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.

Dwarf goods

This section explains the relative importance of various goods in the early and late game.

Fortress startup

The most important points are food and drink. Booze should be brought in larger quantities than food, since it is easier to produce food (it does not nessecerally need to be stored in barrels), and dwarves drink twice as often as they eat. Approximately 60 drink and 20-30 food is a safe startup supply. Try to have a 1 or a 6 in the ones place when buying up food, as this will give you a cheap, free barrel when the game is created. The booze you bring is fairly irrelevant, as early on they're all the same. Try to bring either turtle or some other kind of fish as your startup food supply. They cost no extra than your basic meat and will produce bones when eaten (plus shell, in the case of turtles), which is useful for outfitting early hunters or militia. Do not bring plump helmets. They cost 4 points apiece, and for the same cost you can bring 2 plump helmet spawn and 1 cheap fish.

It's critical to bring at least some seeds on embark. The exact number is largely a matter of personal preference. If you want large farms from the get-go, you'll need a lot. If you have no trouble making more and more farms as you go along, you can get away with a lot fewer. Bring a minimum of 5 plump helmet spawn. 5 pig tail seeds to start an early pig tail crop is also very good. Pig tails provide cloth early on for rope, and are more brewable fodder so you don't have to brew your chief food crop, too.

Bring 1 copper pick for each miner you have and 1 steel battle axe for every woodcutter you have. They're gonna be no good without their tools.

Whether or not to bring an anvil to start out with is a pretty contentious issue. It's largely up to your playstyle, and the conditions surrounding the site you come up with. Generally, if you are settling an area that is very mountainous with lots of ore around and some magma to make production easy, you are definitely going to want to bring an anvil. If not, you may end up not using a forge for many seasons, so you can comfortably appropriate one from the dwarven caravan before it's needed.

Bringing wood in your starting wagon is more important the less heavily forested your surroundings are. Even sparsely-wooded areas will provide enough wood to fuel your initial fortress, but woodcutting will take time. Another consideration is that if you make enough room to bring 30 logs or so, you will probably be able to sidestep having a dedicated woodcutter entirely, which will free up the 300 points you would have spent on a steel battle axe for other purposes. It is your call.

Always make room for 2 dogs. Always. Dogs are a critical part of any fortress and bringing a breeding pair to start out with will help a lot.

You should also make room for a wooden cage if you can. It makes animal control much easier.

Don't bring any beasts of burden. You will start with a breeding pair of them for free and immigrants will routinely bring their own to your fortress. You'll be overrun with them soon enough.

Advanced goods

This section covers advanced goods for the betterment of one's own fortress. Trade goods are covered below, in Dwarven economics.

Statues are one of the better ways to easily increase fortress wealth and improve the mood of the dwarves in the area. It's possible to make a metal statue from the ore of the metal if you turn off economic restrictions on the stone, which not only saves you time in operating the smelter and the fuel in the process, but it also allows you to triple the production potential from a single vein. Statues require 3 bars to make from metal, but only 1 stone to make from ore. Plus, it's easier to get a high-skill mason to do the job than a high-skill metal crafter. Turning off restrictions on economic stone will allow you to make a metal ANYTHING from that ore stone, but statues get the highest multiplier, so they are best used there unless you are trying to impress a noble with a small room.

Cloth is better than leather for making clothing for your dwarves. Cloth can be dyed, which increases its value and impressiveness, and it weighs significantly less, which is an important consideration for soldiers wearing heavy plate mail or haulers that are not strong. Leather can be used to sew images into clothing if you have a large abundance of leather.

Glass is outstanding if you have sand and magma. A powered magma glass furnace with a steady supply of sand can essentially make rough gems, furniture, and cages out of nothing. Plus, green glass has a basic value of 2, the same flux stone. If you have no magma, though, feeding a full-scale glass industry is too expensive to consider, fuel-wise.

Dwarf jobs

This section encompasses advice for working your dwarves for the betterment of your personal fortress; the merits of various economic professions like craftsdwarves will be covered later.

