Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Phlum]

Dwarf fortress, just do it!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Phlum cancels reply to thread, discovered that "Nike" is secretly drug dealing.

[craniak716]

Thanks for all the great replies! I'm beginning my first fortress tonight after a quiz for school. How irresponsible of me, right? Well, I will be capping the pop considerably and I will definitely be keeping the wiki open side by side with the game. I will let everyone know how my foray into the world of DF goes. I expect failure but nevertheless I shall relate my experiences to you. Again, thanks.

[My Name is Immaterial]

After you finally nail the basics

MUST. RESIST. URGE. TO. FIX. CAN. NOT. RESIST.

After you finally nail the babies

To keep them from being snatched.

On a serious note, sieges are baptisms in blood. LOTS of it. Mostly yours, to start.

[MaximumZero]

The best way to learn the game is right there in the Lazy Newb Pack's interface.

Turn off Aquifers. They will wreck your shit.

[xpi0t0s]

I started by following this tutorial: http://afteractionreporter.com/dwarf-fortress-tutorials/
Don't worry about losing work.  You can always reclaim.

Plus there's DFHack, so if something turns up that you really can't handle, just use "liquids" to encase it in obsidian, or drop magma on its head ;-)

[0cu]

Lazy Newb Pack is the best. Turn off aquifers, increase your population cap with every game startup if you feel ready for more migrants. Also, don't mind some lost dwarves.

[zehive]

I tried teaching one of my friends how to play DF once. It lasted an hour and a half and it ended with him yelling 'DOOR NEEDS DOOR' into his microphone

[Imp]

Craniak, if you really think you're likely to get distressed by having things that you don't understand about the game not work the way you planned, there's always save scumming.  Many people consider this cheating, many people don't.  It's a sandbox game, play your own way, and learn your own way especially I say.

Some of the more efficient ways to do this include going into the init files (ask if you need more detail) and turning the seasonal autosaves on.  This gives you a uniquely named save for every season that will stretch across the life of your fortress.

Then, play normally.  When you realize ahead of time that you're about to try something you think you may regret, save the game, then restart it and proceed.  Assuming you're using a PC, if something absolutely unacceptable to you happens, open task manager and use end process on the df game.  It'll close without saving, allowing you to reopen it from your last save.

Occasionally you may realize that you made a tragic choice months or years earlier in your play - if you'd rather roll back to then instead of playing through or starting over, that's what the seasonal saves are for.  You can even rename them before you turn back to them to make it easier to find the right one again if you decide to use it.

I'm not saying that you should quit if the game doesn't give you the results that you want to see.  But I think everyone should know that it's a choice you have, especially those players who tend to walk away rather then play through or start over; surely everyone agrees it's better to save scum then abandon play entire 

[Deathworks]

Hello Craniak716!

While I have been playing DF on and off for quite a while, I am more of a casual/small/scale player. Thus, I think I can give you some hints as to how to reduce the complexity of the game in the initial phase.

As was already mentioned, the init files are your friends, especially d_init.txt (in the data/init subdirectory). Besides the population settings mentioned by others, it also allows you to toggle features of the game.

Look for the following group of options:

[TEMPERATURE:YES]
[WEATHER:YES]
[ECONOMY:YES]
[INVADERS:NO]
[CAVEINS:YES]
[ARTIFACTS:YES]
[ZERO_RENT:NO]

Yours probably look a bit different, as this is my current version.
TEMPERATURE is important especially when you embark in extreme climates, but it also includes the risk of dwarves walking onto ice that melts under their feet in spring.
WEATHER is only a real problem in extreme climates (or evil biomes, I think), so I don't think it adds much to the core difficulty. In addition, you do need it for replenishing pools (which in themselves are not that important, though).
ECONOMY is currently completely deactivated, so this flag does nothing.
INVADERS is an important flag for difficulty for it sets whether any hostiles will enter your site. Mind you, wild animals are not counted as hostiles, so you can still have bears and tigers come around, but goblins and kobolds and the like can be stopped using this flag.
CAVEINS toggles whether unsupported parts of the fortress collapse. Given the oddities of digging habits of dwarves, accidents with caveins are a real threat in the beginning.
ARTIFACTS are a kind of bonus feature that may give you some exciting trinket in your fortress - or a potentially dangerously insane dwarf.
ZERO_RENT is related to ECONOMY and thus currently useless.

I recommend that you set all these features to NO initially, though WEATHER is not that important, I think.
Once you feel sure about the controls, you may turn on TEMPERATURE and CAVEINS (check carefully that you are not in for a bad surprise).
Once you have a feeling for creating goods, food, trading and the like, you may want to activate ARTIFACTS.
And once you feel comfortable with the game, you can turn on INVADERS to really get a new challenge.

