User:Mixtrak/Strategy/part 1

This first section of the strategy guide covers world generation, site and civilisation choice, provisioning and skill allotment.

Worldgen, Site and Civ Choice

This step is rather straightforward, and well-covered in the wiki. First, read the article on basic World Generation. Then, create your world, using the following settings:

World size	History	Number of Civilisations	Maximum Number of Sites	Number of Beasts	Natural Savagery	Mineral Occurrence
Small	Short	High	Medium	Medium	Medium	Frequent

This should result in a well-balanced mix of challenge (hostile civilisations, beasts, savage animals) and opportunity (minerals, trading civilisations) for the beginning player. The world should also generate and the game run fairly fast on a variety of machines; note that these aspects of performance tend to degrade exponentially with world size and complexity.

You may wish to consult the Map legend to understand the result a bit better. When you're done, hit Enter to save the world and return to the main menu.

Now that your world is done baking you could, if you desired, dive right in with Dwarf fortress mode. However, I prefer to learn a bit more about the various dwarven civilisations before I choose one to play. If you'd like to do the same, you want some third-party tools (otherwise skip a section).

Examining the World

Install DFhack, and then Legends Viewer. Follow the instructions to get Legends Viewer working - it's fairly straightforward and easy to use.

The initial page should show some summary statistics about the various civilisations. Pick a dwarven civilisation you like the sound of, and which has a middling to high number of citizens (five hundred is probably a good minimum, to ensure you get caravans and migrants). Click on that civilisation and you'll be taken to more information about them. Continue to explore different civilisations and their stories - tragic or heroic rulers, battles, lost fortresses and so on - until you've settled on one. I like to choose a civilisation I can build a story around, and which gives my fortress a purpose - strengthening a frontier against aggressors, for example, or expanding territory, or whatever. Then go back into Dwarf Fortress and start fortress mode. Be aware that choosing a civilisation with active conflicts increases your dosage of vitamin F. And even if your civilisation is not at war after worldgen, wars often begin in the short burn-in time before starting your fortress, and also soon after you begin playing. The first caravan often brings quite dire news.

I should note here that DFHack starts automatically alongside Dwarf Fortress, but for the rest of this guide I'll assume you're not using any third-party applications. It's easy to switch DFHack off - just rename "SDL.dll" (which actually came from your DFHack install) to something like "SDL_dfhack.dll" and then rename "SDLreal.dll" to "SDL.dll". Reversing this process turns DFHack on again.

Choosing a site

Once you're ready to choose a civilisation, read some advice on Choosing a Good Site. It's worth taking your time with this! There are a lot of important considerations. You want it not too dangerous, useful temperature, flora and fauna (especially trees), flowing water of some kind, fair expectation of caravans and migrants, no aquifer (useful but compelx/dangerous), all the metals and flux you could desire, a few layers of soil, and ideally also some sand and clay. It's also worth checking your proximity to your own civilisation, trading partners, and potential belligerents (in particular, maybe avoid necromancer towers for now).

Embark loadout

Once you have a good site, it's time to kit out your dwarves. The loadout below is focused on the equally urgent needs of any early fortress: security and self-sufficiency. You need to excavate your fortress, secure its entrance, and obtain sufficient food and drink. There are a few more long-term considerations as well, particularly as regards to crucial supplies which are, for one reason or another, difficult to manufacture early in the game. You have the strangely specific sum of 1,504 copper Dwarfbucks (sometimes written as "DB"s or with the symbol "☼") to allocate between supplies and skills.

Supplies

Let's first look at supplies we can do without:

•  You'll only need a single copper battle-axe for your wood cutter, so remove one of the defaults
•  Ditch any crafted wood items (buckets, crutches, splints, stepladders etc.). These are extremely quick and easy to make.
• Similarly, remove all quivers. We'll get around to a leather industry soon enough.
• Remove all your pig tail thread, cloth, bags and ropes. Pig tail fibre is really expensive! In its place, we'll the cheap stuff: yarn (see below)

Many advanced players also like to remove the iron anvil and trade for one early on. However, making an anvil requires an anvil, and although you can usually trade for one early enough it's safest to bring your own rather than rely on this. That way any accident or threat which prevents you trading won't utterly cripple your metal industry.

Now for some useful items which are somewhat difficult to obtain in early-game:

•  Take three gypsum plaster, three yarn thread and three yarn cloth in case we get unlucky and need emergency supplies for a field hospital.
•  Bring four yarn ropes: two for tying up guard dogs, one for building a well, and one for making a traction bench (again, for the hospital).
• Bring ten yarn bags for storing seeds; our textile industry will take a while to get off the ground.

You'll want some animals, too. Unfortunately, we can't just bring a single male-female pair of animals we want to breed, because it [i]is[/i] possible for animals to be exclusively homosexual or asexual. We'll need two of each sex for redundancy.

