v0.31:Quickstart guide

v50.14 · v0.47 · v0.34 · v0.31.25 · v0.28 · v0.23

This article is about an older version of DF.

xTATTEREDx · +FINE+ · *SUPERIOR* · ≡EXCEPTIONAL≡ · ☼MASTERWORK☼

Much of the information in the guide for the previous version still applies. However, the save game is no longer of use and information on the military and healthcare, as well as almost everything to do with the underground is most likely to be deprecated. Farming, for example, has been changed significantly since the last version. In order to construct a subterranean farm (the type required to grow the crops that you embark with), in addition to a dwarf with the Farming (Fields) labor enabled, the farm plot must be placed on muddied tiles. This makes it quite a bit harder to get started with a new fortress as food and alcohol are two of the primary concerns for a budding fortress, and both of them rely on farms to be produced. Keep this in mind when starting a new fortress.

One noteworthy change is that Anvils now only cost 100 (one-tenth of the old cost), and battle axes on the embark screen can be made of copper rather than steel (cheaper but slower, and less useful as weapons).

New Quickstart Guide, In Progress

So, you want to play Dwarf Fortress, but you have no idea what to do. That's understandable, in Dwarf Fortress you can really do anything you like. It is a huge, complex, and totally open-ended game. But in order to do anything, first you need a sustainable fortress. It turns out, that is not so hard to do! Here you will find some advice on how to set up a functioning fortress that will let you focus on doing the things you want to, whether that is killing Goblins, creating mega-projects, or just keeping your dwarfs happy and alive.

Pre Embark

(see also Embark)

Choosing a good embark site is crucial for beginners. Advanced players can create a functional fortress on a glacier, but for now, lets stick to dwarf (and newbie) friendly environments. You will want to look for certain features in your initial embark site that will make your first fort much easier to manage.

Finding a good site

For your first game, a site with sedimentary stone is recommended, because it is very difficult to forge steel without a sedimentary layer. Steel makes nearly the best weapons and armor, and the materials are not difficult to acquire if you have sedimentary layers. Ideally, look for a site with chalk, limestone, or dolomite, which are not only sedimentary stones, but flux stones as well. But any site showing some sedimentary stone should contain all of the necessary ingredients.

You will want to avoid sites with aquifers, as these can be incredibly difficult to dig through, leaving you without stone of any sort until you manage it. Look for sites near mountains and hills, as these tend to have better drainage. Also, you will want to avoid sites that have no trees. Dwarfs like to sleep in beds, and beds are only made from wood. After the first Dwarven trade caravan arrives, you can tell them you would like a lot of wood, and the next time they show up, they will bring it. But that will be a year and a half after you first arrive, a long time to wait for beds. You could dig down to the first cavern level and chop down giant mushrooms for wood, but even the uppermost cavern level often contains far more fun than a newbie can handle.

Having a river on your site will make things much easier. It isn't a necessity, there are other sources of water on most maps, but only oceans, lakes, rivers, streams and brooks contain unlimited quantities of the stuff. Speaking of water, take a look at the climate. In temperate or colder climes, above ground water will freeze during the colder months. This can be anything from a minor inconvenience to a major pain, depending on circumstances. Just be aware that it is one more thing you will have to deal with, and choose your climate accordingly.

While searching your map for a good site, hit the 'Tab' key to change the display. You will notice that there are several informative screens besides the default screen showing the biomes and stone layers. One screen shows the relative distance to different races' civilizations. If "Goblins" are close by, you WILL suffer ambushes by your second spring. As a newbie, these Goblins will very likely destroy you. If you like seeing dead dwarfs and blood all over the map, go right ahead and pick a site next to a Goblin fortress. If you do, you will need to focus on defense immediately before doing nearly anything else.

