40d:Your first fortress

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This is a guide to help new players get started on their first fortress and teach them the basics of keeping their dwarves alive. If you have unanswered questions or find given details confusing, please tell us so on the discussion page! Above all else, always remember the Dwarf Fortress motto: "Losing is fun!"

We discuss generating a world, choosing a fortress location, buying skills and items, and playing the first month or so. Setting game initialization options is covered in technical tricks. The advice here is biased for safety; with a little experience you'll do better with strategies customized for your play style and preferred start locations. For more extended treatment of particular subjects, consult the linked pages or the rest of the Dwarf Fortress Wiki.

Generating a world

It all starts here. The first thing to do when starting Dwarf Fortress is to create a world. Later on, you may wish to tweak the parameters to suit your play style, but for now, the Create New World Now! option is an easy way to get into your first game.

The engine will start to create the world--watch it unfold! You might notice that worlds are rejected, sometimes even after the generator begins runing rivers and lakes. This is normal, as the generator seeks a world which meets the criteria for optimum Dwarven Fun.

Generating a standard random world can take several minutes. You can speed things up by selecting Design New World with Parameters instead of Create New World Now! and setting a smaller world size. These worlds tend to be less interesting and replayable, but work well if you want to try new things.

See the article on world generation for a complete guide to the world generation screen.

Choosing a location

The interface

So long as you have at least one world without an active game, you will be able to choose "Start Playing" from the main menu. Select "Dwarf Fortress" and you'll find a four-section window:

You can move around the region map with ←↑→↓, or at 10x speed with Shift+←↑→↓. The region map is immense, at the default size, so there is also a world map that shows you where you are in the world.

Your next goal will be choosing the starting location for your fortress.

Your surroundings

You can discern a lot of information by scrolling through the various modes. The interface has five modes which you cycle through by pressing TAB. In turn, they display the biomes, civilizations, and geology of the local area.

Biomes screen

This display gives you an idea for the environment you'll be parachuting into. Click any of the blue links for more information on the subject. Biomes are determined by the type of life in the area. On the Biome screen, you'll see:

Temperature: How hot or cold it gets in the area. Can be Freezing, Cold, Temperate, Warm, Hot, and Scorching. In a nutshell, temperature extremes make it harder to get and keep a reliable source of water going. In Freezing and Scorching climates, you may have to do without water at all. Temperate and Warm are both good places to start your first fort.
Amount of trees, and other vegetation: A general indication of the density of plant life in the area. For trees, this can be none, scarce, sparse, woodland, or heavily forested. For other plants, you can see none, scarce, moderate, and thick. Trees are chopped down for wood, which is a critical, if small, part of your fortress. You can import lots of it from caravans, so don't worry too much about it. However, more trees never hurt anyone, and totally treeless maps are quite a bit more difficult in the early going, so aim for sparse or greater trees. Other plants basically means shrubs, bushes, and other vegetation that you can harvest food from with the plant gathering skill. Generally speaking, you will use this trick in the first year of your fortress, then never again. Plant density is not very important.
Surroundings: This is a hint at how wild the wilderness is. The outskirts of a jungle might be fairly calm and safe, while the heart of that same jungle could be thick with vicious predators. In game terms, this will clue you in to the specific types of trees and plants you will find, in addition to indicating the animal types you'll run int. This also clues you in to the alignment of the surrounding area. So, the two things this word tells you is how good or evil an area as, and how calm or savage an area is. Good-aligned areas, from calm to savage, are serene, mirthful, or joyous wilds. Neutral-aligned areas are, from calm to savage, calm, wilderness, or untamed wilds. Evil-aligned areas are, from calm to savage, sinister, haunted, or terrifying. Good zones tend to have one of the most aggressive animals in the game, the unicorn, and evil areas have a multitude of undead and some of the most vicious creatures in the game. For your first fortress, stick to a neutral alignment.
Major land forms: A last field, which will not always be full, will mention things you should know about, like rivers. Rivers provide an unlimited source of water, but can be home to dangerous fish like the longnose gar and carp. Still, though, the benefits generally far outweigh the risks. Volcanos are also noted here, one of the only guaranteed ways to get magma. Magma makes a few things a lot easier, but it is dangerous to work with and must be handled very carefully because of the horrible creatures that come out of it. Not critical, especially not for your first time out.

