Pets and food animals== | ||
+ | *[[Cat]]s. Having a few cats will not only boost the adopted dwarfs' mood but will also make your food safer (due to a lack of [[vermin]]). However, with how many cats immigrants bring as pets, it's practically impossible to control them indefinitely. The resulting excessive numbers of cats can cause framerate issues, though this is less of an issue then in previous versions. | ||
− | [[ | + | *[[Dog]]s. Bringing 2 dogs along with your starting caravan and train any full grown dogs you get into war animals. Assigning war animals to civilians is one of the best ways to increase security. You may choose instead to have civilians train their own war animals. Training is fairly quick even at dabbling and trained animals follow their trainer while still remaining strays (no sadness if the animal dies, but no immediate mood boost from being comforted if unhappy). |
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+ | * Shamelessly kill off newborn pets to prevent overpopulation. Especially useful on cats. 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. | ||
− | [[ | + | * 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. 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. Slaughtering each dog gives 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. Also you can slaughter dogs at whim, whereas you can't slaughter an owned pet. |
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− | + | * Alternatively, dogs are generally a lot better used as war animals, even if you have a lot of them. Every war animal you have is another defender against goblins, and quite possibly one fewer lost dwarf. If you want an emergency food supply, make a 5x5 room and honeycomb it with ropes. Assign beasts of burden like musk oxen, horses, and the like to them. Chained animals will breed, so you will get offspring, but they will all stay in their little corrall and make finding animals to slaughter very easy. | |
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− | + | * Simply put a meeting zone across the entrance to your fort, which will cause stray animals (including war dogs) to wander around in that meeting zone. Any [[thief]] is instantly turned into kibble, and they're quite handy at assisting with smaller sieges too. | |
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==Defense== | ==Defense== |
Revision as of 15:40, 30 October 2008
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 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
- Incorrect. While a legendary dining room is very important, according to the thought article, it is a +20 thought. This can be very quickly erased by severe cave adaptation, which is -20 when exposed to the sun. Couple in a few other powerful unhappy thoughts, such as losing a friend, and a dwarf can tantrum very quickly. Dining rooms work great to stabilize early fortresses, but in larger ones where unhappy thoughts are more plentiful, you need more. This can be as simple as a platinum statue flanked by simple rock statues in a high traffic area to make a "completely sublime, tastefully arranged statue", which I have observed (but not confirmed) to be about a +30 thought. Private bedrooms help too, especially when the dwarven economy starts up so you can avoid the 'lack of chests' unhappy thought. Remember: Only you can stop death spirals. -ThunderClaw
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
- 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 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
- Indoor light does not (or no longer) prevents cave adaptation. Further, making your main meeting area anything Above Ground means that your dwarves will have to avoid it when the "Dwarves stay indoors" order is on - 'indoors' is considered 'below ground', and nothing else. To fight cave adaptation, make a separate, above-ground courtyard that you can quickly dissolve in an emergency. This is quite important! Cave adapatation thoughts take away as much happiness as a legendary dining room gives! -ThunderClaw
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
- If you're training siege operators, you can set up an 8x8 non-economic non-ore stone stockpile to ease the hauling load on your catapulters. -GreyMario
- A worthwhile alternative to stockpiling is channeling a hole above some workshops (I haven't tried directly above, but it might work), setting it as a garbage dump, and then dumping all the stone you come across. Unforbid the stone you want to use when you want to use it. It takes up only 1 square to store an arbitrarily high amount of stone, but requires more micromanagement (you don't want to pitch your obsidian into a chasm, or that rotting corpse into your workshop) and will only work for one material at a time.