You can set up your fortress to keep the Goblins out, or kill them with traps, but do not expect your militia to fight off these first waves. They will die. And remember, keeping Goblins out means keeping traders out (or worse, stuck inside, wanting to get out.) Goblins will attack trade caravans, and YOU will be blamed if the caravans die. As a newbie, you may want to opt for a site far from Goblins. If you choose an island site, you will notice that no other races are listed. Only dwarfs will come to trade with you, but you won't be attacked by Goblins, or anyone else for that matter.

It may also be helpful to choose a location with a solid cliff face and a decent mountain to dig into above ground, so that your fortress can have a more straightforward layout. It's also possible to ignore this and have a fortress that's entered from above, if you'd like, but some may find it easier to have all of the main parts of a fortress visible on one screen, to help facilitate an early understanding of how the fortress works.

Finally, you really, really do not want the surroundings of your first site to be "sinister", "haunted", or "terrifying". As you might imagine, zombie whales can be difficult for even seasoned warrior dwarfs to handle.

Okay, you've found a site with sedimentary flux stone, good drainage, a warm climate, some trees, a water source (hopefully without aquifers), and possibly far from Goblins. Now it is time to pick your Dwarfs!

Choosing your Dwarfs and equipment

Since we know certain things about our first site, we can choose our Dwarfs and equipment knowing what to expect. Metal will be our primary industry. We won't be hit too hard by enemies right off the bat, so we can concentrate on civilian Dwarfs and supplies. Our starting location will have wood, so we don't need to bring a bunch with us. What should we bring, and what sorts of Dwarfs should we choose? Well, first we will need something to chop down trees, and something to dig with: pickaxes and battle axes. We will need enough food and drink to see us through until we are producing our own, and to produce our own vegetables, we will need seeds. Rope is useful to have as you need them to make a well and you can't produce your own until your have either metalworking or pig-tail farming and processing set up. They are also useful for chaining animals up near your entrance as a warning system. I recommend bringing an anvil, to set up your first forge. You could wait until the first caravan shows up, they will almost always bring one in the first fall, but that can be a long time to wait to start producing metal.

Sixty drinks and forty food should be enough to see you through until you can produce your own, even if you get large waves of immigrants right off the bat. Skip dwarven wine, that is the very first sort of alcohol you will be producing, from plump helmets, and you will be making a lot of it. Five to ten of each sort of seed will be enough to start you off farming, though you may want additional plump helmet spawn. One copper axe, and two copper picks should suffice to start. You want three ropes, one for a well and two for chaining up animals. As for medical supplies, you can easily make your own crutches and splints, but you may want to bring along a small amount of thread, cloth, and plaster powder for stitching up Dwarfs and making casts, as these are more difficult to produce initially. You also might want to take two or three dogs and a breeding pair of cats. The dogs can help you hunt and fight if you train them, and the cats catch vermin. Both make good pets which help keep Dwarfs happy. And in a pinch, they can both make a tasty snack.

As for Dwarves, choosing certain skills will make your life much, much easier starting off. I recommend the following skills as essential to starting a fort: carpentry, masonry, architecture, mechanics, farming, cooking, and brewing. As most maps have tons of gems, the gem cutting skill can be an easy and quick source of early trade goods. If you chose a site with flowing water, fishing can help keep your fort fed early on. If not, hunting can do the same, but keep in mind that safe hunting requires a lot of micromanagement. Your hunters will happily stalk and attack elephants, cougars, and other dangerous animals before they have the skills necessary to deal with them. Fisherdwarfs, on the other hand, really only need to worry about alligators and crocodiles. Leatherworking can be another useful skill, especially if you hunt or raise animals. If not, your first caravan will likely show up with tons of cheap leather. Leather makes good armor for your marksdwarfs, as it is light weight and won't slow them down too much. Finally, as your economy will be centered around metals, you should choose a metalworking skill, probably armor working but weapon making is also a good choice. Some people say the best defense is a good offense, but dead Dwarfs won't fight, so I usually pick armoring as my first metalworking skill. You really don't need to pick mining as a skill, it is very easy to train up quickly if you have any kind of soil rather than just rock. Digging in soil trains up mining very, very quickly.

