40d:How to safely start fortress mode

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.

Firstly, my advice:

Yanlin's tips:

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.

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.

Cats. DO NOT DO IT! IT IS NOT WORTH IT!

Dogs. DO IT! IT IS WORTH IT!

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.

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 forge, you win.

A fort divided does not stand. Make sure your dwarves don't run around like idiots.

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?)

Wood. You don't really NEED a heavily fortested 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.

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.

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.

Micromanagement. Only your core dwarves need it. The rest can just do anything they want.

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.

Fishing. Not worth it.

Hunting. Worth it. But at least give your hunter some armor.

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.)

Cloth. Pig tails can give you all the cloth you need.

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!

Goblin pedophiles and Kobold noobs. One dog on a chain will kill them on contact. Especially a war dog. I usually buy a few chains at the embarkment.

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.

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.

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.

Advice from others:

Flok Speargrabber says:

Dogs are not worth it FPS wise. (I say, put them in cages.)

He also mentions the 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.

Turtles are AWESOME!

Bringing a few seeds of everything along with you is wise. (I suggest bringing plenty of plump helmet and pig tail seeds.)

Wood is useful for: - Beds - Bins - Barrels - Spikes - Pump parts - Windmills and water wheels

Stone is good for: - Statues - Coffers - Cabinets - Coffins - Trade goods - Doors - Floodgates - Chairs - Tables - Statues (Cheaper though) - Blocks for roads and floors (More brick-y than block-y)

Metal is good for: - Weapons - Armor - Coins (HORRIBLE MISTAKE! THIS ADVICE WILL MAKE YOU SUICIDE!) - Magma-safe pumps - Expensive statues - Noble orders, usually, unless they don't want a special metal item

HisMajestyBOB says:

Shamelessly kill off any newborn pets to prevent overpopulation. Especially useful on cats.

blakyoshi7 says:

Immigrants are good for fishing that pesky carp. (Well not really. But they are good for fishing nonetheless.)

Proteus says:

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, if I remember correctly. 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.

when you slaughter them each dog gives you 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.

Vaftrudner says:

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.

He also suggests to abandon farming pig tail and just buy cloth. According to him that's a worthwhile method for saving work in your fortress. From what I understand he just claims it's not worth farming it. Maybe it's worth buying the grown pigtail and processing it yourself.

Jude says:

Don't bring dimple cup or pig tail seeds. They don't yield food and if you want a cloth or dye industry, you can import the seeds later. (Incorrect. As far as I know, seeds give you bags. Free bags = good)

Overdose says:

1 fisherdwarf is a good compliment to any map with a decent amount of water (with exception to rivers which get dwarfs killed). Particularly if you have an aquifer on said map, you can make an indoor fishery that produces upwards of 100 turtles or more a year with just a small one (you could make many of them or large ones if need be), and as we all know, turtles = food+free bones/shells.

Having an unlimited supply of bone bolts, shells for those moods, plus a food supplement isn't that bad at all.

Bringing more then 4 of each type of seed is usually a waste, since through brewing/processing or raw consumption, you'll easily start having overwhelming numbers of seeds.

Hunting isn't worth it unless you have dangerous animals lurking about, in which case the hunter is only providing security for your woodcutters and such. I'd treat them more like a patrolling watchman then for a food source.

Also, contrary to Jude saying, 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.

motorbitch says:

Pigtail makes great booze. It helps keep your dwarves happy and avoid the "Tired of same booze" unhappy thought.

Stonefall traps cause a lot of rearm jobs of they are triggered. If you wish to avoid that use weapon traps. Spiked balls are recommended. They have 3 hits and some crit chance. One of those can almost bring down a demon.

You need cloth only for strange moods. You can easily buy all the cloth you need and have your farmers do more useful work.

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.)

Coal. Bring it.

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.

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.)

kurisukun says:

Forbid at least 2 of every kind of item.

Raw gems, Bones, metal bars, Shells, Cloth (Silk and Plant), shells, bones, etc.

You will be thankful that you didn't accidentally make all your cloth into bags when your weaponsmith starts asking for cloth as a fey mood item.

It may be worth forbidding 3, depending on the item type.

This thread has reached it's goal of becoming great. Now lets try to make this thread even better. One that Today one would be proud of.

Gamerofthegame says:

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.

Bring a cage. Just one. You can use it to stuff your excess creatures. Mainly anything outside two cats and maybe two dogs.

You might want to bring along a rope, too, 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.

Hyndis says:

Dogs are better than cats. Dogs breed just as fast and you can have an army of wardogs slaughtering everything, not to mention they make an incredible thief defense. Simply put a meeting zone across the entrance to your fort, then you'll have all eleventy billion dogs wandering around in that meeting zone. Any thief is instantly turned into kobold kibble, and they're quite handly at dealing with smaller sieges too.

Also you can slaughter dogs at whim, whereas you can't slaughter an owned pet.

Lord Dullard says:

If I embark somewhere with little/no trees I usually bring along the anvil right away so that I can start making metal barrels when I hit a few veins of copper, lead, or another cheap metal. The best way to do this is to bring along the anvil, three bituminous coal, three non-economic stones of any kind, and 2-5 copper bars depending on how many dwarves you want mining. This way you can construct your smelter, wood furnace, and metalsmith's forge, burn the wood from your wagon, convert the coal to fuel, and make copper picks right away.

Ashery says:

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)

wendigo says:

1: Learn to construct walls and other stone buildings. 2: Build a keep around your trade depot/entrance. Fortify with traps and war dogs. Have battlements with arrow slits and train your early armed forces to stand behind said slits raining crossbow death on ambushers and siegers. 3: Have your carpenter(s) craft a steady flow of beds/barrels/bins 4: Have a healthy farm operation going on, as near the surface as possible. 5. Run a still nonstop. Get those seeds, distill that booze.

Remember: Weapon traps and marksdwarves = survival for for most

Metalworking is desirable, but not crucial.

Hyndis says again:

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.

Adding your own advice

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