Fortress startup

The critical jobs in a fortress are Miner, Grower, Mason, and Carpenter. Your first 7 dwarves should always include someone who is proficient at these 4 jobs. The other skills you assign can be whatever you prefer or is most appropriate for your situation, though don't be afraid to double up on these base skills. 2 miners and 2 growers can make the early game much easier. Military skills can be critical in harsh starting locations. Cook and Brewer are only mildly less critical, as good food and drink gives essentially free happy thoughts, and trained kitchen/still staff produce much faster. Mechanic is useful if you intend to use mechanisms as trade goods. Taking a Proficient armorsmith, weaponsmith, or siege engineer from the start can save a lot of material and time, and could be worthwhile. Woodcutter is also a common, popular choice, especially since it can be cut with Axedwarf for some extra security early on. Herbalist can help you get away with bringing less food so you can instead get more durable commodities like picks, armor, or even dogs. Herbalist will also help you harvest the local seeds so you can get above-ground crops going quickly. Once the earth is struck, you should build a mason's and carpenter's workshop and have them start churning out things like doors, tables, chairs, and beds as quickly as they possibly can; your fledgling fortress will need lots and lots of basic commodities.

Advanced jobs

These are jobs that are important building blocks to your finished civilization, but are better handled by immigrants.

Fishing is one of the better industries to found with your first wave of immigrants. The most useful 'fish' to capture is the turtle, which spawns as vermin in any still pool of water, including flooded cisterns inside your fortress. Turtle production provides bones and shell, which are common requests in strange moods, and also provide an alternate food source for your dwarves in case your farms fail for whatever reason. To boot, fisherdwarves require no special equipment and can just jump right to work.

Hunting is good for many of the same reasons. Animal kills produce fat, which can be rendered into tallow at the kitchen and makes fantastic fodder for prepared meals. Leather also comes from the hunting industry, which is outstandingly useful as cheap armor for your military and bags. Animal skulls are also useful for making the totem trade good, but that is a separate consideration. Hunters will require weapons to be most effective. Build a Bowyer's Workshop to construct a bone or wood crossbow (this requires the Bowyer skill, but the quality of a crossbow only affects its damage as a melee weapon, so having an untrained dwarf fill in is not harmful), and a Craftdwarf's Workshop to stamp out bolts. This will require either bone carving or woodcrafting, depending on if you use bone or wood bolts. Bone carvers tend to be fairly common in immigrant waves, but a hunter can handle most animals even with normal-quality bolts. Also be sure to have a tanner designated so you can process the hides, and a leatherworker designated who can construct some leather armor for your hunter as you get some hides to use.

Siege operators are important for the long-term survival of your fortress. Siege engines the only safe way to deal with the biggest threats you will face, like megabeasts and goblins riding beak dogs as cavalry. They take a long time to train, so you need to plan well ahead. Designate some early and have them start training on throwaway catapults as soon as you can spare the labor.

Your standing military should also be a consideration from your first immigrant wave. Consider starting a cross-training program to get the flabby, untrained Peasants that immigrate into shape for military service.

The cloth industry is also a good one to establish if you get things like weavers and clothiers with your first immigrant wave. The cloth industry lets you create ropes (critical for building wells) and bags in the short term, and good finished clothing in the longer term to keep your dwarves happier. Pig tails will provide an easy early cloth supply if you bring some seeds along when you embark.

Dwarf happiness and domestics

This section will cover how to keep your dwarves happy and satisfied in the early and late games.

Fortress startup

Early fortresses are usually pretty placid. There are not that many unhappy thoughts to go around, so dwarves generally do not get too angry at anything. However, it will certainly not remain that way, so you should plan for the eventual 200 mark from the get-go. A legendary dining room is a great place to start. Something as simple as a 5x5 room with a few very impressive things in the middle (such as an expensive statue or a furniture artifact) will induce the 'legendary dining room' happy thought in dwarves even without engraving (though smoothing doesn't hurt). Dwarves get harder and harder to impress as the game goes on, though, so be certain to engrave it once your engravers are legendary or close to it.