You will probably want one dwarf with medical skills, and another with crucial social skills. For your doctor, put one point into each of diagnosis, surgery, setting bones, suturing and dressing wounds. For your leader-dwarf, put one point into appraisal, judge of intent, leader, organizer, and record keeper.

And So It Begins

Okay, so you have a site picked out, you have chosen your dwarfs and equipment, and you have embarked. You will see your dwarfs clustered around your wagon full of supplies somewhere near the center of your map, with the game paused. Do not unpause the game just yet. Take a look around. Look up and down a few z-levels. Notice the terrain features, the vegetation, and any minerals visible. If you chose a site with flowing water, where is it? What about pools of water? The more carefully you examine your site, the better off you will be. Remember that this is more of a simulation than a game, it is not 'play balanced,' and you can very easily find yourself in impossible situations. That is all part of the Template:L because even when you lose, you create an interesting story. But you don't want too much fun yet, do you? So, open up the unit screen and look at what other critters share the map with you. Your wagon functions as your initial meeting areas until you designate another, so if your wagon is parked next to a river full of crocodiles, or near other dangerous animals, you may want to designate another meeting area immediately. If your wagon starts on top of tiles that are pure cyan or white, it is on ice and the ice is likely to melt unless that portion of your site is Freezing. Designate a one-tile garbage dump on the nearest safe tile and dump the entire wagon onto it. Don't forget to change the refuse options to allow your dwarves to collect refuse from outside. Work quickly! You don't know how much time you have.

First Steps

Generally, you will want to get all your Dwarfs and supplies inside a protected area as quickly as possible. Getting your farming area constructed is your next priority, as you will need to flood it and then wait for it to dry. Next you will want to set up crucial industries such as masonry, carpentry, and mechanics. Then you can start making some traps to protect your entrance. After this, focus on creating some nice living quarters, a dining room, and kitchen complex. Next, you will want to set up your metal industry and begin mining for coal and metal ore. Finally, you will want a military. Even if you chose a site without enemies, it is good practice, and eventually you will need them to protect you from giant monsters.

If your wagon is near a cliff, you can tunnel into the cliff to create an entryway. If you are on flat land, dig channels down and then tunnel over to create your entry. Your entryway defines the boundary between your safe and protected inner fort, and the big bad outside world. You may be tempted to make a short entry hall, so your dwarfs don't have to walk as far to get outside. Bad idea. You may also think it clever to have several entrances. It is not clever.

Think about the difference between inside and outside. Outside does not necessarily mean outdoors, and inside does not mean underground. Outside means undefended. Inside means defended. You can have multiple entrances, for instance, as long as they all lead to the same well defended gateway. But if you have an undefended back door, that is where you will be attacked. Make sure that to get inside, into the defended areas of your fort, enemies must pass through your defenses. Initially, you will not have the resources to defend more than one entrance.

Here is a list of first steps:

