Generating your world
Before the game can start it needs to generate a world. Terrain, population, and even history are created. It can take a while, but once done the Start Game option should appear on the main menu.
Finding a site
Once the world is created and a new game is started, you're presented with a map in three windows. The only difference here is scale - left being local, middle is area, right is world. Scrolling around these will reveal information about the area, so have a look around. Alternatively, use the find option (f) to pick out a nice area.
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Easiest find options:
Savagery: Low*
Evil: Low*
Temperature: Medium**
Flux Stone: Yes***
Aquifer: No**
River: Yes****
*These settings represent the temperament of the local wildlife.
**Low and high temperatures create water problems. Aquifers make digging under the water table difficult.
***Flux stone is useful and/or valuable, also known as economic stone
****Rivers aren't essential if there's decent rainfall and some surface water, but that can't always be relied upon. Rivers are a supplied water source, so can accidentally flood your fortress.Once you've found a nice area, hit 'e' to start your expedition.
Preparing your expedition
It's well worth selecting the option to 'Prepare for the journey carefully'. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of random dwarves when you could optimise their skills for the early game. Later on migrants bring skills, so don't worry about the other skills for now. Bear in mind too that any dwarf can be trained to do anything eventually, so it's more of a head start than a game-breaking decision.
The equipment you take is fairly standard, and the starting lineup isn't bad. Some things you will definately want:
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Battleaxe(s) - Also used to chop down trees.
Picks - Required to dig
Seeds - Needed to make your mushroom farmsSkills can be assigned to dwarves heading out, up to 10 per dwarf and up to 5 in any one skill. Some you'll really want to max out, but as you only get 7 dwarves some might have to double up.
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Miners - They'll be working a lot, all game, so might as well start with some good ones. It's worth taking two to speed things along, no more though unless you buy more picks for them to use.
Woodcutter - You'll be needing wood, so having a woodcutter is useful. As with miners, they can only cut wood as long as they have an axe.
Farmer - Those mushroom farms are vital, so having a skilled grower will really help.
Expedition Leader - Having one dwarf with a good Appraisal skill and Judge of Intent will help with trading a lot. They're not easy to train up, and will make life easier when it comes to making up shortages with bought goods. Since someone has to fill the role of mayor, this guy will fit that nicely too.
Carpenter - You'll be creating a lot of furniture, both early on and as your fortress expands. Dwarves need beds, tables and chairs to be happy, and your carpenter will be working flat out making them.
Stonecrafter - This could be doubled up with another skill because it won't be in constant use. You'll need him though to create goods to sell to traders, as well as a few other useful things.
Mason - You'll need a mason to make new buildings and some stone goods. This could probably be doubled up with stonecraft without too much detriment.Code: Select all
Siege Engineer/Weaponsmith/Armoursmith - Not used until much later, but difficult to train.
Cook/Brewer - They'll be needed soon enough when your supplies start running out and you have to start making your own consumables.
Mechanic - Used in building traps and mechanisms, used as early defences.Starting your fortress
First of all, pause the game (space) and look around. Hit TAB a few times to enlarge the left hand portion of the screen, and ditch the area map on the right. You're looking for somewhere to start digging your fortress. Ideally this should be fairly out of the way, but with a wide enough accessway for carts to get to it (at least 3 squares wide). While scanning around, use <and> to move up and down a layer, bearing in mind the area is in 3D, sliced into levels (called Z-levels as they're on the Z axis). Try and find somewhere reasonably close to water, as you'll need some before you can farm. It can be useful to have an area of earth rather than rock for those farms too, but since you'll need to get water in either way to farm (a bug, you shouldn't need water for dirt farms) it doesn't really matter. While looking around you can hit 'k' and examine individual squares to see what's in them.
Layout
It's well worth considering the eventual construction of a large fortress when starting out, since you can't fill mined areas in again. Things to bear in mind:
Dwarves don't like to walk far, and it's more efficient if they don't have to.
You have three dimensions to use, so building up or down might be closer than keeping everything on the same level.
Raiders will come in through your front door. Put traps and barracks near it, keep stores and apartments away from it.
Put similar industries in the same area, as many processes rely on other workshops.
Keep high traffic corridors wide.
Keep living quarters away from workshops, it keeps your dwarves awake at night.
I find that the following setup seems to be okay:
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Level 1 - Entrance, barracks, kennel, animal trainer, animal storage, refuse storage, graveyard, weapon and armour storage, armoury.