Sometimes, you'll be looking at a place with more than one biome in the same selected square. You can press F1 F2 F3 or F4 to view the different types of biomes. In the picture above, we are looking at the mountain in the center, which is cold and has no trees or plants because it's too high up for those things to grow.

Civilization screen

These are nearby civilizations that are capable of interacting with you. Other settlements are shown with various symbols on the regional map. The possible entries here are dwarves, humans, elves, goblins, and kobolds.

Dwarves: You will want to be in contact with dwarves to get immigrants and a dwarven trading caravan. However, dwarves are, sometimes seemingly magically, everywhere. It is impossible to settle anywhere without dwarves, assuming there is at least one surviving dwarf civilization. Depending on how remote the area is, though, you may not get some of the features of the game you would otherwise: being cut off from the world will prevent most nobles from coming to your fort, which will stop the dwarven economy from ever being activated. You will also not get a liason with your dwarven caravan, so you will be unable to request goods.
Humans: Humans are almost always friendly, and love trade. They send liasons to let you request goods and are generally a huge boon to any fortress.
Elves: Elves are usually friendly and make fair trading partners, but have a particular ethos about trading. They do not send a trade liason and their goods are luxuries at best. They can be very annoying, but are generally not dangerous unless you provoke them.
Goblins: Goblins are your main enemies in Dwarf Fortress, and will lead almost all of the aggressive attacks on your fort. You can try to settle away from them, but at a certain point the game will spawn a goblin civilization to harass you, anyway. Just be sure not to start in the middle of a goblin citadel, and you will be fine.
Kobold: Kobolds are petty thieves that are little more than irritations in most situations. If you are careless and let their thieves get away with a lot of stuff, though, they may upgrade to raiding parties of archers.

Elevation screen

Relative elevation. This is a normal topographic map that you're used to from real-life maps. It just gives you an idea of the lay of the land.

Slope screen

Slope steepness. This shows you where large cliffs are. Try to avoid cliffs of 4 or more, as the taller maps take a lot more computer power to run. On the other hand, flat areas are boring - a good elevation map contains lots of low elevation changes ranging from 1 to 4.

Embark alerts

When you're satisfied with your area and hit e to embark, you may get some alerts about being in a very difficult area, or about an aquifer. Aquifers can make it frustrating to get started, so if you are alerted about an aquifer, seriously consider moving somewhere else for your first fortress. After you have the basics down, tackling an aquifer is much easier.

Location recap

For your first fortress, it's not entirely important. However, there are some general guidelines that can help you decide:

Try to get a temperate or warm climate, since extreme temperatures are more difficult.
Trees and vegetation are good for producing lumber and food for your fortress, but you don't need tons of them.
Neutral-aligned surroundings are best for your first fortress, but good-aligned surroundings are also OK. Avoid evil-aligned surroundings, however.
Running water (rivers, streams, and brooks) are a permanent source of water. Lakes and pools have a finite amount of water and may dry out. Not having enough water can be a big obstacle, so try to get some running water your first time out.
Humans and elves are friendly, so an area they have access to is nice.
Magma is cool, but not critical.
Areas with Aquifers require some engineering to get to rock. You'll be warned if you chose an area with an aquifer. When in doubt, don't try it.
Who cares? If you like what you see, go for it. You can always start over. And remember the DF motto: Losing is fun!

For more information on specific game mechanics such as sand, flux, and how to find iron, check this page.

Fortress size

Once you've decided on location, you need to decide the size of your fortress area. This is the size of the game field you're playing on. Advantages of requesting a large local area include more raw materials, greater diversity of rocks and special underground features, and the ability to include desired terrain (such as a river, a forest, or a magma vent). Disadvantages include slower game performance (larger areas require more CPU power), higher likelihood of merchants failing to reach your trade depot before they run out of time, and more risk of losing immigrants as they struggle to your front gate. (Note that you can mine many levels deep into the ground, and even a 3x3 area generally contains more raw materials than you're ever likely to need.)

You can adjust the size of your fort's area by using SHIFT + the h k u or mkeys.