First off, look over your dwarves' assigned labors. Besides the labor enabled from having the skill, ensure that someone has wood burning, furnace operating, wood cutting, plant gathering, gem setting, armoring, weaponsmithing, blacksmithing, metalcrafting, and stone finishing enabled, even if nobody has those skills. If you took hunting or fishing, disable those until you have your initial fort completed.
Certain labors are crucial in setting up a fort. You may want to disable less important labors such as hauling for dwarfs with the crucial skills of masonry, architecture, carpentry, and mechanics. You want these dwarfs working on creating beds, doors, and trap components before hauling stone and cleaning. Enable mining for the other dwarves.
Hit the n key to open up the nobles and administrators screen. Your expedition leader should automatically be the one you gave the social skills to. Make your doctor the chief medical dwarf. Your militia leader should be anyone you do not want to actually be in the militia. This may sound counter-intuitive, but it will make setting up your squads less confusing later. You also need to designate a broker, record keeper and manager, if you followed this advice, that should be your expedition leader. Don't worry that it's just one guy doing all this, none of these jobs need take very long. While you are on this screen, highlight the record keeper and set him to work for maximum accuracy. You really don't need this level of accuracy, but it will ensure he trains up the record keeping skill early. Turn it down to medium after he has achieved total accuracy, which he can't even start on until you have built him an office.
Decide where you will build your entryway. Unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise, (such as a large deposit of valuable ores visible on a distant cliff face) put it near your wagon.
Near your planned entry, create a storage area for refuse. It needn't be too large. Create another storage area for wood, again, it will only be temporary, don't make it too big, maybe five by three, or fifteen tiles total.
Also near the entry, designate at least fourteen trees to be chopped down. You will turn these into seven beds and seven chests. Don't designate too many trees at the beginning, or your dwarves will spend all their time chopping them down and hauling them rather than making things out of them.
Next to this farming area, dig a separate hallway three tiles wide and at least ten long. This will be your entryway. At the end of the hall, dig a five by five room for your trade depot, a stairwell, and a storage area at least ten by ten tiles. Designate this as a storage area that will accept any and all items you brought with you. Using the q key, set your wagon to be deconstructed. Using the i key, create an activity area, at least three by three, near the stairwell. Set this as a meeting area.
On this first level, build a five by five room connected to the stairwell or the storage area, but not directly connected to the main hall. Put in a wood burner. Hopefully, you will find enough coal that you will only need to use it once, in order to create enough charcoal to jump-start the coal production. Without magma, you need to burn coal (or charcoal) to make coke. Unprocessed coal is not a fuel, only refined coke or charcoal.
Once your farmland has begun to dry, connect it to your entryway and place a three by three farm plot. Set it to grow plump helmets during all seasons. Create a storage area, preferably on non muddy ground if there is any left in the farming area, and set it to accept food, but disable every food except for seeds. Obviously, you want your seeds stored near your farmland and not down in your dining area.
Dig down one level and create four five by five rooms off of the stairwell . These will hold your mechanic, mason, carpenter, and jewelry workshops. Put the workshop in the center, and use the remaining space for the appropriate type of storage (wood for your carpenter, stone for your mason and mechanic, and gems for your jeweler.)
