Im still quite new so hopefuly the advice I can offer is worthwhile.
- Take with you anything you can't get easily yourself (Anvil, picks)
- Swap out the Axes you are given for training axes, they are much cheaper if all you are doing is chopping down trees with them
- Avoid taking things you can make yourself (so buckets, barrels, and even a training axe if you reclaim the wagon and make a training axe as your first job)
- Avoid taking things you will not immediately need (such as crutches/splints) as you will get these in the general course of things
- Hunting, Mining and Wood-chopping can't be skilled on the same dwarf at the same time. This doesn't mean you can't have them skilled and switch between the tasks but this level of micro-management is very annoying.
- Try to avoid giving multi-skills to dorfs that will never use. So giving a guy Mining and Engraving sounds worthwhile but if you anticipate they will spend 100% of their life mining, giving them anything that is a job-related skill is pointless. Same goes for carpenter and mason, if you want your carpenter to constantly be spitting out barrels and bins and your mason to be making doors, beds, chairs, tables.. its unlikely you will have time between doing one thing to do the other.
- (related to the above) It is fine to give your dwarfs just 1 skill, there is no mandatory reason to max this out and after multiple play through's of having your grower/herbalist only to realize that you spent more time farming that he never went out to gather plants (or it wasn't a benefit when he did) ... its then you realize that those points might have been better just buying food
- Migration waves can bring good skilled workers. So don't stress about not having your mechanic, doctor, engraver setup from embark as you could likely get them popping in later down the line
- Any dwarf can do any job... but without skills they will be quite bad at it. So if you have no mechanic but REALLLLY need to build that bridge and have a lever connected to it, just assign one of your guys to get some mechanisms made and then re-assign when done
- Some tasks require no skill such as architecture and construction. Although good architecture gives a nice moodlet if the dorf views an impressive building, mostly its a good idea to have all of your dwarves skilled on this. Wall construction is another one, assign all of your guys to masonry either permanently or on a temp basis so your solo mason isn't doing all the work. If you do it forever, make sure to set your mason workshop to have a preset mason as the only worker OR a minimum skill level to do the work
- If you just want to make money, the quickest method i have found is MINE>ORE and WOOD>CHARCOAL>SMELT and BARS>GOBLET. This requires a furnace, smelter, decent ore (like gold, platinum etc) and a good metalcrafter. With this method you can fashion goblets worth 1-2k a piece VERY quickly and its very easy to just buy out a caravan in your first year!
- It is very annoying to get a caravan arrive and have nothing to trade, especially if you NEED things you are short on (seeds, plants, beer etc). For this purpose, consider going straight from embark with stonecrafting. Then just craft rock mugs. Ideally also get your carpenter working on bins as this helps speed up hauling once the caravan arrives. Mugs are good compared to instruments/crafts/toys as they dont have name variants, just MUG - so very easy to search.
- When trading, it can be difficult to haul all of your items to the depot if you didn't group them in bins. This can mean that from when the trader arrives to when he is leaving, you still don't have them all loaded. Here are a few tips to make sure that you don't lose out on the trade.
1) Make your trader (at least for the time the caravan is there) jobless, not hauling or anything. This will mean that aside from eating, sleeping or drinking, he will be right at the depot. I even went so far as to make the traders bedroom next to the depot and have a keg and food barrel in his room with a table+chair to avoid him taking long.. silly I know
2) You can trade multiple times so I will usually trade once right after the season save (as they wont leave before the season changes) and then once again as they are about to leave, squeezing any more in as i see the haulers popping into the depot
3) Try to make your finished goods stockpile near the depot. Having the depot INSIDE the stockpile is an idea! - that way a job that takes ages is done in seconds.
- Lastly... learn to use macros, they are great in building and great in trading (you can set one to repeat trade, down, trade down (for the entire window) and at the press of a button you sell all in the current page of the trade list. Just remember that when you are building, where it starts is where it ended... so if you want to build bedrooms, make sure you end the macro at the point where your next bedroom needs to go
I am sure there are more tips, these are the immediate ones I found
Oh, and although there are plenty of people that do Lets Plays on DF, by far the best (and for other LP as well) is Quill18 on Youtube.
He has made a few video series, often on live-streams and his humor/approach is very watchable.
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Topic: Quick Question From A Newbie (Read 412 times)