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23a:Important advice
| This article is about an older version of DF. |
The following are a few important things every aspiring dwarven slavemaster should know, but might not even know to look for.
Quick guide to controls
Fortress construction
Mining
Cave-ins can only happen if your dwarves mine out an area containing a 7x7 block with no supports or unmined walls.
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For more diagrams and explanations of how to safely excavate, see Template:Ls.
Entrance
Give yourself room for your entrance hall, so that you can better install defenses against sieges. Moats (filled Template:Ls) with drawbridges are nice, as are rooms lining your entrance hallway with Template:Ls and Template:L so that anything coming in will be shot at. These defenses aren't really needed early on, but plan ahead. The space for barracks can be used as communal housing in your first year, before larger apartment blocks are dug.
Connectivity
Larger hallways make for faster travel. Hallways a single square wide will cause traffic jams. Hallways two squares wide will work well enough for low Template:L areas, but your dwarf and animal population can quickly rise above 100, clogging your main thoroughfare. In a mature fortress, hallways five or six squares wide may be necessary for efficient movement. Plan ahead. Wide hallways can also be used for Template:Ls, Template:Ls, and other rooms until you set up dedicated work areas.
Workshops
Placing Template:L near workshops will help dwarves work faster, harder, and happier.
Concentrate industry together, and keep stockpiles nearby to minimize running about. 5x5 rooms with workshops in the center allow high concentration of workshops while still allowing free movement between them. Placing every workshop in its own room will help to isolate things like Template:L and dwarves in Template:Ls.
Building construction
When possible, don't use light Template:L (Moonstone, Limestone, or Marble) or dark stone (Obsidian, Jet, or Onyx) or wood to construct Template:Ls; use rocks (pretty much everything else) instead. Light and dark stones are more Template:L and should only be used if you need something of higher value (Template:L's furniture, for example). Limestone is essential in Template:Lmaking; Template:L, besides being even more expensive than other light and dark stones, can be used to make swords which do 133% damage (equalling Template:L).
Farming
If the Template:L floods your fortress when you strike it, go ahead and Template:L in the areas that were flooded for the first year rather than trying to set up the floodgate system and then farm. You'll gain lots of valuable farming time that way; while it doesn't take so long to dig out the farming area, it can take a painfully long time for your dwarves to get around to installing floodgates and levers. If you strike Template:L approximately one screen's width in from the mountain face, you have probably reached the river. Before digging any further, you may wish to clear out a space for your farm, on the chance that it will flood.
There's no need to surround your farms with walls, unless you really want to. Dug Template:Ls block floodwaters as well as wall, while not getting in the way of dwarf movement.
Quarters
When the Template:L starts up, even the poorest dwarf will want a room with a bed, a cabinet, and a chest. As such, room with three squares of space are probably as small as you'll want to go. Blocks of
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work well for this purpose. There aren't the fanciest of rooms, but a nice dining room can make up for these living conditions in order to create happiness. The walls and doors are technically optional: the rent drops a little when the room isn't enclosed, but otherwise it's still a quite rentable space, even when the rooms overlap. Furthermore, poor dwarves (usually Template:Lers) will have an easier time affording the Template:L for a small room.
Dining room
One of the easiest ways to keep your dwarves happy is to have a nice Template:L. It's far more efficient than making their bedrooms nicer. To start off, as little as a couple of tables and a pair of thrones (don't bother with chairs, wood is too precious) is good enough. When you have more time, detailing the floors and walls can easily vault a sufficiently large dining room to "Legendary" status.
Drinks
The longer your dwarves go without a Template:L, the less work they will do, so make sure they have a steady supply of alcohol. Drinks also increase dwarves' Template:L. If no alcohol is available, dwarves will drink Template:L, either from the indoor or outdoor river, or from Template:Ls; this will keep them from dying of thirst, but increases the likelihood of attacks from Template:Ls like snakemen, frogmen, and lizardmen.
If you manage to get a good farming operation started up early enough, it may be possible to start Template:L before you run out of your initial supplies of alcohol. Dwarves will drink alcohol in preference to water, which means you can potentially go through the entire game without constructing a single well.
Masonry
Anything that can be Template:L, should be: Template:Ls, Template:Ls, Template:Ls, Template:Ls, Template:Ls, Template:Ls, etc. Template:Ls are a good way to remove excess stone from the fortress as they can be stored in Template:Ls.
You can never have enough doors.
Alternatives to military service
Building clusters of Template:Ls wherever creatures may appear (at the fortress's entrance, the Template:L, Template:L, Template:L, and beside any Template:Ls you may have built) will protect your fort quite effectively. Any kind of trap works well; a mix of stone-fall, Template:L, and Template:L traps will protect you best when facing a varied enemy force. A small number of able Template:Ls can soon secure your fortress against most risks it will face.
A single Template:L also has a good chance of severely injuring or killing an average low-grade monster, and several of them together is a threat that would be very unpleasant in Adventure Mode. Train any "Stray Dogs" you have at the Template:Ls and assign them as "work dogs" to any dwarf that may encounter dangerous creatures. War dogs are far more effective in combat than stray dogs and still produce puppies (which will mature into stray dogs which can be trained).
Save often!
Even though it means quitting out and getting back in, this alpha version will crash sooner or later and nothing is worse than losing hours of work, or even entire worlds.
Also make backups of your saves - Just compress or copy the ..\data\save subdirectory where you uncompressed Dwarf Fortress.
Speed issues
If you are having issues with speed in Dwarf Fortress, or are running at a lower speed than the capped default limit which is 100FPS, try turning vsync off in your graphic card options. This should greatly increase your performance in game.
If you do not know the exact speed of your game, you can turn a FPS counter on in the init file located in the \data\init folder from your Dwarf Fortress root directory. Merely editing the file with a simple text editor and scolling down until you see the reference to the FPS counter is enough to suceed, so no coding skill whatsoever is necessary.