v0.31:Stonegears/Digging

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Before doing anything else, make sure to recenter on the wagon with F1, and make sure the game is paused (Space to toggle pausing on and off).

Designations

You can do many useful things in your fort with designations. A designation means (for the most part) "a wide area order to your dwarves to alter your site". You can access the designation menu using d from the main menu:

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Press Esc to exit from menus

Lets use downward stairways as an example. Use j to select Downward Stairway, then use the arrow keys to move the X cursor to the south of the wagon. Press Enter, then move the cursor one tile to the east. Where you pressed Enter will be a blinking +, which is the anchor for the designation. Now move the cursor four more to the east, then five south, then hit Enter. There will now be a six-by-six area of downward stair designations (NOTE: don't unpause yet):

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The anchor and the cursor act as opposite corners of a rectangle which gets filled in with the selected designation type (just hit Enter twice to designate a single tile). Note that the tiles containing trees have no designations, since you can't dig stairs if there's a tree in the way, and a designation command will only select tiles where the current order is appropriate. The only feedback you'll get on how a designation command went are the highlighted graphics in the closeup view and the brown shading in the map view; if no tiles were selected then you'll get no warning or error message.

Since designations are merely orders to your dwarves, they're easy to undo if none of your dwarves have carried them out yet (which they won't have, if you kept the game paused). If you make a mistake or changed your mind you can undo a designation with x to select Remove Designation. Since the stairs designation we just did was only an example, we want to get rid of them all. Press Enter when the cursor is at one corner of the square of stairs, move the cursor to the other corner and press Enter again; all the designations will be gone. The remove designation mode can be used for more than just fixing mistakes. For instance, you could designate a large rectangle and then un-designate a small hole in the center, which would be easier than putting multiple separate designations up around a hole.

Note that in designations mode you can move the cursor around with the mouse by right-clicking a spot, though you still have to press Enter to mark the area to designate. Right-clicking doesn't move the cursor in any other mode, just for designations.

Cutting trees and harvesting shrubs

Each of your dwarves can be doing a separate task independently of the others, so we'll set a few of them to working on the surface while two of the others dig around underground. Use t to select Chop Down Trees and move the cursor ten tiles northwest of the wagon. Press Enter, Shift-→ twice, Shift-↓ twice, then Enter.

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This will designate a 21x21 area around the wagon for clear cutting. You could select the entire surface for logging, but since your dwarves are all morons your lumberjack would go all the way to the northwest corner of your site and start cutting trees there, rather than cutting trees closer to the center like a sensible person; this also has the advantage of being a smaller area to undesignate. Trees instantly turn into logs once cut without the need for further processing, and leave behind no stumps.

Now use p to choose Gather Plants and select the same area, to designate shrubs to be harvested. Note that "shrub" is really just shorthand for "wild growing harvestable plant", since shrubs can yield anything from strawberries to wheat to tubers.

Digging

Now we'll designate the real down stairways (j) that we actually want, since our dwarves are going to live and work underground. This time, however, we'll use the mouse. Clicking the mouse cursor over a tile will choose just that single tile for the selected designation, rather than defining a rectangle; dragging the mouse while holding down the button will select all the tiles the mouse cursor crosses. Note that the X cursor will just sit there, not moving in response to what the mouse cursor does.

Okay, we want a west-east row of three down stairways just south of the wagon (see the notes section for why three, and also for weirdness about digging through sand). Once you've designated them, use Esc to exit the designate menu, then press Space to (finally) unpause the game. Your lumberjack will pick up an axe from the wagon, your two miners will pick up their pickaxes, and then they'll go to work. Once the three stairways have been dug, pause the game again with Space and go down one level (>) to see what's happened:

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You'll note that there are no stairs one level down, and that the only thing that's happened is that the tiles directly under the stairs have been revealed. This is because no designations cause results that cross z-levels (except for channeling and ramps), and your dwarves are too stupid to realize that the stairs should go to someplace, leaving it up to you to designate the underground stairs. Note that you do not want to designate another set of down stairs on the revealed tiles: the direction of the stairs indicates which direction the dwarves taking it go, so a set of down stairs would mean dwarves below the surface would be unable to move up to the surface; further, the two sets of stairs would be disconnected, so dwarves on the surface would be unable to move down underground. You could use up stairways (u), but then the next set of down stairways to the next lower level would have to be just north or just south of those up stairways. Instead, use up/down stairways (i), since using these will allow you to make a central stairwell that goes straight up and down, rather one that zigzags every z-level.

Before unpausing the game again, put a single up/down staircase designation off to the west (left) of the other three, with at least one tile of blank space between them:

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Unpause for long enough to dig out the three-wide stairwell, and the result will be this:

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Note that your miners have not dug down from the surface to the remaining up/down stairway designation of to the left, since there's no down stairway over it on the surface, and they haven't dug sideways to it from the stairwell since it's not right next to an already dug-out tile. You can use this behavior to lay out mining designations you don't intend to actually dig until later, both as a reminder to yourself to do the digging later, and to help visually lay out your digging plan, so you don't end up digging where you don't want to.

Now (making sure the game is paused) chose the Mine designation (d) and lay out a three tile wide west-east hallway and a north-south hallway. The mining designation will replace the up/down stairway designation.

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However, for now we only need the east hallway, so use undesignate to isolate the other three hallways from the stairwell, so your dwarves won't dig them out yet.

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North of the east hallway we'll put a 5x11 area for farming. And while we're doing designations, we'll put down some unconnected 3x3 areas which will later be used for workshops.

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And some storage areas connected to the workshops.

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Finally, unpause and let your miners dig.

Next tutorial page

Stockpiles.

Notes

• The fortress layout used in this tutorial is just one of many ways of laying out a fortress. This layout is used because it's not too complex and is reasonably efficient.
• The stairwell and hallways are three tiles wide to make it easier for dwarves and pets to move past one another. They could be one tile wide, but then it slows traffic down when two dwarves moving in opposite directions have to squeeze past each other. Making it two tiles wide would suffice in most circumstances, and we make it three wide to make the chances of traffic congestion very small.
• Digging through sand in Dwarf Fortress is very strange, since your dwarves use pickaxes instead of shovels, surrounding sand doesn't fall in to fill up holes, you can carve stairs into it, and the sand dug through merely disappears rather than having to be moved elsewhere. This is because soil (including clay and dirt) mostly acts like stone.
• You usually don't have to worry about cave-ins, since the cave-in physics simulation is extremely simplistic and unrealistic. As an example, a 50 story tall upside-down pyramid made entirely of lead could be supported by just a single bar of soap.