Continue digging down seven more levels. Just create the stairwells for now, you want your living quarters nine levels below the surface as felling trees creates a lot of noise that will keep your dwarfs from sleeping soundly. Dwarves don't need much space for living quarters, in fact, you can turn a one by three room into decent quarters by smoothing the stone and filling it with a high quality bed, chest, and cabinet. Designing living quarters is a matter of personal preference and aesthetic sense, I will leave the actual design as an exercise for the player. Just try to keep the bedrooms close to the stairs, and make your access hallways at least two tiles wide so your dwarves don't have to crawl over and under each other to get where they are going. Higher traffic corridors can be larger, while low use corridors can be only a tile wide if you want to save construction time, and space. I prefer wider corridors, but again, that is more a matter of preference. You will want to create at least eight rooms: seven for your bedrooms, and one as an office for your bookkeeper, which rather than a chest, bed and cabinet, will contain a chair and table.
Press d-b-d to get to the mass dump/forbid screen and select the 'dump' option. With 'dump' selected, create a rectangle over all the loose stones cluttering up your living area. This will designate this stone to be transported to an activity area marked as 'garbage dump' Note that garbage is not the same thing as refuse. Refuse is rotting stuff. Garbage is anything you designate to be hauled to a garbage area, even important things that aren't really garbage. Think of your garbage areas as a way to specify that objects you select will be brought to a specific area. Unlike storage areas where you are limited to storing one object per tile, any number of items may be piled in a garbage area. That means you will only need one tile to hold as much garbage as you like. Designate a one tile garbage area near your masons and mechanics workshops. Once the stone from your living area has been moved there, it will be set as forbidden. You will need to unforbid it using the same d-b screen, hitting c to claim it instead of 'd' to dump it.
Congratulations, knowing how to use garbage zones and dump commands puts you head and shoulders above most newbs. It took me weeks to figure that part out.
Now would be a good time to start building some furniture and trap components. You could queue up all these items directly from your workshops, but why not give your manager a little practice, and ask him to queue up those jobs? Using the manager screen j-m hit q to queue up a new job, and type 'bed' select 'construct bed.' Set the quantity to seven. Next, queue up seven beds, seven wooden chests, eight doors, seven cabinets, two tables and two chairs.
Above the living quarters, and right off the main stairwell, create another four rooms. One will be for food storage, one a dining hall, one a kitchen, and one a still. Make the kitchen and still five by five. The storage area and dining hall should be larger. Create storage areas in the remaining space in the kitchen and still. For the still, customize this storage to accept food and furniture, then turn off all food except plants, (not seeds, or leaves. Just plants. If you want to get fancy, make sure that it only accepts plants that can be turned into booze, not, for instance, dimple cups.) and all furniture except barrels. Make sure prepared food is turned off for this storage area. If you set your first initial storage area to accept furniture, disable barrels for it now. For the kitchen storage area, turn off prepared foods, plants (you want your brewers to get first shot at those, the kitchen staff will still take them from the still if nothing is closer.) and seeds. For the main food storage room, just turn off seeds.
Once your furnishings are complete, you need to place them in the rooms using the 'build' screen. Make sure each room gets a door, each bedroom gets a chest, bed and cabinet, and the office gets a chair and table. Put the other chair and table in the dining room. After the furniture has been placed, you can use the q key to turn it into actual, defined rooms. Don't worry about assigning the bedrooms, the dwarves will pick their own. You will need to assign the office to your bookkeeper, though.
Designate someplace close to the bottom of the stairwell as a meeting area. It could be the dining room, or just the stairwell itself if you've made it big enough. You want idlers in a central location, close to where you will be placing your emergency drawbridge levers.