Level 2 - Living quarters, craft storage, furniture storage, meeting room. Possibly food storage, as this is where the dwarves will eat.
Level 3 - Most other storage.
Level 4 - Workshops
Level 5 - Additional storage (keeps goods closer, rather than spread out over level 3). Can be worth putting a gem store and valuable ore storage (custom stone stockpile) to save having to lug them up two extra flights of stairs from the mines.
Level 6 and below - Mines, looking for goodies to extract. It can be worth putting a long corridor ahead of your mines, especially if you haven't hit anything valuable yet, and filling it with traps. Invaders can come from below as well as above.
Other - Farms need to go wherever you can get water to them.Feeding
Your dwarves need to eat, and the supplies they bring with them will only last a short time. They need to start producing their own sustenance - food and booze mainly.
Foraging
The bushes outside your fortress can supply you with berries to eat. Simply designate (d) the area for gathering and your dwarves will go and pick them. This is only a short term solution though. They're unreliable and not in great supply. It's nice to have it as a backup though for hard times, before your dwarves start eating the rats.
Farms
Farms are essential to any fortress as the main source of ingredients for food and booze. The main problem though is that they need to be built in mud (at the moment), and that requires water. Luckily, once an area has been moistened the mud will remain indefinately, so you only need to do it once. The easiest way to make mud for farming is to find a nearby pond and drain it into your fortress. Care needs to be taken though lest you cause a flood. Look for a medium sized pond (say 10x10 squares) and build a fairly large room nearby the bed. Dig a tunnel to the edge and prepare your area for flooding. If you have a masonry or woodworking workshop you can build a floodgate with which to control the water flow. They work much like traps, so more on those later. If you've got your pond/farm chamber scales right though it shouldn't matter too much. Just to be on the safe side, stick a door on the entrance to your farm so at worst you'll just lose that room. Then dig out the last block to the pond and let the water in. If you've done it correctly the water should drain from the pond into the farm chamber and turn the ground to mud. If there's a bit of water left (up to 2 deep) it's not a huge problem as you can still work in that. It should dry up pretty quickly though, leaving you with a muddy room for your shrooms to grow in.
Once you have mud you can build your farms, just like any other room (b for build, p for plant). I make mine in patches of 3x3 so I can rotate them, but you can make them whatever size you like. Hit q and select your farm. The options should have the types of seeds that will grow in it, a bunch of seasons, and a few other options. Select what you want to grow and you're away. This will only grow in the season you're in though, so select the other seasons and choose crops to grow in those too. Plump Helmets are a good crop throughout the game because they can be eaten raw, cooked, or made into beer.
Hunting
Having a few hunters and/or trappers will add meat to your dwarves' diets. This may or may not make them happier with their meals, but some of the by-products (particularly bone and hide) are useful anyway.
To get a hunter working he will need a crossbow and ammo. If you begin the game with a hunter they will come with a free set, otherwise you'll have to build them. Crossbows can be made from wood or bone in a bowyers without too much difficulty. Bolts are made in a crafts workshop from a multitide of materials. Bone is most often used, because as the hunter brings in kills the bones are made into more ammo for him.
A hunter will pick up a crossbow on their own, but need to be allocated ammo in the military menu (m, f). Once armed up, if they have the hunting labour enabled they will head off on their own to shoot animals and bring them back. It's worth having a small refuse storage pile near your butcher which is set to only contain fresh raw hide in item types. This way it won't get filled with crap, and your butcher won't have to spend so long getting the meat that it goes rotten.
Occasionally a bug will cause the hunter to simply stop working. If you notice your butcher stockpile not filling up and your hunter partying too much, just remove the labour and re-add it to get him working again. Since the hunter has a tendency to stay outdoors and sleep on the ground, drinking out of ponds, this isn't suck a bad thing as it gives him the chance to go home for a while and not get unhappy from lack of bed and booze.
Stockpiles
In order to store the huge amount of resources you'll be creating you need stockpiles. There are quite a few types, and you'll be getting to know some better than others. 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.
Refuse and graveyards
Refuse stockpiles are special in that you don't want what's in them. They store all the dead things that your cats drag in, goblins you've splatted, and leftover giblets from butchery. Eventually some will rot away to bones and you can use them, but that takes a long time. Give your refuse pile a lot of room, because it's only ever going to get bigger.
