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v0.34:Quickstart guide
| This article is about an older version of DF. |
- This is a quickstart guide for Dwarf fortress mode for those who have never played before who quickly want to jump in head-first.
- If you are looking to learn adventure mode instead, see the Adventure mode quick start guide.
- Also see Tutorials for more detailed tutorials that people have submitted.
Always remember that losing is fun! Be prepared to lose a few fortresses before you get all the way through this guide – it can be easy to accidentally kill the entire fortress while learning. But remember: losing means that next time, you'll remember how you lost. In a big way, Dwarf Fortress uses the principle of learning from one's mistakes.
If you have any feedback on this guide, please see the instructions in the feedback section.
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 this is not as hard as you might think.
As this article doesn't always contain the exact key sequences needed to do everything described, you will likely need to refer to the Fortress Mode Reference Guide and the rest of the wiki while reading this.
Common UI Concepts
While the guide contains many links, you may still need to look something up. Refer to the Fortress Mode Reference Guide or use the wiki search function. Also, don't hesitate to ask for help if you can't find answers on the wiki.
About key symbols
This wiki uses symbols that look like t or 
t to indicate what keys or interface buttons are used for an operation. Note that keys are case sensitive and to save space, Shift+t is shown as T. So t means "press the 't' key without the shift key" and T means "hold down shift and press the 't' key". Lowercase and uppercase keys will often perform different functions, so it is important to use the correct key. Sequences of keys will be in separate boxes, so abC means "press 'a', then press 'b', then hold shift and press 'c'"; while 
b
T means "press 'b', then hold shift and press 'T'. A plus sign '+' between the boxes means to press them all together, so Shift+Enter means to hold shift and press 'Enter'. Other separators, such as ',' or '-', might be used but mean the same as no separator: to press the keys in sequence.
Keybindings can be seen and changed on the Keybindings tab in the Settings menu.
| Esc or right mouse | Go back to the previous screen/menu |
| Mouse wheel | Scroll menu one line |
| Shift+mouse wheel | Scroll menu one page |
| Left mouse | Select menu option |
Esc or right mouse will almost always return to the previous screen until you get to the top level of the UI, at which point Esc will display the options menu.
World Generation
The first thing you will need to do is generate a new world. Unlike many games, the world that your game takes place in will always be procedurally randomly generated by you or someone else. There is no "default" or "standard" world.
Luckily the basic version of this process is rather simple, and doesn't usually take too long unless your computer is a bit outdated or the world's history is set to Long.
For your first game, generate a new world using the Create New World! option in the main menu with the following options:
- World Size is Medium
- History is Short
- Number of Civilizations is Medium
- Number of Sites is Medium
- Number of Beasts is Medium
- Natural Savagery is Very Low
- Mineral Occurrence is Frequent
This should help to avoid difficulties.
Pre-Embark
- Also see: Embark
Embarking is the process of choosing a site, outfitting your initial dwarves, and sending them on their way.
Select Start Playing from the main menu, then select Dwarf Fortress.
The map you see on the right is the World Map which will show you the whole world. The one in the middle is the Region Map which will show you a zoomed-in view of the part of the world indicated by the cursor in the world map. The Local Map on the left will show a zoomed-in view of the part of the region indicated by the cursor in the region map. In the local map area there will be a highlighted embark region that you can move around with u m k h and resize with U M K H. This highlighted square is what will become your play area after you embark (This means that you cannot do or see anything outside of this area during your game). Use ↑ ↓ ← → to move the region and world cursors around. Hold down Shift while doing this to move more rapidly.
Choosing a Good Site
Choosing a good embark site is crucial for beginners. (Very) highly skilled players can create a functional fortress on an evil glacier, but for now, let's 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.
For your first game, find a site with the following properties:
- NO Aquifer (This is very important!)
- Trees: Forested or Heavily Forested
- Temperature: Warm
- Surroundings: Serene, calm, or at least not any evil or savage biome.
- Clay or Soil is important to make farming easier when starting out
- Shallow Metals (That's Metals, plural, not Metal. You want more than one.)
- A River if possible
- Deep Metal(s) if possible
- Flux Stone if possible
You may want to use the find tool to help you find a site. You may find it easier to put only some of the criteria into the tool (at the very least, No Aquifer). Once the find tool has finished running, the general areas which it has found will be indicated by flashing characters on the map.