A legendary dining room is usually all the more you need to keep the peace in the early going. One powerful happy thought without many things to dampen the mood will keep everyone smiling wide.

Early on, you should plan ahead for the late game, though. Figure out where your heavy traffic areas are going to be, and make the hallway at least 3 squares wide. Cramped hallways slow down dwarves and make unhappy thoughts more likely after the economy activates. Designate a large (5x5 minimum) barracks and line only 2 sides with beds. Peasants will no longer use undesignated 'hospital beds' for sleeping after the economy activates, but at the same time, sparring soldiers will be hurt and accidentally killed much more often in very crowded barrack rooms. You need to provide large tracts empty space to keep sparring non-lethal. Plus, huge barracks are more impressive, which is another easy happy thought.

Plan an apartment complex from the get-go. Private bedrooms are a huge part of the late game, and will help keep everyone peaceful until the late game arrives, so there's no reason not to do it. The bedroom design article can help you more. Resist the urge to smooth and engrave EVERY apartment you make. When the economy activates, a bunch of people living above their means are going to get evicted, and they're going to need affordable housing to move into.

In other considerations, cats are almost certain to come to your fortress with immigrants, even if you didn't start with them. Since they arrive as pets, keeping them from breeding is impossible.

Advanced domestics

Happiness becomes one of your primary considerations when lots of dwarves are around and the economy has activated. The economy brings about a whole new truckload of possible unhappy thoughts in addition to the ones you've already been dealing with, so you need to use everything in your power to combat them. A cross-training program becomes a serious benefit here, since legendary dwarves are exempt from the economy and continue living large without any interferance from the nobles.

Private bedrooms are key. In addition to the happy thought that dwarves get from sleeping in a place that's theirs, having their own place with their own chest and cabinet will stave off unhappy thoughts they get from not having a place to store their acquisitions. You may also consider installing a table and chair in each bedroom; happy thoughts on par with or better than 'legendary dining room' are gained from eating at a high-quality table that the dwarf owns. Be sure that you have a lot of affordable housing; 300☼ is all the more most joe-dwarves with steady work can afford before they are evicted.

A high-quality recreational pursuit is very important. The easiest is probably a statue garden. Mine or import a chunk of native platinum or native aluminum (native aluminum is better for importing), and build a private mason's workshop for your best mason. Move the ore to a stockpile right outside the mason's workshop and provide enough doors to lock the mason in. Order a stone statue built and wait for your mason to respond. Your mason will bring an ordinary stone to the workshop. Once he is in the workshop, pause, lock the doors, and lift the restrictions on the platinum/aluminum nuggets as an economic stone. Order a few more statues built until your mason makes a statue with the ore. You now have an extremely high value platinum/aluminum statue (worth about 3000☼). Place the statue in its own room and flank it with the plain rock statues that your mason made. Then, make a sculpture garden room centered on the platinum/aluminum statue. Your dwarves will now come in to admire the 'completely sublime, tastefully arranged Statue', which can take them from unhappy to ecstatic in one fell swoop.

Another thing you may consider is getting your dwarves pets. Assigning trained war dogs to peasants makes the peasant adopt them as a pet, which not only makes them more safe from goblin attacks while they are milling about outside, it also gives them an instant happy thought if they ever become unhappy ('comforted by a beloved pet recently'). The downside, of course, is that if the war dog ever has to lay down its life for its master, the dwarf will become very upset, and doubly upset if you don't have the tombs to lay the pet to rest.

Making catacombs is another good way to provide some stability to your fortress. Unlike bedrooms, dwarves do not have to pay for thier own tombs, and get a yearly happy thought from them that lasts almost a whole season. Catacombs are also fairly easy to furnish, requiring little more than coffins and engravings. Some statues can also be good if you are going that route. Be sure to allot some coffins for pet burial, too; dwarves are just as upset about their pets dying as they are about their friends. It's best not to compound the problem by letting pets rot.