Graveyards are similar in that they'll only ever expand. However, you'll be putting your dwarves in there who've died. This has a psychological effect on their mates, so it's better to treat them nice. A small graveyard should be enough to use as a holding space, because as soon as you can you'll want to get those dead dwarves into coffins. Coffins can be built from wood at a carpenter's, or from stone in a mason workshop. They act like furniture, and when activated as a room can be set to hold dwarves (and pets by default, but I disable that). By placing them around the outside of your graveyard your stiffs will spend a minimum amount of time in the open air, causing as little distress as possible to the others, and reducing the risk of miasma.
Miasma is what the pair of these have in common. It's a stink created by dead bodies rotting, represented by a purple cloud, and it makes your dwarves feel bad. It never gets chance to appear in the open air and so it's often worth putting your refuse pile outdoors. It also can't move through doors.
Resources
Production
Living space
Dwarves like to have places to hang out, and a place to sleep. They can survive without living spaces, but they'll be unhappy and it's only a matter of time before an unhappy dwarf goes mental.
Bedrooms
A dwarf with his own bedroom is more likely to be happy. Dig out a space, stick a bed in it (made by a mason or carpenter - see production) and hit q and select one of the beds. This gives you the option to turn the area around the bed into a bedroom (r), so do that. Expand the selection to fill the room and hit enter, and you have an unassigned bedroom. If you just leave it like that the next dwarf who wanders along will claim it as their own, otherwise you have the option of assigning it to an individual (for example larger and more elaborate rooms for your nobles) or designating it a barracks or dormitary.
Once made bedrooms can be improved in order to make your dwarves happier. Smoothing then engraving the floors and walls will make them happier, as will higher quality and gem encrusted furniture. Bedrooms can also contain a cabinet and a chest for them to put their stuff in. This means the minimum size you'll want your bedrooms is 1x3, but the larger they are the happier your dwarves will be. I've found 3x3 to be categorised as meagre, and 3x4 as moderate. Of course the bigger they are the more space they take up and the more smoothing/engraving will be needed.
Lastly, and to repeat what was said in the layout section, don't put your living quarters near workshops. The hammering will keep them awake and make them unhappy.
Barracks
The first living space you'll want to build is a barracks. It may seem odd, because you'll have no military for a while yet, but bear with me. Barracks and dormitaries are communal sleeping areas where any dwarf without a bed of their own (and lazy ones who do) can have a kip. I choose barracks because your first room is likely to be near the entrance, so later on your militia will hang out here. The only difference between making this and a normal bedroom is that you'll want multiple beds. No need to assign them all, any which come under the selection made when creating the room will be used.
Dining/meeting room
Unless you have a lot of rooms this is likely to be the same thing. Dwarves like to hang out and eat together, and the meeting room is where they will go if they're not busy (and throw parties). The room is made by placing a table, selecting it with 'q', and hitting 'r' to create a dining room. There you have the option to make it a meeting room for your dwarves to gather in as well as eat.
For a dwarf to eat he needs a table and a chair to be adjacent to each other. As with barracks, any additional furniture put in the room will be used without having to allocate it, so just pile a few more in there. Both can be made from stone to conserve your wood for beds and get rid of some of the stone clutter. As with bedrooms, dwarves in the meeting room will be happier if it has been smoothed and engraved, as will they be with better quality furniture.
One last thing to note about dining rooms is the parties. If your dwarves are bored they'll start rocking out, and they won't stop when you want them to go back to work. If you need to pull the plug on their fun, select the room with 'q' and de-allocate it. The dwarves will no longer have a meeting room to party in and will stop. Then simply re-allocate it as your meeting room and everyone goes back to work happy.
Zoo
Not very common, but worth noting, are zoos. By placing a caged animal in a room you can turn it into a social room where dwarves will visit and look at the animal. If this is an animal that doesn't disgust them they will be happy (and sometimes throw a party for it).
Traps
Trading
Stone Management
Military
Setting up and using your military will become imortant when you start getting more than 20 dwarves and the goblins start following in the caravans. Traps will hold them off for a while, but eventually you're going to have to fight. Creating your militia is done in several steps.
1. Assign a militia captain (noble menu). This dwarf wil be the squad leader.
2. Go to the military menu and create a squad. The captain will be the first member, and up to 9 more dwarves can be assigned. Search through your list and pick out any dwarves with weapon skills (it points out relevant skills) who you can spare. Select them with return to add them to the squad. Do this for as many dwarves as you like or can fit. They don't need weapon skills, but it helps.