Notes about the find tool:
"Calm" is classified as Neutral, Low Savagery (see the chart here for why). The find tool will also only indicate a general area containing suitable sites, so you will still need to check the attributes manually by moving between flashing regions on the world and region maps (with the arrow keys or numpad) and by moving around on the local map (with u m k h) until you find the most suitable site.
The find tool may take 1-2 minutes to run, when it's done, be sure to press ESC to look around at the different sites it returns (look for flashing Xs on the world map). As you move your yellow X over the flashing suggested sites, the info bar on the right will tell you soil, minerals, aquifer, etc. Choose the one that looks best to you!
Your site may have multiple biomes overlapping it. If so make sure to press F1, F2, etc, to take a look at all of them (Macs may require fn-F1, depending on your settings). They may each have significantly different characteristics. Note that occasionally a site with multiple biomes may contain an aquifer which isn't visible on the local map at first, due to it not being in the "first" biome (the one visible with F1). If your site has multiple biomes, it is very important to check all of them to avoid surprises like this.
Additionally, you can resize your embark area using U M K H. A 4x4 embark (the standard) is usually reasonable, but you may want to decrease the size to avoid an undesirable biome (or if your computer can't handle a 4x4 embark).
See Starting site for more info on why these characteristics are important.
Press e to embark once you're sure you have the right area highlighted on the local map.
Skills and Equipment
If, at this point, you'd like to get into all of the details of picking individual skills and equipment for your expedition, select Prepare for the journey carefully and see Preparing carefully for instructions. This is completely optional.
Now the Prepare for the Journey screen should appear. You will be given the choice to either:
- Play Now!
- Prepare for the journey carefully.
Selecting Play Now! will start you out with a default set of equipment that is reasonably safe, allowing you to skip having to set up your skills and equipment. If you'd like to get going now, just select that option.
A Minimal Fortress
At this point you have embarked and your dwarves have arrived at their destination. You will see your dwarves clustered around their wagon full of supplies somewhere near the center of your map. Immediately hit Space to pause the game unless it is already paused.
Surveying the Area
Do not unpause the game just yet. Take a look around. Use the k command and the arrow keys. Look up and down a few z-levels with < and >. Place the cursor on various tiles to familiarize yourself with what the symbols mean. If you get lost, you can press F1 to return to the wagon. (You can define more hotkeys later, to jump quickly to other sites of interest.)
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 before breaking ground, 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 fun because even when you lose, you create an interesting story.
Your wagon serves as the initial meeting area for your dwarves. Since you should have started in a non-freezing, calm (low savagery), non-evil biome, you shouldn't face any immediate danger, but if for some reason the area around your wagon proves to be unsafe, immediately designate another meeting zone using i (see Temporary Meeting Area below).
Controlling Your Dwarves
The first thing to keep in mind is that, for the most part, you can't directly control your dwarves the way you control characters in a typical fantasy RPG. Instead, you designate things that need to be done and then dwarves with the appropriate labor assignments will decide what to start working on based on a set of largely hard-coded priorities.
For example, if a dwarf needs to eat then he will go eat and only get around to digging a tunnel once he is done eating. It is also possible to designate things that no dwarf is able to do. For example, if you designate an area to mine but no dwarf has mining as one of his allowed labors or no dwarf has a pickaxe then the mining will never get done, and the game will not always advise you of why.
So what you are doing throughout the game is essentially giving your dwarves a detailed group-wide to-do list, but it's up to them to figure out which one of them will execute any given task if the task is even possible. Often many of the details of how a task is performed (such as exactly which rock will be used to make crafts) are left up to them.
Stout Labor
Labors are how you control what types of tasks a dwarf will do. For example, if the Fishing labor is enabled for a dwarf, that dwarf is allowed to engage in fishing.
When dwarves are idle, it could be because you haven't given them anything to do, or it could be because none of the idle dwarves have been told that they're allowed to do the types of tasks you've designated. For example, if you designate an area to mine, but none of the dwarves have the mining labor enabled, they will all just sit around ignoring your mining designation thinking that it isn't their job.