Checkpoint

By this point, you should have your entryway created, along with a farm, initial storage area, trade depot, and wood burner on the first underground level. Below that, you should have a mason's shop, a mechanic's shop, a carpenter's shop, and a jeweler's shop, surrounded by appropriate storage piles. A stairwell connects to the lower levels, where you have your kitchen complex and below that, bedrooms and an office. You should have selected your administrators, designated a refuse pile (for trash) and a garbage area (for excess stone.) Your bedrooms and office should be furnished. At this point, you have all the components of a minimal but functional fortress. Your next steps will be to make it safer and better protected, to set up your metal industry, and to start your militia.

Use the 'z' screen to check your stock levels. How much food and booze do you have left? You only have unprepared food at this point, and the booze you brought with you. If you are running low on food, you can designate gathering some outdoor plants, turn on fishing, or turn on hunting. Before turning on either hunting or fishing, examine the units ('u') screen to see if there are any dangerous critters your hunter/fishers need worry about. With hunting especially, be prepared to check this screen frequently.
Designate some more trees to be chopped down.
Start producing mechanisms at your mechanic's shop. Queue up ten. After they are built, use them to create stone traps near the start of your entry hall. Queue up some cages, and more mechanisms, and use these to create some cage traps right after your stone traps. Cage traps are incredibly effective at stopping ambushers, but traps in general will not protect you from thieves and kidnappers, who will almost always bypass them.
Build two restraints (use the ropes you brought) near the beginning of your entryway, one on either side. Using the 'q' query key, assign an animal to each of them. These animals will spot thieves and raiders before they gain entrance to your fortress. Try to pick disposable animals, as they WILL be slaughtered by the first ambush raiders. Don't assign female animals, you want them safe for breeding.
Continue to fill up your entry hall with alternating rows of stone and cage traps.
Now, below your first workshop level (3 levels down), dig out four more five by five rooms around the stairwell. Three of these will be smelters, one a smithy. Designate storage for coke only around the smelters, for coke and metal bars around the smithy. You will not be storing metal ore or economic stones in storage areas, you will be storing these in 1x1 stacks on your garbage zone, which gives you much greater control and takes up FAR less space than you would need to store these items in conventional storage areas. You may want to create another garbage dump on your forge level. You can turn activity areas on and off using the 'a' active/inactive control from the 'i' activity area screen. Haulers will generally take items to the nearest active garbage zone.
You don't have anything but a stairwell on levels 4-7. These will be where you dig exploratory tunnels looking for ores, minerals, and gems. While digging creates as much noise as felling trees and initially may keep your dwarfs from sleeping soundly, unlike trees, stones don't grow back. Once you've mined out the area directly above the bedrooms, your mining should be far enough away not to bother your sleepy dwarfs.
Once you find some coal, start your smelters out processing it into coke. Put these jobs on repeat. Only use one smelter to begin with, but you should be getting a group of immigrants fairly soon, and you can put them to work in the other smelters.
When you do get a group of immigrants, take a headcount and queue up enough beds, doors, cabinets and chests to make bedrooms for them all. Examine their skills. Be sure to enable any labors that they have skills in, but aren't active. Turn any useless dwarfs into furnace operators.
Metalsmithing will be our primary economic activity. This means you will need miners, haulers, smiths and furnace operators. Unless a dwarf is doing something else vital to the proper functioning of your fort, such as training in the militia, making traps, cooking food, and so forth, they should be doing one of these four things. For instance, say one of your new immigrants turns out to be a talented weaver. Should you plant some pig tails and create a loom for him? No! Put him to work smelting metal even though he has no skill at it. Do not split your efforts yet.
You should have uncovered some gems by now, put your jeweler to work cutting them. These will be the only thing you trade in the first year, and only for things you absolutely need and can't produce enough of yourself.
You may have struck gold, and you may be tempted to put your furnaces and smiths to work created valuable gold crafts. Do not do this! Until you have your militia formed and fully equipped with steel armor and weaponry, your smelters and smithy should be doing nothing else but smelting coal & iron, making pig iron and steel, and making weapons and armor. In my experience, creating a lot of wealth initially is a sure fire method of pulling down a Goblin ambush you are ill-equipped to deal with. If you chose a starting location without Goblins, feel free to disregard this advice and go hog wild smelting gold right off the bat.
For the same reason, spend no time smoothing or engraving anything yet. The only wealth you want to be creating in the beginning is the sharp pointy kind of wealth.
Once your first crop of plump helmets starts to come in, you will want to start brewing as a repeating task. Also, now would be a good time to start cooking actual meals rather than forcing your dwarfs to eat raw food. I have not found a reason to bother with anything but lavish meals.
In order to keep the booze flowing, you will need to create some barrels. Your dwarfs should have emptied a few by now to get you started, but you will definitely need more. A lot more.
Keep checking your food and drink stock levels on the 'z' screen periodically. While cooked food and alcohol don't spoil, there is really no need to stock two thousand barrels of dwarven wine. Id say, ten times the number of drinks and meals as you have dwarfs is more than enough. If you start running out of food or drinks, designate some wild plants for harvesting, start hunting or fishing, or start more farms.
In fact, now would be a fine time to make another three by three farm. Set it to produce sweet pods in the spring and summer, cave wheat or pig tails (your choice) in the fall, and plump helmets in the winter.
Keep up on your exploratory mining, and keep those metalworks stocked with coal, iron ore, and flux stone.
Build a drawbridge to seal off your entryway. Put it after the hall-o-traps, but before the trade depot, to help keep traders safe. Build a lever near your meeting area and connect it to the drawbridge. In case of an ambush, you will want to close up your fort, keeping the Goblins out until your squads have formed up and are in position. If you've done things right, the traps should take care of most of them and your militia will be for mopping up.
Speaking of your militia, once you have gotten your first wave of immigrants, you should have enough dwarfs to start a small training program.