Embark

When done, hit e to embark. A warning may appear if you've chosen a challenging site, or one with an aquifer.

Buying skills and items

After you embark, you're given the option to either start immediately or prepare for the journey carefully. You should pretty much always prepare carefully if you enjoy staying alive.

Here, presumably, you are the dwarf determining who will go and what they will take. You have a total of 2060☼ to spend in two categories: Skilled dwarves and items. Some items have already been selected for you, but you probably won't want most of these.

There are as many possible ways to approach setting up as there are fortress locations. The starting builds page offers several examples for you to choose from. Here, we are only going to discuss some basics that help you understand enough to make your own decisions. The embark screen opens up on the skills screen, and can be changed to the items screen by pressing TAB.

Skills

In Dwarf Fortress, it's not what you have, it's who you have. Skilled dwarves are the cornerstone of everything, from domestics to security, so it's extremely important to embark with good people.

As you will see in this screen, you have 7 dwarves, all with 10 points to put toward starting skills. We will want to use all 10 of the points on all 7 of the dwarves. By default, you won't have enough ☼ to do this, so hit TAB to go to the items screen and hit - over the Steel battle axe line to give subtract one. This should give you enough ☼ to assign all your skills. You can only spend 5 of the 10 points in any one skill, making the maximum skill level upon embark proficient. This makes a total of 14 proficient skills.

In a fledgeling fortress, the 4 indispensible jobs are mason, miner, grower, and carpenter. You should not embark without at least 1 dwarf being proficient in these 4 skills. Many people choose to double up on proficient miners and growers, since mining and farming are both pretty big jobs.

Other useful skills to consider:

Cook: Cooks make prepared meals in the kitchen, which helps you manage your food stock space. Well-prepared meals are also valuable trade goods, and make dwarves happy when eaten. Highly skilled cooks make better meals, and prepare meals faster.
Brewer: Brewers make booze in the still. Dwarves being dwarves, they need alcohol to operate at peak efficiency, and highly-skilled brewers make better tasting booze. Dwarves get happier when they drink good booze, and they finish brewing faster.
Herbalist: Herbalists gather food and seeds from shrubs in the local area. Skilled herbalists pick faster and come away with far more food. Where an unskilled herbalist will come away with one wild strawberry or none at all, a proficient herbalist will often pick 3, 4, or sometimes 5.
Woodcutter: Woodcutters fell trees for use by carpenters. Highly skilled woodcutters fell trees much faster. However, since you don't need that much wood, you can get away with a normal (no tag) woodcutter just fine.
Mechanic: Mechanics build and use mechanisms, which have myriad uses in traps and levers. Highly skilled mechanics finish installing mechanisms much faster, and the mechanisms they build are of higher quality. However, the quality of the mechanism only matters for its trade value, and in early fortresses the need for mechanisms is usually so small that any dwarf can pick it up and handle it well enough. Still, a solid choice, especially if you like traps.
Armorsmith, Weaponsmith, and Siege engineer: These 3 skills are not useful at all in an early fortress, but become very important later on, and training an unskilled dwarf in these skills is hard and requires a lot of material, so if you're in it for the long haul, consider them.
Military skills (Wrestler, Axedwarf, Hammerdwarf, etc): Early on, it's unlikely that you'll need these, since there's generally very few things that will bother a band of dwarves who aren't hurting anyone, but certain places, such as those with a chasm, will have hostile creatures around. In these areas, you may consider giving your woodcutter the Axedwarf skill so he can use his chopping axe as a weapon.
Social skills (Appraiser, Judge of Intent, Consoler, etc): Putting these on one dwarf will make them a shoo-in for the Expedition Leader slot, and ranks in Appraiser and Judge of Intent will make interacting with the first caravan much easier. However, even if you don't train this at all, some persistance in trading with the first caravan will level your leader up enough to trade with the second caravan like a champion.

Once again, examples can be found in the starting builds page. What you bring is incredibly dependant on your play style, though. Some people think bringing Mechanics along is a total waste of time, others consider them indispensible. Some people like having skills that aren't even on this list, like Leatherworker. Read the starting builds, ask questions, and explore! Who cares if your first idea doesn't work out after playing an hour? Restarting is easy and losing is fun.