Dwarves will automatically have some labors enabled if they start out with skill in those labors, and some labors (such as hauling and cleaning) are enabled for all dwarves by default. This is why you didn't need to enable any labors on dwarves to get them to haul and mine, but later you may need a labor that no dwarf is currently capable of.
You may have noticed that the UI for managing dwarves is a bit difficult to use. There are a few utilities available for this purpose (for Windows, Mac, and most Linux systems):
- Dwarf Therapist can make labor management considerably easier, especially when you're dealing with twenty times the number of dwarves you have now. It can group and sort dwarves by multiple attributes and display their preferences, mood, and more.
- DFHack also contains a UI for managing labors. While it has fewer features than Dwarf Therapist, it still lets you change labors. In addition, it is accessible from within DF (which eliminates the need to constantly switch between applications). It also supports sorting and can display dwarves' moods and preferences.
With the digging and stockpile taken care of, look over your dwarves' assigned labors. Press v (View Units) then place the cursor on a dwarf. Now, press p-l for "preferences: labors". You will see a list of labor categories that you can navigate using -+. You can enter each category and toggle each labor off and on with Enter and get back out with Esc.
After exiting the View Units menu, you can use u (the units screen) to help you locate dwarves. Hit u, select a dwarf, hit c for "zoom to creature" and you'll automatically be placed in view mode on that dwarf. (Then use p-l to get to the labor configuration menu if necessary.)
Even if no dwarves have the corresponding skills, ensure that someone has wood burner, furnace operator, wood cutter, plant gathering, gem cutter, armorsmith, weaponsmith, blacksmith, metal crafter, and engraver (stone detailing) enabled. If you have dwarves with hunting or fishing, disable those until you have your initial fort completed. When you're first starting out you don't want dwarves wandering around alone where they can get killed.
Any unskilled dwarf can perform any labor given the necessary equipment and materials. Dwarves with no skill will simply be slow and produce a smaller quantity of lower quality goods in a given time period, but they will gain skill points as they do so.
Strike The Earth!
Generally, you will want to get all your dwarves and supplies inside a protected area as quickly as possible. So the first thing you will do is designate some areas to "mine".
Decide where you will build your main entrance. The best thing to do is just put it near your wagon to make it faster and less work to haul all of your supplies inside.
To designate an area for digging:
- Hit d to bring up the Designations Menu.
- Hit d again to select Mine. (Note that dwarves mine horizontally, not downwards. Use h (Channel) instead if you want to dig down.)
- Place the cursor on one corner of the rectangular area you want to designate and press Enter.
- Move the cursor to the other corner of the rectangle and press Enter. A rectangle will be highlighted and a miner dwarf will start to dig out this area once you exit the menu (with Esc) and unpause the game with Space.
This is basically how all of the designation commands work. Everything has to be designated one rectangle at a time, but rectangles can also be one tile wide, or just one single tile.
If your wagon is near a cliff, you can just designate a tunnel to mine (d-d) into the cliff to create an entryway. If you are on flat land with no cliff near the wagon, channel out a small rectangle (perhaps 3x3) on the surface with d-h to create a sort of pit with ramps on the edges, then go down one z-level with > and tunnel into the wall of the pit (with d-d) to create your entry. (Think of this as creating your own cliff, with the inside wall of the pit being the "cliff".)
Dig a hallway one tile wide and at least 10 long, ideally more like 20. This will be your entryway.
Your entryway defines the boundary between your safe and protected inner fort, and the big bad outside world. You want this to be your only entrance so that you only have to worry about defending this one opening.
A guide to starting a fortress can be found here
Additional miners
Mining will go faster if you have more than one dwarf doing it. By default, only one dwarf has the Mining labor enabled, but this can be changed fairly easily:
- Choose a dwarf that isn't doing anything especially useful (the fish cleaner is a good choice for a beginning fortress, but you can always change your mind if you end up with a useless peasant later on)
- Press v, navigate to the dwarf, and press p-l
- Enable the "Mining" option (see Stout Labor above)
- Exit with Esc
The next time you designate an area for mining, both of your miners should start working (assuming they're not busy doing something else).
Notes:
- Each miner requires a pick. A standard embark comes with 2 picks. If you want more than two miners, you'll need to forge more picks. Two miners should be adequate for most fortresses, but more miners can add reliability (for when a miner decides to sleep) and speed.