Pointy Things and You!

Look over all your dwarfs. I have not mentioned it, but Dwarf Therapist, a separate utility program, makes administrating your dwarfs about a million times easier than using the in game interface.
You are looking for any dwarfs with military skills, or at the very least, without useful civilian skills. These guys will be your military. Shoot for an initial squad of five, but look to increase that to ten by the end of the second spring.
First, go back to your nobles screen. You should see a new position listed that was not there initially, militia captain. Appoint either your leader-dwarf or the best fighter to this position.
Now open up your military screen. Highlight your militia captain (not commander) and 'c'reate a squad. Choose 'metal armor' as their uniform. You can adjust their assigned equipment later.
Enjoy a hearty laugh at the delightful name your dwarfs come up with for their squad. All tremble before the might of the fearsome Geared Warthogs! No, you can't change it (though you can disband the squad and create it again: it'll have another name).
Your militia captain will already be assigned to position one. Pick four more dwarfs for positions two through four. Try not to pick moms with babies, they will carry those babies right into combat.
Queue up an armor rack and a weapon stand, wood or metal, it doesn't matter.
Pick a location for your training grounds. It should be near the entrance, but still in a defended area. Having it outside will keep your military dwarfs from getting cave adaptation, but it will also leave them vulnerable to sneak attack. Is your mason busy? If not, you can have him make a little walled fort around your entryway and training grounds. Put in a drawbridge and a lever to control it. Remember to make it a drawbridge, not a retracting bridge, and be sure it raises towards your gateway, so it will create a wall when raised. Build your weapon rack and armor stand where you want your dwarfs to train. Designate it is a barracks. Your squad should now be listed. Hit 't' to tell them to train there.
Your squad is now ready, but inactive. Unless you activate them, they will only engage in individual practice and will not train as a squad.
Before activating your squad, you need to adjust their training schedule. You only have five squaddies, but the default order is to train ten, at a minimum. Go to the military screen, then the scheduling screen. Highlight the first cell marked "Train" and hit 'e' to edit it. Set it to train four minimum: you want to let squaddies go off duty to eat and drink, otherwise they will literally train themselves to death. After editing this order, hit 'c' to copy it, and paste it into the remaining months.
Now hit 's' for squad. Your squad will be highlighted, as they are the only ones. Hit 't' to toggle their active status.
If you've done everything right, you should see some messages about Urist McGoblinFodder has become a recruit and they should report to the training grounds you have set up. Keep an eye on them using the units screen. Their tasks will initially be something like 'Waiting for (training session)' but they should actually start the session after a while. The graphics won't look any different, but it will say somethign like 'at (training session)' instead of 'waiting for.' The usual cause of not progressing beyond the 'waiting for' stage is having orders to train more dwarfs than there are in your squad. They will wait forever for that tenth dwarf to show up.
(The following concerning marksdwarves is highly unlikely to work reliably in the current version of DF2010) Do you have any marksdwarves or archers or the like? If so, you will need to take additional steps to have them train correctly. You will need to create archery targets, you will need to go to the 'e'quip page and assign them an archer's 'U'niform, you will need to ensure that quivers are available, and you will need to assign them 'f ammunition. If you have done everything right here, eventually you will see piles of broken bolts at the base of your archery targets, a sure sign your marksdwarfs are actually practicing.
Speaking of ammunition, have you created any? Wooden ammunition will do just fine for training purposes, but can only be created at a craftsdwarfs workshop. Build one now and queue up some wooden bolts if you'd like to train marksdwarfs.
Also, many of your military dwarfs will initially not have any weapons skills. The uniform we assigned them consists of metal armor and 'individual choice' weapons. Your untrained dwarfs won't have a preference, and will choose 'none' meaning they will train in unarmed combat, which is lame. Create some training weapons of the type you'd like them to use in your carpenter's shop, then use the 'e'quip screen to assign those specific training weapons to the untrained dwarfs you want to learn that weapon skill.