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[Crust13]

What are your favorite preparations.  I'm never sure what first skills I should give my dwarves.  They all end up learning something new.  Also, I tend to keep the items I leave with at a minimum.  Only what I need then I just build everything else there.  4 hens and a rooster, dogs, cats.  That's about it.  Are there any specialized set ups?

thanks.

[Baffler]

My usual setup is a miner, a carpenter/woodcutter, a mason/architect, a grower/brewer who gets butchery and tanning assigned, a grower/cook who gets milking and shearing assigned, a bowyer/woodcrafter, a weapon/armorsmith, and a leatherworker/bonecrafter who gets cheesemaking assigned. As far as items, I take some cats and llamas (an extraordinarily useful animal, they can be sheared, milked, and butchered, and have very modest pasture needs) 2 picks, an axe, 10 of each seed, and 10 units of each type of booze. The rest of the points get spent on equal quantities of cassiterite and tetrahedrite to make bronze.

[Arx]

The embark system used to be gamed to hell and back. I'll see if I can find the thread on it, parts are probably still relevant.

[catten]

Skimming over my notes I find the following for embark supplies:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

• Sand bags are dirt cheap (1pt) can be used to produce magma-safe items and highly lethal non-metal trap components, and give a free bag.
  
• Bituminous coal (3pt) can be turned to 8 charcoal, allowing you to save wood/trees for beds and bins
  
• Cassiterite and Malachite (6pt each) can be smelted to create 8 bars of bronze with one fuel, great for equipping your early military with decent gear
  
• Garnierite (6pt) can be smelted to nickel if you want cheap magma-safe minecarts early on
  
• Dogs (12pt?) can be trained into war animals very quickly and make nice meat shields against early invaders
  
• Peafowl (6pt) lay 6-8 eggs at a time, are full grown in a year (turkeys and hens take two years to reach full size) and butchering them yields nearly as much meat as a turkey. Letting 3 peahens hatch one batch of chicks per year and collecting the eggs the rest of the time will produce 420+ food if you butcher the chicks after they reach full size (less than 18 months after embark).
  
• Cats (12pt?) kill vermin.
  
• Milk (1pt) gives one free barrel per type, and can be made easily into cheese for high-value early food. Won't rot until you process it into cheese.
  
• Meat (most 2pt) also gives one free barrel per type
  
• Seeds (2pt). Essential to jump-start booze, food, and fiber production.
  
• Plump helmets (4pt). Embark with 56 points worth of them---instead of taking booze and plump helmet spawn---then brew them quickly into 70 booze and 14 seeds for planting. 7 is an efficient farm plot size if you plan to fertilize your fields.
  
• Strawberrries (2pt) are even cheaper than plump helmets as a way to bootstrap your booze+seed supplies, if you're willing to grow an above-ground crop.
  
• Wood (3pt) gives fuel, beds, bins, ...
  
• Lye (2pt) is way cheaper and easier to make into fertilizer (potash) than wood, for significant yield improvements for those early plantings. It can also be used to make soap so your first hospital patients don't die of infection.
  
• Silk and wool cloth or thread costs half the pigtail based stuff the default embark would give you, but same functionality.
  
• Don't bother with splints or crutches, caravans *always* bring them for cheap and you can make them easily if the need arises earlier.
  
• Pick and anvil are necessities. You could make the pick from embark bronze, but it will delay striking the earth by a couple of weeks
  
• Rope. Restrain those war dogs so they actually guard your entrance instead of following your haulers around. Plus build a well.
  

[li]Quivers (10pt). Not much more expensive than the raw leather, and saves the need to embark with a leatherworker just to equip your markdwarves.
[/li][/list]

... and the following for essential skills :

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

• Discipline - Everyone *must* be at Adequate or better if you want them to be any use in a fight
  
• Mining - One or two Skilled or Proficient miners can dig out your fort drastically faster, useful for getting everyone safely underground ASAP in a hostile embark.
  
• Carpenter - Skilled or Proficient means faster production of important items (shields, beds, bins, wheelbarrows) but also higher quality (esp. important for giving your founders nice things to admire until you can give them more expensive toys).
  