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
- Be sure, however, not to let idlers get out of control. No more than 5-10 regardless of the size of your fortress. Idlers make friends very quickly and friend connections are the leading cause of death spirals. Be sure to have plenty of busy work around, whether it's training in a screw pump gym or gathering sand or making excess finished goods from cloth or leather or anything else. Idle hands are the downfall of a fortress. -ThunderClaw
Fishing: Not worth it. Only the shells 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
- Shells are also extremely worth it. Turtles will populate as vermin in any pool of water in a temperate map, so making a large underground cistern will produce tons of turtles, without your fisherdwarves ever needing to leave the fortress. Shell is great for making cheap plate gloves for your army (since there are no protective leather handguards), and are fantastic for decorating finished goods when you start getting lots of them. Turtles also provide variety to your dwarves' diet, which can be a problem if you are suffering an extended siege and are seeing the 'getting tired of the same old food' thought.
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
- A bone crossbow, bone bolts, and a suit of leather armor will be everything a hunter will ever need. Have the hunter train his own hunting dog, so it will stick with him without being considered a pet if the local wildlife is aggressive; hunting animals are fragile and will die easily on more vicious maps. If the local wildlife is fairly tame, assign the dog so the hunter gets a happiness bonus from having a pet.
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
- Plant a variety of plants as your fortress grows. Cave Wheat and Dimple Cups are fantastic when you have the dwarves to handle the milling. Dimple cups provide dye for better finished clothing, and Cave Wheat Flour is great fodder for prepared food to make it high value. Pig tails are also critical so you're able to produce cloth during a siege. -ThunderClaw
Cloth: Pig tails will provide you all the cloth you need and booze too. -Yanlin
- It's way more effective, in the end, to buy cloth. Plant fiber cloth is incredibly cheap from caravans (~400 value for 10 cloth, plus the bin it came in) and they traffic huge quantities of it. It's not unusual to buy up 50 cloth from a single caravan, which frees up your pig tails for easy brewing fodder, and gives you enough raw material to sew images, which is great for increasing fortress wealth, dwarf happiness, and allows you to naturalize captured goblin clothing so you can offer it to caravans for the diplomacy boost.
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
- 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
- Mechanisms as trade goods are not feasible. They weigh too much. Merchants will decline the trades just because their animals can't haul that much. Crafts, toys, and mugs are very viable, as are meals. Anything that turns a significant wealth profit is fine for buying your first anvil. 1000 value is not that much in the grand scheme of things, by the time you get to 100 dwarves you will probably be trafficing 5000 value with each caravan. -ThunderClaw
- Well, no; I've been able to do all my trading with mechanisms in my current fort, buying as much as 30,000☼ from each caravan. The key is to get a top-skill mechanic and use high-value stone (ideally, obsidian). One masterpiece obsidian mechanism is worth 1,080☼ and only weighs 167Γ. You might have to buy some cheap but heavy goods first to clear some space (bars, pets, cages, etc.), but even the elves can handle the weight as long as the mechanisms are pricey enough. Mechanisms require much less hauling than crafts, being 3x the price per unit, and training a mechanic is much more useful than training a stonecrafter. Trading with prepared meals is even better, although you have to manage their storage and transport carefully or else they'll spoil. (You can't leave them in the depot between caravans, for instance, and they have a tendency to spoil before someone gets around to hauling them out of the kitchen.) -Maximus
- This is fine and dandy for later on in your fortress when you have highly skilled mechanics and access to better stone, but for your first anvil, when your mechanic is at best proficient (and more likely untrained) and you have to trade with whatever mechanisms you have available, using them as trade goods falls through very quickly. A dolomite mechanism weighs closer to 350Γ and is less valuable than an obsidian one. Later on, when you are trading massive quantities of heavy stuff like wood from each caravan, you might be able to do this, but early on it's too much of a gamble. -ThunderClaw
- Therefore, mugs. You even get the bonus of three mugs per rock. But mugs aren't the best trade good in the world - sooner or later you're going to want to import giant cave spider silk cloth and thread so you can make socks from them so you can use them as trade goods instead. Everybody loves smooth silk socks, and they're, at worst, worth 600☼. -GreyMario
