User:Calite

This guide should be finished in a day or two.

Jumping into Dwarf Fortress Mode

This guide hopefully helps one get into dwarf fortress and get a fort going without imposing any particular way to play.

Prior Consideration

Before playing, realize you will need these for success:

• Time and patience
  • You will fail(repeatedly) at first, and a good fortress takes a long time to build
• Planning and long-term thinking
  • Only with these will you be able to make a lasting fortress
• Open-Mindedness
  • Whether it's because dwarf fortress often does impossible and absurd things, or because there's a better way to accomplish your goals, you need to be willing to learn new rules and new ways of thinking.

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

One More Thing

• Play some adventurer mode.
  • It's very different from Dwarf Fortress, but at least gets you used to the default tileset and the complexity of the game.
• Don't be afraid of the wiki
  • Read about anything in the game you don't understand or are confused about.

Fortress Survival

No matter where you embark or what you embark with, there are a few things a fort needs for long term survival:

• Food
• Drinks
• Safety

Food

Food is necessary to keep dwarves alive.

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

• Fishing
  • Very simple, requires only one dwarf assigned to fish, a fishery, and one dwarf assigned to fish cleaning.
  • The stability of this source of food depends on how much water you have, how many dwarves you need to feed, and luck(sometimes it seems like none of your water sources have fish, sometimes it seems like they never end)
  • Fishing requires no oversight or extra resources after you have the fishery, it may not be the best choice for a main food source but it is a great source of extra food, and some things that can be caught(such as turtles) drop bones or other such things that have additional usages.
• Hunting
  • Perhaps the most complicated source of food, requiring a hunter with a quiver, bows, and an arrow and a butcher's shop where the meat may be butchered.
  • This food source's stability depends on the amount of animals on the map and the skill of your hunter(a bad hunter will just waste arrows for a few seasons before killing something)
  • A great plus of hunting is that almost everything your hunter brings back will drop bones and other things besides meat. Since bones can be made into arrows, this can make hunting self-circulating, as well as providing materials for crafts and other usages.
• Farming
  • Somewhere between fishing and hunting in complexity, it requires a farm plot, seeds and a dwarf assigned to farm.
  • Stability is variable depending on what plant(s) you are growing.
    • Some plants grow outside, while others grow inside
      • Currently, indoor farms must be made wet, that is, water must be applied to the ground where the farm is to be. There are several ways to achieve this, ranging in difficulty and safety.
    • Plants have different growing seasons and growing rates
    • Some plants don't even produce food, while others must be cooked or process(Read the page on plants for more information)
  • Farming has several additional benefits.
    • Seeds come from the usage of the product of the plant. This means that eating, cooking, or brewing a plant product will provide the seeds needed to grow more.
    • Many plants can be brewed into alcohol. More on the importance of this in the drinks section.
• Plant Gathering
  • A very simple way to get food, it requires a dwarf with Plant Gathering assigned and an area designated for plant gathering.
  • Plants grow slowly naturally, and an unskilled dwarf won't even get anything from most of the plants it picks (but still destroys the plant).
  • It provides food from outdoor plants. When used, this food will provide seeds that you can use to start outdoor farms.
• Trading
  • Trading requires a trade depot, things you want to trade to the traders, and a dwarf assigned to trade (a broker, usually).
  • The stability of trading for food depends entirely on the caravans.
    • A caravan from each civilization that can reach your location (and is not at war with you) will come in a specific season (at most one civilization per season).
    • Additionally, the caravans may bring a lot of food or a little. This can be influenced by requesting that they bring food next time (when you meet with their representative), but you cannot influence this for the first time you trade with them.
  • Traders often bring plants and seeds you cannot obtain from your environment through plant gathering.
• Preparing Meals
  • Preparing Meals requires someone assigned to cook and a kitchen, as well as 2 or more pieces of food.
  • Cooking uses more food than it provides, making it completely counter-productive to providing more food
  • Prepared meals have a much higher value than the food used to make them, especially if the cook is highly skilled
    • Eating a prepared meal gives a dwarf a happy thought, making them great for morale
    • This also makes it great for trading to caravans for other things.

As far as I know, farming is the most common source of food in forts due to its high stability once you get it going. Personally I mainly use hunting, farming, and fishing to ensure stability and variety.

Drinks

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

• Dwarves are alcohol-dependent
  • Lack of alcohol will make a dwarf work and move slower; on a large scale this can bring a fortress to a virtual halt
• A dwarf will not drink the same type of alcohol forever
  • They will deprive themselves of alcohol if there is only one choice (bringing us back to the first bullet).
• An injured dwarf cannot drink alcohol
  • They must have water, or they will die.
• Dwarves always prioritize alcohol over water
  • If all other rules are met, then a dwarf will not go out of his way to obtain water (unless he is bringing it to an injured dwarf)

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

• Brewing
  • Alcohol can be brewed from plant products, which can be obtained via plant gathering or farming
    • Brewing produces seeds
• Trading
  • The rules for this are exactly the same as the rules for trading for food.

Safety

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

• Dangers
  • Cave-Ins
    • If an area of rock is no longer connected to the rock below it, it will fall, killing or hurting anyone nearby.
  • Fire
    • Dwarves don't understand the dangers of fire, so things can go downhill awfully fast.
  • Flooding
    • Water quickly becomes your worst enemy when it fills your dwellings. Do all water related projects carefully
  • Magma
    • Destroys most things, and catches stuff on fire.
• Passive Defense
  • Traps are your best friends
    • Some creatures are sneaky and avoid traps very well.
• Active Defense
  • Army
    • A well trained, well equipped, well managed army will take care of almost all potential assailants before they cause problems
  • Animals
    • Some domestic animals attack enemies, and all can see them and alert others of them

Essential Resources

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

Basics:

• Wood
  • Wood is important for most forts because barrels, buckets, and bins can only be made from wood or metal(which weighs much more). It's also useful in construction
• Stone
  • Often the most abundant and most used resource, stone is useful for construction and crafts.

Most other resources will be skimmed over in Industry; otherwise, look them up on the wiki.

Digging & Construction

A large part of dwarf fortress is reshaping your environment to fit your needs.

Digging

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

Digging:

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

Construction

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

Problems of Construction:

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

Benefits:

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

Industry

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

Crafting

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

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

Metalsmithing

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

Ambition

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

Check these pages for ideas:

• Megaprojects
• DF2010:Stupid_dwarf_trick
• DF2010:Mega_construction

My Fortresses

I've decided to start keeping a log of my fortresses and their important events. Read along if you want.