• Grower - Skilled or Proficient means he can plant and harvest more efficiently, with time left over to brew and cook. Better crop yields are a really nice as well.
  
• Brewer - More skill turns plants into booze more quickly
  
• Cook - More skill turns ingredients into lavish meals more quickly, and higher quality makes dorfs happy. Plus, a barrel of high-quality lavish meals can buy out most caravans (including more than enough food ingredients to replace the lost calories).
  
• Mechanic - Skilled or Proficient means faster production of mechanisms for your early traps, and high-quality mechanisms that make those traps more lethal.
  
• Glassmaker - put those sandbags to use. The high-quality (= lethal) trap components are an especially nice early bonus, and he can make things that like nest boxes that would otherwise need a wood- or metal-crafting skill.
  
• Manager - Novice Broker, Appraiser, and Recordkeeper skill gives a usable manager/broker (those positions are useless with zero skill)
  
• Doctor - Novice at all medical skills means you have a hope of saving some lives if things go wrong. Adequate or better at Diagnosis speeds up treatment significantly, since every phase of treatment requires a diagnosis first.
  
• Weaponsmith - Proficient will turn your embark bronze into some high-quality axes and picks for your early military. Plus a crossbow and some bolts for your marksdwarf (below). I like to put everyone in an off-duty squad and tell them to keep equipment when off duty. That way they have some way to defend themselves from nasty surprises. Have your carpenter make them some shields, too.
  
• Armorsmith - Proficient will turn your embark bronze into high-quality armor for your military.
  
• Crossbow - An adequate marksdwarf will easily turn most early-game threats into pincushions if you can keep him from zerg rushing them.
  
• Shield user - Even Adequate gives a drastic increase to survivability if your dorf gets jumped.
  
• Masonry - More skill churns out blocks more quickly so you can build walls and bridges (which go up to 3x faster than if you use rough stone). Also makes furniture from all the stones your miners will produce so your dorfs have somewhere to eat, sit, and stash their stuff.
  
• Furnace operator - Adequate skill will turn your embark coal and ore into useful materials much more quickly than a no-skill dwarf.
  

Other skills can be assigned as needed, because they're either relatively unimportant at first or because they would be used only briefly as you bootstrap the fort. Things like animal trainer, metalcrafting, butchery, wood burning, and cheese making.

The embark supplies listed above are cheap enough that you can usually get plenty of supplies, max out your dwarves' skill slots, and still have points left over. I usually try to have 4 pairs of bronze ores, 8 coal (= lots of fuel!), a year supply of lye (1 unit for soap, the rest for fertilizer), 75 units of food, 60 units of booze (or the ingredients to brew them immediately), and a year supply of seeds for two 1x7 farm plots. The rest is a matter of taste (wood vs. sand vs. ores, depending on the embark). I butcher the random stray animals immediately for meat (usually quite a bit of it) and tallow to make that first bar of soap; otherwise you have to pasture and protect them, because you can't butcher them if they starve or die in an ambush.

[Insert_Gnome_Here]

I always start with a proficient mechanic, who I make manager then set to make mechanisms forever, and a proficient weaponsmith/armorsmith.
I sometimes take a proficient siege engineer, if I feel like it.

[xaritscin]

two miners/masons, two woodcuter/carpenters, two farmer/fishermen and 1 engineering/bookeeper/broker. two female cats, 4 female wardogs a pair of pigs and two hens. also complete some leaving equipment. and bring metal bars (y capped embark to 10k points)

[Iapetus]

I always used to check preferences, and assign weapon/armour smithing do dwarves with appropriate metal/item likes, and after than assign masonry/carpentry using the same principle.

I'd give admin and negotiation admin/negation skills to a dwarf with the least annoying preferences for demands, to encourage that one to get elected mayor.

Non-moodable skills were then paired with moodable ones, for optimum artefact production.

(And I'd follow the same policy to assign labors to migrants).


Recently though I've taken to assigning all labours to all dwarves (except when I get a really good combination of attributes and preferences), because I found I ended up with too many dwarves idling (and all the ones with a particular labour would probably be asleep or eating when I needed them). This way, jobs should get done on time, even if it ends up with a less skilled worker doing it.  (If a particular dwarf gets good at a particular skill I'll change their labours to make them concentrate on it, and use them for high-value tasks, such as steel-working).