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. -Yanlin

• Legendary dining room is all you need. It is so useful it makes rooms better than barracks merely a roleplay thing. Also, dabbling masons should work on blocks, not furniture. -Someone-else
  • Incorrect. While a legendary dining room is very important, according to the thought article, it is a +20 thought. This can be very quickly erased by severe cave adaptation, which is -20 when exposed to the sun. Couple in a few other powerful unhappy thoughts, such as losing a friend, and a dwarf can tantrum very quickly. Dining rooms work great to stabilize early fortresses, but in larger ones where unhappy thoughts are more plentiful, you need more. This can be as simple as a platinum statue flanked by simple rock statues in a high traffic area to make a "completely sublime, tastefully arranged statue", which I have observed (but not confirmed) to be about a +30 thought. Private bedrooms help too, especially when the dwarven economy starts up so you can avoid the 'lack of chests' unhappy thought. Remember: Only you can stop death spirals. -ThunderClaw

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. -Yanlin

• Average artifact in a small plain room with crappy tables and thrones counts as legendary dining room too. -Someone-else

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

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?) -Yanlin

• Indoor light does not (or no longer) prevents cave adaptation. Further, making your main meeting area anything Above Ground means that your dwarves will have to avoid it when the "Dwarves stay indoors" order is on - 'indoors' is considered 'below ground', and nothing else. To fight cave adaptation, make a separate, above-ground courtyard that you can quickly dissolve in an emergency. This is quite important! Cave adapatation thoughts take away as much happiness as a legendary dining room gives! -ThunderClaw

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. -Yanlin

• If you're training siege operators, you can set up an 8x8 non-economic non-ore stone stockpile to ease the hauling load on your catapulters. -GreyMario
• A worthwhile alternative to stockpiling is channeling a hole above some workshops (I haven't tried directly above, but it might work), setting it as a garbage dump, and then dumping all the stone you come across. Unforbid the stone you want to use when you want to use it. It takes up only 1 square to store an arbitrarily high amount of stone, but requires more micromanagement (you don't want to pitch your obsidian into a chasm, or that rotting corpse into your workshop) and will only work for one material at a time.

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. -Yanlin

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

• Be sure, however, not to let idlers get out of control. No more than 5-10 regardless of the size of your fortress. Idlers make friends very quickly and friend connections are the leading cause of death spirals. Be sure to have plenty of busy work around, whether it's training in a screw pump gym or gathering sand or making excess finished goods from cloth or leather or anything else. Idle hands are the downfall of a fortress. -ThunderClaw

Fishing: Not worth it. Only the shells are worth it. -Yanlin

• However, fishing can give you lots and lots of fishbones, which can then be made into bone bolts that Dwarves use for practice. Very useful on maps without trees. - HisMajestyBOB
• Shells are also extremely worth it. Turtles will populate as vermin in any pool of water in a temperate map, so making a large underground cistern will produce tons of turtles, without your fisherdwarves ever needing to leave the fortress. Shell is great for making cheap plate gloves for your army (since there are no protective leather handguards), and are fantastic for decorating finished goods when you start getting lots of them. Turtles also provide variety to your dwarves' diet, which can be a problem if you are suffering an extended siege and are seeing the 'getting tired of the same old food' thought.

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

• Do not waste starting dwarf on it. This is job for immigrants. -Someone-else
• A bone crossbow, bone bolts, and a suit of leather armor will be everything a hunter will ever need. Have the hunter train his own hunting dog, so it will stick with him without being considered a pet if the local wildlife is aggressive; hunting animals are fragile and will die easily on more vicious maps. If the local wildlife is fairly tame, assign the dog so the hunter gets a happiness bonus from having a pet.