- If you're digging a one-tile-wide hallway, only one miner can work from an end.
- Miners, carpenters, and hunters are exclusive - a dwarf can only have up to one of these professions at a time. For this reason, it's not recommended to make your only woodcutter a miner, since they won't be able to cut wood anymore.
Delving Secure Lodgings
Near the beginning of the entryway, build a 5x5 room, and link it to the entrance tunnel with a 3-wide passageway. From the link to the opening, extend the entrance tunnel to a 3-wide tunnel. At the end of the entrance tunnel, dig a 3x3 room, which will later become your main stairwell. Two tiles away from that, dig an 11x11 room, which will later become your general stockpile, and connect it to the stairwell with a 1-wide passageway.
Don't make any of these rooms too big or your miner will take forever to dig the rooms out, especially if he is digging in stone instead of soil. (Digging through soil is much faster.) You may want to designate one room at a time, then wait for it to be mined out before designating the next room.
Stockpiles
Stockpiles are very important. These areas are where your dwarves will drop things for storage when they aren't needed elsewhere. To create a general purpose stockpile for your first storage area:
- Hit p to open the Stockpiles menu.
- Use t to change the custom stockpile settings to enable everything but Corpses, Refuse, Stone, Gems, and Wood. Use directional keys, enable, disable to do this.
- Esc out of that screen back to the stockpiles menu.
- Hit c to select Custom Stockpile.
- Designate the whole 11x11 storage room as a custom stockpile. This works just like designating an area to dig: place the cursor on one corner of the room, hit Enter, move to the opposite corner, and hit Enter again.
- Press Esc to get out of the Stockpiles menu.
Once you exit the stockpiles menu you should see dwarves running off to haul everything from your wagon into the new stockpile area. Later you can change what sort of things the stockpile accepts by hitting q (Set Building Tasks/Prefs), placing the cursor on the stockpile, then pressing s to get to the stockpile settings.
It is particularly important to keep wood, stone, refuse, and corpses out of your general purpose stockpile, so you may want to double check to make sure all of these things are disabled in the stockpile settings. Failure to keep these things out of this stockpile will cause problems.
Note- When assigning stockpiles, you should make sure they're in a vacant area. IE; the tiles should only "contain" the ground. Dwarves will not haul stuff to filled tiles, so make sure the area is vacant (Assign the area for dump) before assigning a stockpile.
Stairways
Designate a Downward Stairway in the middle of your 3x3 room with d-j. Notice that after your miner digs the stairway, it doesn't automatically create another stairway on the z-level below. If you hit > to move the view down a z-level you'll see that there's no stairway below, but there is a revealed tile of rock/soil. Because of the down stairway that was dug, this tile is now accessible to miners. You can then designate an Up/Down Stairway on it with d-i and the miner dwarf will dig it out. Below that you can then dig out another up/down stairway and so on. For now just dig down one level; we will deepen the stairwell later.
Temporary Meeting Area
Using the i key, create an activity zone (at least 5x5) in the stairwell or general stockpile area (be careful not to make this too small lest your overcrowded animals start fighting). This works much like creating a stockpile except that you draw the rectangle first then hit keys to define what the area is for. Draw the rectangle over the area then set it to be a meeting area. Your idle dwarves will hang around in this area, hopefully keeping them inside the fort and out of trouble.
Refuse
Outside your fort entrance, use p followed by r to create a stockpile for refuse at least 5x5 in size. This should be outside in the open or you will have problems with Miasma. If you do not disable vermin (Item Types -> remains), you will probably have to expand it later as it will fill up with vermin remains rather quickly. If you are seeing refuse appear in your general-purpose stockpile instead of the refuse pile, use q on the general stockpile and check its settings to make sure refuse has been disabled.
Woodcutting
Create another stockpile for wood outside your entrance. As it will only be temporary, don't make it too big (maybe 5x3, or 15 tiles total). Later you will move this closer to your carpenter's workshop once you build one.
Press q, place the cursor on your wagon, and hit x to deconstruct it. This will flag the wagon for disassembly. Eventually a carpenter will come along and turn the useless wagon into a few units of wood. Removing other buildings is done the same way.
Also near the entry, designate at least 10 trees to b