- This is fine and dandy for later on in your fortress when you have highly skilled mechanics and access to better stone, but for your first anvil, when your mechanic is at best proficient (and more likely untrained) and you have to trade with whatever mechanisms you have available, using them as trade goods falls through very quickly. A dolomite mechanism weighs closer to 350Γ and is less valuable than an obsidian one. Later on, when you are trading massive quantities of heavy stuff like wood from each caravan, you might be able to do this, but early on it's too much of a gamble. -ThunderClaw
- Well, no; I've been able to do all my trading with mechanisms in my current fort, buying as much as 30,000☼ from each caravan. The key is to get a top-skill mechanic and use high-value stone (ideally, obsidian). One masterpiece obsidian mechanism is worth 1,080☼ and only weighs 167Γ. You might have to buy some cheap but heavy goods first to clear some space (bars, pets, cages, etc.), but even the elves can handle the weight as long as the mechanisms are pricey enough. Mechanisms require much less hauling than crafts, being 3x the price per unit, and training a mechanic is much more useful than training a stonecrafter. Trading with prepared meals is even better, although you have to manage their storage and transport carefully or else they'll spoil. (You can't leave them in the depot between caravans, for instance, and they have a tendency to spoil before someone gets around to hauling them out of the kitchen.) -Maximus
- Mechanisms as trade goods are not feasible. They weigh too much. Merchants will decline the trades just because their animals can't haul that much. Crafts, toys, and mugs are very viable, as are meals. Anything that turns a significant wealth profit is fine for buying your first anvil. 1000 value is not that much in the grand scheme of things, by the time you get to 100 dwarves you will probably be trafficing 5000 value with each caravan. -ThunderClaw
- 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
- Seconding cooking over crafting. I generally have a 5x5 plot of plump helmets, which I brew then cook, which will feed an arbitrarily high amount of dwarves and allow me to buy pretty much whatever I want. -Vaniver
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
- 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
- Nobles need their own quarter away from everything because they get the unhappy thoughts about their 'lessers' pretentious lodgings'. Integrating them into normal society is too much of a pain to bother with. Plus making a designated noble's quarter means they're easier to kill if the need arises. As nearly as I can tell, the Tax Collector, Hammerer, and Dungeon Master all consider themselves fairly equal, while the Baron/Count/Duke and consorts consider themselves a step up, with the King/Queen and consort a step above that. Build four 3x3 rooms for each low rung noble (bedroom, office, dining room, tomb), 7 slightly larger (3x4, 4x4, your call) rooms for the second rung (2 bedrooms, 2 dining rooms, 2 tombs, 1 office. The consort does not require an office), and 7 still larger rooms for the king/queen and consort (again, 2 bedrooms, 2 dining rooms, 2 tombs, 1 office). Turn off all engravers except for your one best one for engraving; engravings are extremely variable in impressiveness so you need to keep the worker constant and count on the fact that the rooms are larger to keep the net wealth from engravings from varying too much. Finally, if you really want to keep your nobles stupidly happy, dig out a 1x2 area near their bed, smooth it, and place an Aluminum or Platinum statue next to a stone statue (import aluminum from the dwarven caravan if you can't find any. It's only about 250 for some nuggets and it's much lighter than platinum). Make sure the statues are a part of the bedroom. The noble will now admire his 'own completely sublime tastefully arranged statue' every time he wakes up, for a massive +50 mood spike that can take a dwarf from unhappy to ecstatic. -ThunderClaw
Pets and food animals
- Cats. Having a few cats will not only boost the adopted dwarfs' mood but will also make your food safer (due to a lack of vermin). However, with how many cats immigrants bring as pets, it's practically impossible to control them indefinitely. The resulting excessive numbers of cats can cause framerate issues, though this is less of an issue then in previous versions.
- Dogs. Bringing 2 dogs along with your starting caravan and train any full grown dogs you get into war animals. Assigning war animals to civilians is one of the best ways to increase security. You may choose instead to have civilians train their own war animals. Training is fairly quick even at dabbling and trained animals follow their trainer while still remaining strays (no sadness if the animal dies, but no immediate mood boost from being comforted if unhappy).