As for embark supplies - I used to spend lots of points on skills, and so couldn't bring very much stuff with me.  For my most recent forts I've gone the other way and only bought a few skills, so I can afford to bring lots of ore and other supplies.

[vjmdhzgr]

Five points for all of these.
One dwarf with miner, one with woodcutter,one with grower and planter, one with mason, one with carpenter, and one with brewer and cooking. Sometimes I give the miner fighter and the woodcuts axedwarf. I normally bring 20 seeds of whatever plants I want, three sets of 20 units of food, two sets of forty units of alcohol, 2 copper pickaxes and axes, then some animals. Normally pigs, but I quite like water buffalo even though it takes me too long to set up a good pasture for them.

[Naryar]

Three miners (one Proficient), and one of Mason, Weaponsmith, Carpenter, Grower, all at proficient.

Also brewer, cook, woodcutter, armorsmith, engraver, stoneworker, mechanic, building designer at lower levels.

Always a dwarf with novice social skills and Appraiser to serve as expedition leader and basically each useful noble profession. Also has novice miner and some Diagnostician skill.

[Niddhoger]

Eh... never bring a bookkeeper or woodcutter.  One trains easy enough and the other goes quickly enough with low skill- especially now that trees give several units of wood.  Anyone chop down a 3x3 highland tree anytime soon? Takes as long as chopping down a cactus at low levels and gives insane amounts of wood. 

I never bring plump helmets with me on embark.  They are double the cost of other booze plants.  True... the other garden vegetables come in bags and are bugged to not be brewable.  You can dump them out of bags and brew them or do as I started doing in 4.23... bring 7 booze and rely on plant gathering.  Plant gatherers can harvest 100+ plants at a time now.  I tend to bring one profecient (level 5) herbalist and have him immediately harvest a couple plants to brew.  Then I tell him to go buck wild and bring in 100+ more for food/booze.  Combined with butchering my pack animals you don't need to bring ANY food with you.  I only bring the 7 starter booze to tide things over for a few weeks while I get the other booze going. 

I tend to smelt all my own tools and weapons early on.  Bring 1 unit of coke and tons of coal along with some ores.  As has been said, 1 unit of malachite and 1 unit of cassiterite is 8 units of bronze for 12 points.  It only takes 9 bronze and 1 unit of wood/leather to fully equip a dorf (8 for armor, 1 for weapon, and 1 wood/leather for shield).  Thus, you can have a full squad's worth of equipment in 198 units of embark points with 6 units of bronze left over for picks/wood axes.  Add in 10 points for the starter coal (or 3 for starter wood for coal) and then another 6 points for buliding material of forge/smelter.  So, 214 points gets me 10 soldiers worth of bronze equipment and 5 picks/1 woodcutter axes.  I can bring mountains of coal as filler points for further smelting jobs.

To save points... virtually nothing in the starter set needs to brought.  I tend to only bring The starter anvil and maybe some seeds.  Everything else is ditched.  Cloth? Can be grown or sheared.  Food? butchering pack animals and gathering plants.  Tools? I forge my own.  Crutches/wooden items? I make my own or buy from caravans.  Again... plant gathering is SEXY now.  Buchering pack animals is the rest of your food even when it wasn't.  Even if you just get two horses as pack animals thats 60 something units of food.  60 units of food will feed 7 dorfs for an entire year with change.  With migrants that is probably half a year easy.  This gives you more than enough time to gather plants/start farming.  As to plant gathering... in 40.23 I gathered 100 units of plants within the first season with an unskilled plant gatherer on a mountain embark that didn't even have plants on one side of the initial wagon.  Try bringing a skilled herbalist in a region with "thick vegetation.  You'll likely have to cancel orders when he starts moving a crawl with 150 plants in late spring. 

