5punky Dwarf Fortress guide

[friznit]

Can you put stones in containers? I have a huge stockpile outside full of crap which I'm slowly shaping into blocks and storing in my building materials vault, and a smaller stockpile inside with just the rocks I need for smelting, but it's overflowing already.

[Dog Pants]

Nope. You might be able to stack stone blocks, but getting rid of all the dug out raw stone is a common problem in the game. There's a page on stone management on the wiki.

I use three methods, and still have a massive excess;
Have a few crafting workshops making trade goods. They're light and you can offload lots of it onto the traders in return for useful stuff. Sells for a reasonable amount too.
Pave your corridors. Takes quite a while and counts as a building (so you can't put traps on it), but uses a good amount of stone.
Zone off an area for garbage, then dump inconvenient stone into it (k to highlight, d to dump). It stacks in there, so can be as small as you want it. Problems are that you have to do each stone individually, and it forbids it once it's in there. There are workarounds (dump an area, go in and unforbid or unforbid the whole stone type), but they're not ideal.


Short answer is, there's no easy way to stay stone-free.

[shot2bits]

i find setting up a couple of craftdwarf shops is the best way, not necesserally the fastest but when you have 2 or 3 legendary stone crafters they cut through the rock pretty fast and the stuff they make is worth quite alot ive never needed anything more than the stuff from that for trade and always have an excess, plus the finished goods can be stacked in bins.

and its good if you have migrants with skillsets you dont need as you just tell them to make shit out of rocks

[Dog Pants]

Ah yes, the bins. I meant to mention that, as they make moving the craft goods around and storing them a lot easier, but you need to make loads of the damn things. Can you make them out of stone? It hadn't occurred to me until now, but that'd solve some problems.

[friznit]

make shit out of rocks

For thousands of years, alchemists have been trying to turn lead into gold. Now we're making shit out of rocks. That's progress!


As far as I can tell almost everything can be made out of either stone, wood or metal and quite a lot out of cloth as well. I've been making stone tables, chairs, doors, columns, walls, fortifations...I even built a stone tower outside just because. I might even find a use for it later.

My latest plan is to extend my underground river (tunnelled from the main river to my well for fresh watter) to the entrance, then build holes for would be invaders to fall through and drown.

[shot2bits]

Ah yes, the bins. I meant to mention that, as they make moving the craft goods around and storing them a lot easier, but you need to make loads of the damn things. Can you make them out of stone? It hadn't occurred to me until now, but that'd solve some problems.

im pretty sure bins can only be made from wood and metal, and obviously wood is lighter, cheaper and ussually more accecable than metal, plus its lighter so its easier for the dwarfs to move them when you want to trade

[Joose]

My latest plan is to extend my underground river (tunnelled from the main river to my well for fresh watter) to the entrance, then build holes for would be invaders to fall through and drown.

Tip for anyone else thinking of trying this: watch out for water pressure. I got mixed up as to what z-level I was on, and all the water fountained out of my well, flooding most of my fortress and causing an excess of Fun.

[friznit]

Hah, yes I had Fun with water pressure on my first attempt. My underground farms this time round are being irrigated by a complicated system of ceiling grates, sluice gates and run offs, none of which I think are needed since afaik you only need flood the area once to get it all muddied but it was amusing putting it all together.

[buzzmong]

Hah, yes I had Fun with water pressure on my first attempt. My underground farms this time round are being irrigated by a complicated system of ceiling grates, sluice gates and run offs, none of which I think are needed since afaik you only need flood the area once to get it all muddied but it was amusing putting it all together.

Some farms don't need irrigation though. Check the Dorfwiki for soil types.

[friznit]

I understood there was a bug currently that meant all farms needed water regardless. Either way, I'm on rock atm so it's good practice.

Apparently there are Dorf Manager tools (may not work with this latest version yet), which make the whole Find Dwarf -> Check Skills -> Assign Labour -> Give kit process actually doable when you have more than 5 to fart around with. It's already a pain trying to find which dorf can do what and assign him appropriately and I only have 12.

[shot2bits]

Some farms don't need irrigation though. Check the Dorfwiki for soil types.

this ^ http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Crops

ive started farming some wild strawberries and prickle berries and it seems to be working fine above ground and im pretty sure theres no water/mud just normal soil

[Dog Pants]

If you can make an underground farm without mud then please tell me how, because I couldn't. I've not tried surface farming yet.

[shot2bits]

im pretty sure all underground stuff requires mud

i meant ive been doing surface farming as id got a few seeds for it

[shot2bits]

also quite a few bits grown in farms like sweet pods will need to be processed or taken to a mill although they need power from either wind or water but you can use a quern for the same purpose of a mill, you just have to make it from stone first

[buzzmong]

Pretty much what S2B said, apparently there's a bug with the underground stuff. Apparently.

However, above ground farming can be done on anything that's regarded as "soil", which means as long as you've got the right seeds/crops, it's a doozy. Especially if you wall off an area and make an outside courtyard, which is one of my plans.

[friznit]

Stockpiles

The DF Wiki has a fairly comprehensive article on stockpiles already and they're not particularly complicated, so this is just a few tips for the not so obvious stuff. Create stockpiles the same way you designate any other area: p > choose a default stockpile type > allocate area > press enter. You don't have to stockpile everything, but it keeps your fortress tidy and can be used to place resources close to your workshops, for example. You can also customise any of the stockpiles to store a specific resource there, such as a stockpile of seeds near your farms or raw fish near the fishery.

Wooden or metal Bins (or barrels for food, bags for seed, cages for animals) are an essential addition to any stockpile, as most stuff can be consolidated into bins so they take up less space.

Supply Chains: you can create supply chains between a number of small stockpiles by using the (t)ake from stockpile option. q menu > highlight destination stockpile > press t > highlight source. Note that the stockpiles can only supply to one other pile, though they can take from as many as they want.

Special Stockpiles: dead dwarves and pets will be dumped in Graveyards if they don't have a tomb built for them. Decaying bodies will make nearby dwarves unhappy so they're best kept outside. Refuse from various workshops and dead enemies will be hauled to a Refuse stockpile. Note that this is different to the Garbage Dump zone (g), which is used to (D)ump items you specify manually (k -> d).

[Dog Pants]

Added loads to the first post, and it just occurred to me that since edits don't show as a new post it's probable that nobody's noticed.

[shot2bits]

for making clothes you either need spider webs or plants that produce thread such as pig tail, with the plants you take them to a farmers workshop to be processed, you then take the thread to a loom with a dwarf that has the weaver skill enabled, the spider webs just go straight to the loom afaik, from the loom you get cloth which is taken to the clothier's shop which requires a dwarf with the clothier skill enabled
and
weaving and clothesmaking skills are both under crafts and plant processing under farming

you can also dye the clothes after to make them more valuable but ive not looked into this yes

[Dog Pants]

Yeah, I've got pretty much every workshop working now. The soapmaker doesn't seem to be doing a lot, and I've not tried the dyer. I've got a working hospital and siege weapons (I assume the weapons work, I've not had anything attack since I built them). It's got to the point where I'm fairly safe and stable, so I'm just keeping an eye on things while I dig further. I might upgrade one of my militia squads to metal armour.

[friznit]

Apparently you can set up some cheap siege artillery to lob excess rocks at nothing much. Helps train up the dudes, since this takes a while (And they're civvies so run away as soon as something nasty shows up)