Items

Now that we're done with assigning skills, hit TAB to go over to the item screen. Item worth is another extremely situational thing, and you'll find as many opinions as there are Dwarf Fortress players as to what is good to bring. Once more, it depends VERY heavily on your play style. Again, starting builds can provide some good example reading. This section will only cover the basics and give you enough information to make your own decisions.

Tools

You'll need a couple of finished tools to get yourself started.

Battle axes: Every Woodcutter needs an axe. Steel battle axes are the only type you can purchase on this screen, and they're expensive. You might want to bring just one, unless you expect to need a lot of lumber and/or axedwarf muscle.
Picks: Likewise, Miners need picks. All picks work equally well, their material only determines the damage they do in combat. Thus, copper picks are the budgeting dwarf's choice, at a paltry 20☼ each.
Anvil: One of the big questions to ask yourself is whether to bring an anvil on embark. It's extremely expensive at 1000☼, but to start a metal industry, you will either have to start with one or request and purchase (or steal!) one from a caravan somewhere down the line.

Generally, if you are going to a very mountainous area where you're likely to see lots of ore and you want to be able to make use of itright from the get-go, bring an anvil. If you're going to spend a few years getting your fortress established before worrying about metal production, drop it and bring more raw commodities.

One occasional problem is that axes and picks are absent entirely. If this is the case, you can bring the materials to build these things yourself.

Purchase an anvil.
Purchase 3 rocks that are not lignite, bituminous coal, or graphite. Any other rocks will work fine.
Purchase fuel for the forge. You can purchase it outright as charcoal at 10☼ per unit, or refine it yourself for a big savings.
- To refine it yourself, purchase one unit of charcoal, and several (at least 5) units of bituminous coal. When you arrive on site, make sure someone has the furnace operating labor enabled (v to select a dwarf, then select preferences and labor to designate a dwarf's labor assignments), and build a smelter (hit b, then e, then s). Order the smelter to turn bituminous coal into coke. Coke is functionally the same as charcoal, and bituminous coal produces 3 coke for each hunk of rock you bring. You need the first hunk of charcoal to start the string, but after that it feeds itself.
Purchase metal to shape. You can buy bars directly to save time, or again, smelt it yourself. Take copper to start out with. It's cheap, and with any luck your initial tools aren't going to see heavy combat. You can take the materials for bronze, iron, or steel if you like, but this is more expensive. Still, if you're willing to go through the process, you can end up with 2 steel axes, likely of decent quality, for 82☼, instead of 600☼, with no quality modifiers at all.
- If you want to save points and smelt it yourself, take copper nuggets instead of copper bars, and use the smelter to convert them into copper bars.
Fuel and metal in hand, deconstruct the smelter (if needed; q to highlight, then x to deconstruct), and construct a metalsmith's forge. Make sure someone has weaponsmithing on. After the forge is up, order it to make the axes and picks you need. Deconstruct the forge when you're done and enjoy your new tools, hopefully with quality modifiers!

Raw materials

As it was briefly covered above, sometimes it makes more sense to bring a lot of raw materials than some finished goods. Raw materials are a lot cheaper than finished goods, and so long as you invest heavily in your dwarves' skills (which you should!), you can probably make better quality stuff, anyway.

Stone: Only bring this if you're trying to build some of your tools on the spot, as noted above. Otherwise, you will get stone coming out of your ears once you start mining.
Metal: Generally not recommended. However, if you're expecting trouble and you're bringing an anvil, bringing many bars of iron and charcoal in lieu of a battle axe can be a big boon. If your dwarves can get to a spot that gives them a breather, a proficient weaponsmith or armorsmith could stamp out high-quality goods to give your dwarves a better fighting chance. This is a pretty advanced trick to pull off, though, so don't try to pull it if you're not confident.
Wood: Wood is a bargain at only 3☼ per log, and the 100 logs you can bring in exchange for a steel battle axe will last you a long time. This is a great technique for making Woodcutter unneeded in the early game, but you need to budget your wood use for the first year very carefully. When you're out, you're out!