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.) -Yanlin

• Plant a variety of plants as your fortress grows. Cave Wheat and Dimple Cups are fantastic when you have the dwarves to handle the milling. Dimple cups provide dye for better finished clothing, and Cave Wheat Flour is great fodder for prepared food to make it high value. Pig tails are also critical so you're able to produce cloth during a siege. -ThunderClaw

Cloth: Pig tails will provide you all the cloth you need and booze too. -Yanlin

• It's way more effective, in the end, to buy cloth. Plant fiber cloth is incredibly cheap from caravans (~400 value for 10 cloth, plus the bin it came in) and they traffic huge quantities of it. It's not unusual to buy up 50 cloth from a single caravan, which frees up your pig tails for easy brewing fodder, and gives you enough raw material to sew images, which is great for increasing fortress wealth, dwarf happiness, and allows you to naturalize captured goblin clothing so you can offer it to caravans for the diplomacy boost.

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! -Yanlin

• Mechanic is the way to go. Not only are mechanisms single items (less hauling) but also aren't useless. Prepared food is very good too, though it needs 3 dwarves working (planter, brewer and cook. Combining them into one dwarf is bad thing). Craftdwarves aren't really useful at start and are almost totally useless after that. -Someone-else
  • Mechanisms as trade goods are not feasible. They weigh too much. Merchants will decline the trades just because their animals can't haul that much. Crafts, toys, and mugs are very viable, as are meals. Anything that turns a significant wealth profit is fine for buying your first anvil. 1000 value is not that much in the grand scheme of things, by the time you get to 100 dwarves you will probably be trafficing 5000 value with each caravan. -ThunderClaw
    • Well, no; I've been able to do all my trading with mechanisms in my current fort, buying as much as 30,000☼ from each caravan. The key is to get a top-skill mechanic and use high-value stone (ideally, obsidian). One masterpiece obsidian mechanism is worth 1,080☼ and only weighs 167Γ. You might have to buy some cheap but heavy goods first to clear some space (bars, pets, cages, etc.), but even the elves can handle the weight as long as the mechanisms are pricey enough. Mechanisms require much less hauling than crafts, being 3x the price per unit, and training a mechanic is much more useful than training a stonecrafter. Trading with prepared meals is even better, although you have to manage their storage and transport carefully or else they'll spoil. (You can't leave them in the depot between caravans, for instance, and they have a tendency to spoil before someone gets around to hauling them out of the kitchen.) -Maximus
      • This is fine and dandy for later on in your fortress when you have highly skilled mechanics and access to better stone, but for your first anvil, when your mechanic is at best proficient (and more likely untrained) and you have to trade with whatever mechanisms you have available, using them as trade goods falls through very quickly. A dolomite mechanism weighs closer to 350Γ and is less valuable than an obsidian one. Later on, when you are trading massive quantities of heavy stuff like wood from each caravan, you might be able to do this, but early on it's too much of a gamble. -ThunderClaw
        • Therefore, mugs. You even get the bonus of three mugs per rock. But mugs aren't the best trade good in the world - sooner or later you're going to want to import giant cave spider silk cloth and thread so you can make socks from them so you can use them as trade goods instead. Everybody loves smooth silk socks, and they're, at worst, worth 600☼. -GreyMario
• Scrape up enough to buy at least 2 cheese then cook the cheese. Use the cooked cheese to buy the rest of the cheese. Cook the rest of the cheese. Buy out the rest of the caravan with the new meal. -Ikko
• Seconding cooking over crafting. I generally have a 5x5 plot of plump helmets, which I brew then cook, which will feed an arbitrarily high amount of dwarves and allow me to buy pretty much whatever I want. -Vaniver