• Bring two male and two female sheep, both adults. Sheep are the most versatile livestock - they don't require a lot of pasture, and they are the only starting livestock which can provide wool, milk, meat, bone, hide, and horn (llamas and alpacas are similar, but without the horn).
•  Similarly, bring two adult male and female war dogs. War dogs serve two important functions. First, we will be using them as guard dogs to detect and frighten off thieves. Later, when a few of their pups have grown, we can train more war dogs and assign them to dwarves for protection.
•  Again, take two adult peacocks and peahens. An egg industry is very simple and self-contained way to ensure a steady supply of food. Blue peafowl are a balanced choice: they live an extremely long time so you won't have to worry about replacing them for a while, grow to maximum size quickly in case you decide to use excess birds in the Meat industry, and have a moderate but consistent clutch size. Many other birds are also perfectly appropriate.
•  Bring a single male cat. Cats kill vermin and so protect your food stocks. Their population can be difficult to control, however, so using a tom cat allows gelding.

You should have about ☼443 remaining.

Skills

Now it's time to assign skills to your dwarves, which will determine which labours they will carry out in your fortress. The following list covers all the essential core skills for a self-sufficient fort, and matches them by workload (so a high-demand job, like masonry, is matched with a seldom-needed job, like architecture).

• Two dwarves will get the maximum 5 points of mining skill and nothing else. Underground space is a precious commodity in an early fort, and you will not be able to spare your miners for other labours for some time - especially if you embark with only a thin layer of soil, in which case you may soon be cursing every meal, siesta and mug of booze that your overworked pick-swingers dare to indulge.
•  One dwarf should get 5 points in mechanics and 5 in stonecrafting. Your mechanic will construct mechanisms (of course), bridges, levers, and traps - all essential in sealing and protecting the early fort. Stonecrafting will, among other things, turn abundant stone into food storage and trade goods.
•  Another dwarf should get 5 points in masonry and architecture. Architecture is used in designing certain buildings - principally, for the early game, trade depots, bridges, and wells - and well-designed buildings make dwarves happy. In any case, the skill is required to build these things, and it's rather difficult to train: why not start off Proficient? But this dwarf's main job will be masonry. Stone blocks are going to be necessary in great abundance for all manner of building projects, as well as sundry stone tables, grates, hatches, chairs, doors, and so on.
•  Another dwarf should get 5 points in each of wood cutting and carpentry. In the early game, your carpentry needs are, apart from some odds and ends, mostly confined to storage bins and cage traps, so in fact your carpenter needn't be particularly busy at first. In which case, they can spend their time happily wielding the Axe of Elvish Irritation and getting as much timber on the ground as possible before those blasted tree-huggers can upbraid you for the senseless slaughter of nature's precious children, or whatever.
•  Nearly there. Another dwarf should get 5 points in each of herbalist and brewer. Although your dwarves absolutely MUST NOT run out of booze, for various reasons you won't want your brewer working 24/7 at first, so your brewer should have a fair bit of time to frolic in the meadows collecting posies of amaranths and baskets of apples to supplement your stocks while your fortress's farms are coming online.
•  Finally, a dwarf should get 5 points of planter and 5 of cook. Now, it'll be a little while before you get farms and a kitchen up and running, but it doesn't hurt to have a general oddbody hauling stuff hither and thither early in the game. Your herbalist and egg-layers should soon supply the ingredients for your kitchen in any case, and once the farms come on-line this skill mix represents a good balance of labour time. Cooked meals have many benefits - they're worth a packet in trade if you can spare them, are easier to store, make more things edible, and can add to dwarven happiness.

Once you've assigned all these skills, you should have a few DBs left over. Go ahead, buy yourself something nice. Don't spend it all in one place - but I will point out that despite my earlier nonchalance about victuals, no fortress ever failed by having too much food (including seeds) and booze…

Other considerations

You'll notice there are no military skills in this list. In a fairly benign embark, you can usually go at least a year or two without needing much of a military, and if you do attract unwanted attention, then many of these unpredictable threats are just as likely to eat your Proficient Axedwarf as they are to succumb to them anyway. That being the case, this strategy relies on barriers and traps to overcome any surprise early-game fun. If things go unexpectedly sideways before the defences are in place, we have some ways of dealing with that in the next section.

Some of these pairings might not make a lot of sense at first. For example, why wouldn't you separate your carpentry from your wood-cutting, so there's a steady stream of wood coming in and products going out? Because carpentry products aren't actually needed so much early in the game so it's more important to get trees on the ground, for later. There are certainly other ways to match labours: for example, any two of herbalism, cook, planter and brewer should make a pretty well-balanced division of labour. But the setup given above is a solid way to make sure your basic needs are met as quickly and efficiently as possible in the early game. Techniques like giving moodable skills, raw-material embarks and jump-starting a metal industry are more advanced.

As for which dwarves are suited for which labour, that's complicated. Check the dwarves' Thoughts and Preferences pages. If they like a material or product associated with a particular skill (e.g. oak wood, mugs, quarry bush leaves) then it's a good bet to match those up. Other characteristics can also be important - you ideally want miners who are slow to tire, for example. The wiki pages for individual skills list the attributes they require and train, if you're interested. On the whole, however, it's not likely to make an enormous difference. By all means bury yourself in the wiki but if you haven't the patience then nobody will blame you. I do cover the subject of dwarf management in more detail later.

So, embark! If you need to, you can save the game when you arrive and pick it up later.