3. Train and assign orders to your dwarves. More on this later, as it's complicated.
4. Militia with no orders will go about their normal jobs. When you come under attack you need to activate the squad, turning them into their military roles. First find the bad guys. You can find them at the bottom of the unit (u) menu and zoom to them (c). Go to the squad menu (s) and select the squad (listed as a, b, c, d etc). Either direct them to attack the target (k), or move near it (m) and they'll do it themselves. I've noticed they tend to get lost if just told to kill something which they can't see.
5. Fighting will increase theit skill with the weapon, and progress them from Recruit to whichever fighter type they are (spearman, swordman etc).
6. Once the threat is gone you can deactivate them by cancelling their orders from the squad menu (s), and they'll go back to work.
Scheduling, training, and alerts
In order for your militia to be effective, and to be able to properly defend your fortress, you need to configure them for certain tasks. The easiest way to do this is to go into the military menu (m), then schedule (s). You'll see all the months with the word TRAIN next to them. Remove every other month (c), setting it to inactive. This will at the very least allow you to go into the alerts (a) menu and set your squad to train without them killing themselves (they will take a break on the alternate months you removed).
They'll need a place to do their training too. Their barracks will do, but the more cluttered the training room is, the more likely they are to injure themselves. It's worth putting an armoury next door by carving out a room and putting in a weapon and armour rack. Here you can set the room as an armoury and your dwarves will train in relative safety. Something to bear in mind is if your squal has less than 10 dwarves to set the training amount lower (edit the schedule order) or else they'll stick to individual training.
In order to defend more effectively you need to set up some custom alerts in order to keep your civilians away from the enemy, and your militia close to them. In order to do this you first need to assign the areas both dwarf types will go to in an emergency (note, you still have to manually order them to go there, dwarves don't recognise an emergency on their own). This is done using the burrows menu (w).
From the burrows menu create a new burrow (a) and select it. From the next menu you can rename your burrow (N), which is useful for knowing who should be going where, and set the marker colours using /, * and c. Name this burrow something like 'SAFETY'. Paint an area of your fort in which you want your civilians to stick to when under attack, just as you would when mining. This can span multiple levels, and you can move around and paint the burrow until you hit ESC to finish. Repeat for an area in and around the entrance, and call this one something like 'GUARD'.
Head back to the military menu and go to alerts (a). Here you have a list of your alerts, a list of your squads, and a list of burrows. The alerts will be appended by a *CIV* marker, which is the alert state your civilians are currently at. By highlighting another alert and hitting return they will go to that alert state, but leave them at inactive under normal circumstances so they can get on with their work. The squad list can be used to assign squads to a particular alert state, just like civilians in the alert list. The alert they are at will append the squad with an A marker when highlighted. Leave them on ACTIVE/TRAIN unless under attack and they'll follow the training schedule. The last column is the burrows assigned to a particular alert, also appended with an A marker when in use by that alert. So, create a new alert (c) and name (N) it 'SAFETY' or something similar. With that alert highlighted, move across to the burrows column and select the SAFETY burrow created earlier so that an A appears next to it. Now, when under attack, you can come back to this menu and hit return on the SAFETY alert to cause your dwarves to be restricted to the SAFETY burrow, keeping them out of harm's way. Repeat the process to create an alert named 'GUARD' or somesuch, and select the GUARD burrow. Now when under attack you can come back to the alert menu, highlight the GUARD alert, and select your militia squad in order to restrict them to the entrance of your fortress.
Labour
Dwarves will only perform tasks which are enabled in their labour settings. Usually these are set by default to skills they are good at, and maybe a few random others. By using these setting you can manage what jobs your dwarves do, and prevent them wandering off to do something else. To set labout, find your dwarf in the unit menu (u), zoom in on them (c) and go to them preferences menu (p), then labour (l). Labout can then be enabled or disabled. Dwarf Therapist is a third party app that gives you a complete list of your dwarves with a display of who has which skills enabled. They can be changed with a click and uploaded to the game live, making it an essential tool for work management. Download it right now.[url]
General Tips
Scroll around the menus if you can't find what you want. Often it's not apparent there are more options.
Check up on what your dwarves are doing with the unit (u) menu. From there you can zoom in on them (c) to check out any problems.
Find out where problems are by zooming from the announcement. Hit 'a' to go to the announcements log, select the one you want, and hit 'z' to go to where it's hapenning.
Resources
[url=http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Main_Page]DF Wiki - contains information on most aspects of the game and is fairly easy to follow. There are some good guides in there. If a page is looking barren, click on the link to the previous version at the top.
RPS video tutorials
The Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial for Dwarf Fortress - Illustrated tutorial for use with a tutorial save game.