Consumables

Easily the most important part of your preparation is what you're going to eat, drink, and plant once you get on site. Without food and booze, you're not going much of anywhere.

Food: Most food comes at a mere 2☼ per unit, and 8 units will feed 1 dwarf for a year. Bringing a year of food will give you a good cushion to getting your farms working, so aim for about 60 food if you can. If you must cut back, though, 40 will be fine if you make your farms an early priority. The best food staple to bring along is turtle. Turtle produces shell and bones when eaten, which can be used as raw materials for other things you need, including armor, crossbows, and crossbow bolts. Further, shell is a common request for strange moods and is a pain to produce, so getting some early could save yourself a failed mood and a dead dwarf.

Note: Food is stored in barrels on embark, with all food in its own barrel. Therefore, you can get a lot of free barrels by taking 1 unit of many, many kinds of food. Barrels are important, and usually need wood to make, so it's worth it to use this quirk while you can.

Booze: Dwarves drink twice as often as they eat, and they always want to down some alcohol if at all possible. They also like different kinds of alcohol. Bring twice as much booze as you bring food, and divide it evenly among the 3 types of alcohol you can take (dwarven wine, dwarven beer, dwarven ale).
Seeds: Your farms have got to start somewhere. Definitely bring along plump helmet spawn (for food and booze) and pig tails (for cloth ropes and booze variety). How many you bring is dependant on how big you want your initial farms to be. 5 of each is plenty to feed your initial dwarves, and you will get more seeds any time the plants are consumed in any way except cooking. You may want to use the kitchen menu to disallow cooking of plump helmets until you have a healthy supply of seeds. Or, alternatively, just don't make any prepared meals until you've got a healthy supply of seeds. The other seed types require a lot more labor to use properly, and should probably wait until you have more dwarves in the fortress. You can buy seeds from the dwarven caravan for almost nothing, but if you want a greater variety along, go for rock nuts. The quarry bush that sprouts from it produces the greatest space to yield ratio in the game. Eventually, though, you should be planting all 6 of the underground crops at least.

Animals

Not only dwarves live in your fortress, after all.

Dogs: Dogs are dwarf's best friend. They can be trained into hunting dogs or war dogs, require no food or maintenance, and make good pets for your dwarves. Always bring at least 2. Genders alternate when picking them up, so 2 will give you a breeding pair that will have more puppies freely. They make fantastic security early and fantastic dwarfsaving distractions later on. Dogs will happily lay down their lives to protect their master, which is huge when it means one of your best legendary dwarves is running away from an angry goblin.
Cats: Cats provide a wonderful function in controlling vermin in the fort. Vermin can make your dwarves extremely unhappy, so some cats are more or less a requirement. The largest problem with cats, however, is that their population is very difficult to control. Cats will choose their own owners (without the dwarf in question's consent), and after they've done so, you cannot order them butchered to control their numbers. The resulting population explosion can clutter hallways and murder your framerate. The best thing to do is to put all stray cats and kittens in a cage (one will hold them all). You can then butcher them without running the risk of the cats adopting dwarves before the butcher gets around to them, and if vermin start to get out of hand, you can always release one or two to help. If you want vermin control from the start, bring just ONE cat so it cannot breed and cause a population problem early. However, immigrants will very commonly bring their pet cats to the fortress, so if you can live with vermin early, you'll likely get a cat for free within a year.
Beasts of burden (Horses, musk oxen, etc): You will get a breeding pair of these for free when you start the game (they pull your starting wagon), and they will breed just as fast as anything else, so don't bring any along, and don't be afraid to use that cage to contain their numbers. Unlike cats, dwarves must choose to adopt beasts of burden, which they won't do unless they have a particular affinity for the animal. That's fairly rare, so the vast majority of the beasts of burden in your fortress will stay strays.

Once again, check the starting builds page for more ideas, read the pages linked above, and experiment. The learning process is half the fun in Dwarf Fortress; enjoy it!

Sample games

These are sample games that others have played and recorded to provide good learning examples. They are not routinely updated, so some information may be out of date, but they still provide good hands-on tutorials of how to prepare for your fortress and play the game.

Indecisive's illustrated fortress mode tutorial
Savok's first fortress playthrough