As for the population cap, I personally recommend 7:

[POPULATION_CAP:7]

The game is hard coded to send an initial wave of migrants, regardless of your population cap, so you will end up with more than 7 dwarves. Mind you, with less than 20 dwarves, most things will take a while as you have a small work force, but without invaders, artifacts, extreme temperatures, and so on, you should have enough time to let your fortress grow slowly.

All these init settings can be changed during game play; or rather between game play sessions: Exit the game. Change set setting. Start and load the game. Some of the settings have a certain lag as some decisions in the game are made a while ahead of time.

If you had not created a world yet, I would have recommended the following course of action:
Design a world using advanced settings, select the MEDIUM REGION and press 'e' to edit the parameters.
Set the End Year to maybe 300.
Set Mineral Scarcity to 500. (This should give you lots of metals and gems you can work with)
Max out all the requirements for the titan attack. (This keeps trouble as far away as possible)
Set Vampire curses, werebeasts and secret types to 0. (This removes dangerous migrants which may mess up even a small fortress)
Set Levels Above Layer 1 to maybe 15 (This gives you enough room to learn before digging deeper into more difficult layers of the game)
Gen a world with those settings.

This way, some of the additional difficulties are removed from the game. The settings of the world you generated are permanent for that world, so if you have 0 vampires initially, you will never ever have any vampires in that particular world.

As for starting out, if you have invaders deactivated, you can safely farm above ground. This is extremely easy as all you need is to 'b'uild a few farm plots (maybe 2x2 each) on any space of sand, soil or grass (ignore the warning about water, that's for underground farming), then 'd'esignate a chunk of the map for 'p'lant gathering. The dwarves will harvest the marked bushes in that area, and once they have gathered any plants, you can tell your dwarves to plant those in the farm plots henceforth. This is probably the easiest and quickest way to start your farming industry.


These are my personal pieces of advice. Of course, keep the Wiki close by and feel free to ask the community here for help.

Yours,
Deathworks

[Imp]

if you do change your cave ins setting to off - I recommend for that game just leave it off.  Turn that one on (if you want it on) at the start of a game.

DF's a bit instant when it comes to what causes a cave in.  But that may not be obvious at all to you until the game dramatically and clearly shows you what you did to cause that cave in - by caving in at that very instant.

Note that you still might not have any idea exactly what caused the cave in - but you do know what orders you'd set for the area the cave in happened, so it's got to be one of those in that exact spacial area.  Which narrows it down a lot.

Turning it on in the middle might cause everything unstable to collapse right then.  That aftermath may be pretty fun to watch, but probably will do little to help you understand how to avoid cave ins in the future.

[Deathworks]

Hello!

Thank you Imp for pointing that out. You are right, caveins should probably stay out for the length of the game.

Speaking of my forgetfulness,Craniak716 , I also strongly recommend that you have the game seasonally save and back up. This way, you get a new save every season which allows you to move back to happier times and also to investigate alternatives or reasons why things happened. The option you need is the first in the d_init.txt file:

[AUTOSAVE:SEASONAL]
[AUTOBACKUP:YES]
[AUTOSAVE_PAUSE:YES]

I also have the game pause whenever it saves or loads so that I have a guaranteed break each season or when starting the game. Doing so allows you to get your bearings and not get overwhelmed by new developments.

[PAUSE_ON_LOAD:YES]

Have a good time!

Yours,
Deathworks

[Tally]

I've never actually run into cave-ins, surprisingly. Granted, however, I've still got habits built into me from 2D when cave-ins happened just from having your rooms too big without supports.

A tip I'll give you is that, once you've got the hang of the interface and other basics, go ahead and experiment with things you don't know very well. Many prosperous fortresses will use irrigration systems, power grids, minecarts, and the like to provide the fortress with the means to function optimally. Minecarts especially are very handy for a sprawling fortress, or starting out on a high-cliff embark (as will happen if you embark on a volcano). The task will likely give you headaches when you start on it, but you'll grow accustomed to it and learn how to adapt such systems to your fortress for your needs.


Also, while you're still new: NEVER EVER EMBARK ON AN EVIL BIOME UNLESS YOU ABSOLUTELY KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING. Or unless you're curious to see for yourself what I'm talking about. Evil biomes are 'Haunted', 'Sinister', and 'Terrifying.' They hold their titles quite well.

[ZimminyCricket]

Had to put the game down a year ago because of complexity.  Picked it up about a month and a half ago, and yes, losing == fun, hang in there, and don't worry when you die.

[HiEv]

A Woodfurnace is also advisable, since it is the only workshop that gives other dwarves happy thoughts, as it counts as a fireplace.

While wood furnaces may give happy thoughts, your reasoning is false. Any building that is designed by a building designer (which includes all furnaces, wells, windmills, trade depots, screw pumps, supports, bridges, archery targets, and paved roads) may give happy thoughts if the dwarf that designed it has a high enough skill.

I'm not sure either way, but if that's the case then the Wood furnace wiki entry needs to be fixed (I just added a verify tag there), and probably the Thought entry as well.