- Shamelessly kill off newborn pets to prevent overpopulation. Especially useful on cats. Or put them in a cage as an emergency food source. Caged animals do not breed, block paths or waste CPU power on pathfinding.
- 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. 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. Slaughtering each dog gives 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. Also you can slaughter dogs at whim, whereas you can't slaughter an owned pet.
- Alternatively, dogs are generally a lot better used as war animals, even if you have a lot of them. Every war animal you have is another defender against goblins, and quite possibly one fewer lost dwarf. If you want an emergency food supply, make a 5x5 room and honeycomb it with ropes. Assign beasts of burden like musk oxen, horses, and the like to them. Chained animals will breed, so you will get offspring, but they will all stay in their little corrall and make finding animals to slaughter very easy.
- Simply put a meeting zone across the entrance to your fort, which will cause stray animals (including war dogs) to wander around in that meeting zone. Any thief is instantly turned into kibble, and they're quite handy at assisting with smaller sieges too.
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
- Don't neglect armor. Leather armor is incredibly easy to make, and masterwork leather armor is as good as iron. Turtle shell can also make very good armor. -ThunderClaw
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
- War dogs actualy miss thieves about half the time they reveal them if they can't pursue. Tying a beast of burden to a chain will scare thieves away (they bug out the second they are revealed) with less of a net affect on security. War dogs on chains are as good as dead in a siege. -ThunderClaw
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
- Interim/second-line defence layout requiring minimal man-hours to assemble; mine out one long entrance tunnel, with doors and fortifications at the very end, one line of traps just inside the entrance to soften them up and another line in front of the defences to mop up whatever your marksdwarves can't kill off in time. Optionally carve fortifications out of both sides of this passage, screened by traps or even a channel, and establish a crossfire. "Crossbows to the left of us, crossbows to the right of us..." -Jake Grey
- Other common security ideas can be a retractable bridge or a pit of grates that drop into a drowning chamber or a cave of spikes. Always make 2 or 3 defensible positions to fall back to in case one is compromised. -ThunderClaw
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
- Use a beast of burden instead. Dogs are better spent protecting important civilians. -ThunderClaw
Weapon traps and marksdwarves = survival for most -wendigo
- But not siege-breaking. Remember that unhappiness kills as many dwarves as goblin weapons, so if you turtle up for too long, you'll find your dwarves emoing themselves to death. -ThunderClaw
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
- Fuel is very hard to mass produce. A large-scale charcoal producing is infeasible because of the distance required for hauling each fallen tree. Coke production is entirely dependant on how much coke-stone you can find. You can request charcoal from the human and dwarven caravans, and coke-stone from the dwarven caravan, but they never bring very much (enough for about 25-30 bars of fuel a year). Glass is nice for producing gems for strange moods on demand (raw glass counts as a gem), but without magma it's not a good use of your limited fuel supplies - metal weapons and armor are much better. -ThunderClaw
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
- If you're being beseiged by goblins, you can melt down their armour for iron. -Tenebrais
- I have to agree here. If you have a magma source. Each goblin gives about 3 bars of metal when you melt down the equipment. Also, dwarven and human caravans bring maybe 10 bars or more each if you give it a high priority. Since you only need iron (/steel) for weapons and armour, you can easily survive on a map without iron ore. -Qwertyu
- You can replicate iron with high-quality bone and leatherworkers. Masterwork bone/shell and leather armor is as strong as normal-quality iron equipment. Goblins never carry more than regular quality gear, so if you have a legendary bone or leatherworker you're competing on equal ground unless the goblins are routinely employing steel. Large-scale melting of equipment to get iron is infeasible without magma because each melt job consumes a unit of fuel, which is rare enough as it is. You can import obsidian (much cheaper and lighter than iron ores, so you see more of it per caravan) from the dwarven caravan to get steel-quality swords and use stonecrafting to back up your marksdwarves. While you will not have the grand dwarven military of legend, your armed forces can get along just fine without iron. -ThunderClaw
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
- Import barrels from the human and dwarven caravans. They're cheap, come ready made, and eliminate the need to use wood on them. -ThunderClaw