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. -Yanlin

• If you happen to have artifact furniture just build one room of average size, but few beds, tables and thrones in it and make it a "noble room". Artifact will boost its value enough for all dwarves who aren't kings unless it's made from one log, stone, bone, shell or the like. -Someone-else
• Nobles need their own quarter away from everything because they get the unhappy thoughts about their 'lessers' pretentious lodgings'. Integrating them into normal society is too much of a pain to bother with. Plus making a designated noble's quarter means they're easier to kill if the need arises. As nearly as I can tell, the Tax Collector, Hammerer, and Dungeon Master all consider themselves fairly equal, while the Baron/Count/Duke and consorts consider themselves a step up, with the King/Queen and consort a step above that. Build four 3x3 rooms for each low rung noble (bedroom, office, dining room, tomb), 7 slightly larger (3x4, 4x4, your call) rooms for the second rung (2 bedrooms, 2 dining rooms, 2 tombs, 1 office. The consort does not require an office), and 7 still larger rooms for the king/queen and consort (again, 2 bedrooms, 2 dining rooms, 2 tombs, 1 office). Turn off all engravers except for your one best one for engraving; engravings are extremely variable in impressiveness so you need to keep the worker constant and count on the fact that the rooms are larger to keep the net wealth from engravings from varying too much. Finally, if you really want to keep your nobles stupidly happy, dig out a 1x2 area near their bed, smooth it, and place an Aluminum or Platinum statue next to a stone statue (import aluminum from the dwarven caravan if you can't find any. It's only about 250 for some nuggets and it's much lighter than platinum). Make sure the statues are a part of the bedroom. The noble will now admire his 'own completely sublime tastefully arranged statue' every time he wakes up, for a massive +50 mood spike that can take a dwarf from unhappy to ecstatic. -ThunderClaw

Pets and food animals

• Cats. Having a few cats will not only boost the adopted dwarfs' mood but will also make your food safer (due to a lack of vermin). However, with how many cats immigrants bring as pets, it's practically impossible to control them indefinitely. The resulting excessive numbers of cats can cause framerate issues, though this is less of an issue then in previous versions.

• Dogs. Bringing 2 dogs along with your starting caravan and train any full grown dogs you get into war animals. Assigning war animals to civilians is one of the best ways to increase security. You may choose instead to have civilians train their own war animals. Training is fairly quick even at dabbling and trained animals follow their trainer while still remaining strays (no sadness if the animal dies, but no immediate mood boost from being comforted if unhappy).

• Shamelessly kill off newborn pets to prevent overpopulation. Especially useful on cats. Or put them in a cage as an emergency food source. Caged animals do not breed, block paths or waste CPU power on pathfinding.

• Dogs give a lot of bang for your buck. They are a good source of meat. You just pay 16☼ for them upon embark. This might be a little bit more than the price of 5 meat (which is 10☼) 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. Slaughtering each dog gives 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. Also you can slaughter dogs at whim, whereas you can't slaughter an owned pet.

• Alternatively, dogs are generally a lot better used as war animals, even if you have a lot of them. Every war animal you have is another defender against goblins, and quite possibly one fewer lost dwarf. If you want an emergency food supply, make a 5x5 room and honeycomb it with ropes. Assign beasts of burden like musk oxen, horses, and the like to them. Chained animals will breed, so you will get offspring, but they will all stay in their little corrall and make finding animals to slaughter very easy.

• Simply put a meeting zone across the entrance to your fort, which will cause stray animals (including war dogs) to wander around in that meeting zone. Any thief is instantly turned into kibble, and they're quite handy at assisting with smaller sieges too.

Defense

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. -Yanlin

• Don't neglect armor. Leather armor is incredibly easy to make, and masterwork leather armor is as good as iron. Turtle shell can also make very good armor. -ThunderClaw

Goblin babysnatchers and Kobold thieves. One dog on a chain will kill them on contact. Especially a war dog. I usually buy a few chains at the embarkment. -Yanlin

• War dogs actualy miss thieves about half the time they reveal them if they can't pursue. Tying a beast of burden to a chain will scare thieves away (they bug out the second they are revealed) with less of a net affect on security. War dogs on chains are as good as dead in a siege. -ThunderClaw