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 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
- I don't think bringing more than plump helmet and pig tail to start out with is nessecery. It will be a number of years before you have the labor to mill the other plants in any sort of volume, and seeds are cheap and easy to buy from the caravans. It's a bad idea to come with only 1 seed of your critical pig tail and plump helmet crops, though; if disaster strikes and you somehow do not reclaim the seeds you need from the grown product (accidental cooking, wilting, etc), you're completely out of luck and your dwarves will have to either forage or starve to death. -ThunderClaw
Immigrants are good for fishing that pesky carp. (Well not really. But they are good for fishing nonetheless.) -blakyoshi7
- If your dwarves need to go to water that contains carp, longnose gar, or other ravenous river creatures, any goon given a crossbow and stationed at least one tile away from the river can keep a fair region of river clear of animals, given a little while. Remember to turn off chasing so they don't run up to the river and get dragged in. -Heron
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
- One-crop farming will create a chronic "tired of the same old food/booze" thought in all your dwarves, and hamstring your ability to make higher quality finished goods to keep the peace internally and become a proper economic powerhouse. Variety is the spice of life. After you have a steady, reliable base of plump helmets so starvation is not a problem, expand into other crops, especially Cave Wheat and Dimple Cups. -ThunderClaw
Wood. You don't really NEED a heavily forested 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
- 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
- You can also request wood from the human and dwarven caravans, and they'll routinely bring 30-40 logs per year. Unless you have a voracious wood burning demand, the caravans alone can provide more than enough for your needs. Many times I only cut trees to clear for building after the first couple years in my fortresses. -ThunderClaw
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
- Wrong. Glass industry requires many bags. -Someone-else
- Arguably, if you've got a use for cloth in bulk then you've probably got an export good valuable enough to buy it with and still turn a profit, though a local supply to top it up couldn't hurt. -Jake Grey
- Bags are also needed for milling. Mass importation of cloth allows you to sew images into captured goblin equipment to naturalize it (make it OK to offer it to traders) and allows you to produce ropes and bags at a whim. Plus, buying the bin from traders means you can use less wood on building your own bins. Be sure to buy a decent supply (5-10 parcels) of silk cloth as well. Strange moods will often request it and it's very rare you'll be able to produce it on your own.
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
- Magma also allows you to mass-produce metal weaponry and armor for export or use in weapon traps. It also allows you to process ore as you find it instead of waiting for a demand to smelt and craft it (since fuel use isn't a problem).
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 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
If you find yourself on a map with an abundance of metal ore and coal or magma, save your wood for beds, ash and the odd strange mood and make as much as you can from metal; it's usually a lot easier to defend and safely access a vein of cassiterite or a coal seam during sieges than a whole forest. Metal bins also make trading with the elves a bit less laborious. (NB: I would strongly advise you to use up your less useful metals such as tin first, even if you're practically buried in magnetite; a sudden run on crossbow bolts could come at the very worst moment.) -Jake Grey
Speaking of which, don't underestimate the usefulness of elven merchants, as the one thing they're reliable for bringing is cloth, and lots of it. Unless you forbid the use of pig tails and/or rope reed for brewing, your still and farmer's workshop will be in direct competition for the same supply, which can lead to shortfalls in one or the other. Apart from the fact that running out of cloth is infinitely preferable to running out of booze, it's also better value for money as an import. -Jake Grey
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 - Blocks for roads and floors (More brick-y than block-y)
-Flok Speargrabber
Metal is good for:
Weapons - Armor - Magma-safe stuff - 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
- However, dwarves get fairly powerful happy thoughts from satisfying acquisitions and fairly powerful unhappy thoughts from having their clothes fall off. There is usually plenty of labor in a larger fortress to clothe everyone, so unless you have an FPS issue there's no reason not to do it. -ThunderClaw
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
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-NameHere
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Formatting
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WIP
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