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. -Yanlin

• Interim/second-line defence layout requiring minimal man-hours to assemble; mine out one long entrance tunnel, with doors and fortifications at the very end, one line of traps just inside the entrance to soften them up and another line in front of the defences to mop up whatever your marksdwarves can't kill off in time. Optionally carve fortifications out of both sides of this passage, screened by traps or even a channel, and establish a crossfire. "Crossbows to the left of us, crossbows to the right of us..." -Jake Grey
• Other common security ideas can be a retractable bridge or a pit of grates that drop into a drowning chamber or a cave of spikes. Always make 2 or 3 defensible positions to fall back to in case one is compromised. -ThunderClaw

You might want to bring along a rope 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. -Gamerofthegame

• Use a beast of burden instead. Dogs are better spent protecting important civilians. -ThunderClaw

Weapon traps and marksdwarves = survival for most -wendigo

• But not siege-breaking. Remember that unhappiness kills as many dwarves as goblin weapons, so if you turtle up for too long, you'll find your dwarves emoing themselves to death. -ThunderClaw

Production and efficiency

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 furnace, you win. -Yanlin

• Fuel is very hard to mass produce. A large-scale charcoal producing is infeasible because of the distance required for hauling each fallen tree. Coke production is entirely dependant on how much coke-stone you can find. You can request charcoal from the human and dwarven caravans, and coke-stone from the dwarven caravan, but they never bring very much (enough for about 25-30 bars of fuel a year). Glass is nice for producing gems for strange moods on demand (raw glass counts as a gem), but without magma it's not a good use of your limited fuel supplies - metal weapons and armor are much better. -ThunderClaw

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. -Yanlin

• If you're being beseiged by goblins, you can melt down their armour for iron. -Tenebrais
• I have to agree here. If you have a magma source. Each goblin gives about 3 bars of metal when you melt down the equipment. Also, dwarven and human caravans bring maybe 10 bars or more each if you give it a high priority. Since you only need iron (/steel) for weapons and armour, you can easily survive on a map without iron ore. -Qwertyu
• You can replicate iron with high-quality bone and leatherworkers. Masterwork bone/shell and leather armor is as strong as normal-quality iron equipment. Goblins never carry more than regular quality gear, so if you have a legendary bone or leatherworker you're competing on equal ground unless the goblins are routinely employing steel. Large-scale melting of equipment to get iron is infeasible without magma because each melt job consumes a unit of fuel, which is rare enough as it is. You can import obsidian (much cheaper and lighter than iron ores, so you see more of it per caravan) from the dwarven caravan to get steel-quality swords and use stonecrafting to back up your marksdwarves. While you will not have the grand dwarven military of legend, your armed forces can get along just fine without iron. -ThunderClaw

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. -Flok Speargrabber

• Import barrels from the human and dwarven caravans. They're cheap, come ready made, and eliminate the need to use wood on them. -ThunderClaw

Turtles are AWESOME! -Flok Speargrabber

• Be sure to disable bones and shells in your early outdoor refuse stockpile so you don't waste turtles' awesomeness. -Someone-else

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

• The second advice is bad. Just start your farm soon and brew what you can and you will have more seeds than need. As for bringing everything: 1 seed each is enough. Rock nuts are useless before you have food chain and plenty of bags. -Someone-else
• I don't think bringing more than plump helmet and pig tail to start out with is nessecery. It will be a number of years before you have the labor to mill the other plants in any sort of volume, and seeds are cheap and easy to buy from the caravans. It's a bad idea to come with only 1 seed of your critical pig tail and plump helmet crops, though; if disaster strikes and you somehow do not reclaim the seeds you need from the grown product (accidental cooking, wilting, etc), you're completely out of luck and your dwarves will have to either forage or starve to death. -ThunderClaw

Immigrants are good for fishing that pesky carp. (Well not really. But they are good for fishing nonetheless.) -blakyoshi7

If your dwarves need to go to water that contains carp, longnose gar, or other ravenous river creatures, any goon given a crossbow and stationed at least one tile away from the river can keep a fair region of river clear of animals, given a little while. Remember to turn off chasing so they don't run up to the river and get dragged in. -Heron

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. -Yanlin

• One-crop farming will create a chronic "tired of the same old food/booze" thought in all your dwarves, and hamstring your ability to make higher quality finished goods to keep the peace internally and become a proper economic powerhouse. Variety is the spice of life. After you have a steady, reliable base of plump helmets so starvation is not a problem, expand into other crops, especially Cave Wheat and Dimple Cups. -ThunderClaw

Wood. You don't really NEED a heavily forested 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. -Yanlin

• If you plan on doing a lot of metalsmithing on a map with no magma, or a lot of clear glass or soap, you will need a lot of wood for charcoal and ash. -Bouchart
• You can also request wood from the human and dwarven caravans, and they'll routinely bring 30-40 logs per year. Unless you have a voracious wood burning demand, the caravans alone can provide more than enough for your needs. Many times I only cut trees to clear for building after the first couple years in my fortresses. -ThunderClaw

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. -Overdose

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

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

• Wrong. Glass industry requires many bags. -Someone-else
• Arguably, if you've got a use for cloth in bulk then you've probably got an export good valuable enough to buy it with and still turn a profit, though a local supply to top it up couldn't hurt. -Jake Grey
• Bags are also needed for milling. Mass importation of cloth allows you to sew images into captured goblin equipment to naturalize it (make it OK to offer it to traders) and allows you to produce ropes and bags at a whim. Plus, buying the bin from traders means you can use less wood on building your own bins. Be sure to buy a decent supply (5-10 parcels) of silk cloth as well. Strange moods will often request it and it's very rare you'll be able to produce it on your own.

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.- motorbitch

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.) -motorbitch

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. -Gamerofthegame

• Magma also allows you to mass-produce metal weaponry and armor for export or use in weapon traps. It also allows you to process ore as you find it instead of waiting for a demand to smelt and craft it (since fuel use isn't a problem).

Have your carpenter(s) craft a steady flow of beds/barrels/bins -wendigo

Run a still nonstop. Get those seeds, distill that booze. -wendigo

• If you have many barrels filled with booze and no free ones just cook some beer biscuits. Not only they will make your dwarves happier but also will train your cook and let your brewer continue his work. Don't do this if you have no plants to brew. -Someone-else

Metalworking is desirable, but not crucial. -wendigo

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. -Hyndis

If you find yourself on a map with an abundance of metal ore and coal or magma, save your wood for beds, ash and the odd strange mood and make as much as you can from metal; it's usually a lot easier to defend and safely access a vein of cassiterite or a coal seam during sieges than a whole forest. Metal bins also make trading with the elves a bit less laborious. (NB: I would strongly advise you to use up your less useful metals such as tin first, even if you're practically buried in magnetite; a sudden run on crossbow bolts could come at the very worst moment.) -Jake Grey

Speaking of which, don't underestimate the usefulness of elven merchants, as the one thing they're reliable for bringing is cloth, and lots of it. Unless you forbid the use of pig tails and/or rope reed for brewing, your still and farmer's workshop will be in direct competition for the same supply, which can lead to shortfalls in one or the other. Apart from the fact that running out of cloth is infinitely preferable to running out of booze, it's also better value for money as an import. -Jake Grey

Wood is useful for:

Beds - Bins - Barrels - Spikes - Pump parts - Windmills and water wheels

-Flok Speargrabber

Stone is good for:

Statues - Coffers - Cabinets - Coffins - Trade goods - Doors - Floodgates - Chairs - Tables - Blocks for roads and floors (More brick-y than block-y)

-Flok Speargrabber

Metal is good for:

Weapons - Armor - Magma-safe stuff - Expensive statues - Noble orders, usually, unless they don't want a special metal item

-Flok Speargrabber

Performance

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. -Vaftrudner

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.) -motorbitch

• However, dwarves get fairly powerful happy thoughts from satisfying acquisitions and fairly powerful unhappy thoughts from having their clothes fall off. There is usually plenty of labor in a larger fortress to clothe everyone, so unless you have an FPS issue there's no reason not to do it. -ThunderClaw

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

Special conditions

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) -Ashery

Adding your own advice

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