I do like bringing lye though.  Soap is just a PITA to make from scratch.  After butchering pack animals you have tallow to spare, so mix that with some lye you bring and you can get years worth of soap.  I also tend to bring leather to turn into bags asap.  Leather is 5 units each.  The cheapest thread is 6 units and still needs to be turned into cloth first.  I make some leather waterskins/backpacks then churn out 10-20 bags for seeds and quarry bushes/milling.  OR I bring sheep along (less butchering returns than llama/alpaca but cheaper and easier to pasture) and shear them for early cloth. 

The main point of all this early industry is to give something for my dorfs to do while my miners carve out the actual fort.  Even when digging through sand I have time where my other 5 dorfs just sit around playing with themselves.  I'd rather crack the whip and have them churning out equipment, cloth, soap, booze, anything.  I also prefer to dig everything out of stone (Dwarves do not live in sandy caves!!!!).  So once the dining hall and some basic stockpile/workshop space is carved along with a farm (I will dig that out of dirt for ease of use) I start to move everything below ground. This usually is completed in the first year before hte caravan arrives.  I also  tend to plop my first masonry in the dining room to clear the stone out into the tables and other such tid bits. 

Unless you embarked on an evil biome, this is entirely safe to do.  Everything you produce is low-value (yarn, bags, booze, bronze equipment, beds) so you won't be provoking monster attacks or ambushes (although maybe a thief or two).  Once you get settled in your carved out spaces and begin setting up bedrooms and trap-lines (or bridges/other defenses) you can begin cranking up your $$ industries (prepared food from growing shit tons of food is my favorite) and training a military.  I do love trap lines in the caverns and cave croc breeding programs too.  Early miltary can be used to "hunt" critters for food and bones/leather.  This is slower training, but still makes them useful.  Its a way to jump start your military when you still have under 20 dorfs... you still get useful food/resource production out of them while training them on packs of crundles.   

[tussock]

A single Copper Pick, or one Iron Anvil and one Copper Nugget to show off, plus whatever you find uninteresting to make yourself.

On tame embarks you don't even need that, as the wagon comes with 3 wood (for a training axe and infinity wood), plentiful bone bolts, meatstuff for food to trade, tallow for soap, 2 leather for quivers, and some hair for thread at the hospital. Once you kill a few things with all your new wooden crossbows and bone bolts (for more leather quivers), you'll be busy enough without all that digging nonsense.

Should you have the Anvil, max Animal Training, and max Mechanics can earn some early pets, or the Hunting/Archer stuff to speed that hunting along if stuck up top, or at least max Architecture for making a nice trade depot and someone as a good trader so you're rich in the first year rather than the second or third. A good Herbalist brings in time-saving stacks of food, as a Fisher does with Fish, and a good Cook makes you the richer with all of them. If you want your early beds and tables to be nice ones, a Carpenter and Mason will do that.

Immigrants cover everything else, and dabblers train up soon enough where they don't. With the slightly challenging embarks where it rains blistering and vomitous contagion on the walking dead over a salty aquifer, you mostly just want a lot of miners and picks and a more aquifer-piercing and cavern-claiming focus for survival. A couple of well-armoured military types can help, or at least some coal and ore. Oh, and lots of booze, because it might be a while before you have water (in as few barrels as possible, less vomiting saves on booze). A single pick will still get the job done, but getting a start is more down to luck.


But I just use the default. It saves me having to remember to make everything, and the skills are useful enough, except the Jeweller.

[Skullsploder]

I used to take tools and stuff but over time I've used less and less of those and now if I'm embarking somewhere with freshwater and plants I take nothing but ore. For skills I take a proficient weaponsmith+armourer, a proficient cook+farmer (who tends to get assigned brewing and plant gathering), a proficient carpenter, a proficient mason, a hunter or miner (depending on my plans), my future militia commander, and a furnace operator+wood burner. I like to get the metalsmithing up and running as early as possible, and then in turn getting my military training with good weaponry and armour as soon as possible. It's very relaxing to have a Swordmasters within Autumn of the second year.

[Iamblichos]

My standard loadout is 1 Proficient Miner, 1 Adequate Metal skills, 1 Proficient Stonecraft/Gems, 1 proficient Farmer/Herbalist, 1 proficient Brewer/Cook (who gets Butcher & Tanner enabled right after embark), 1 proficient Mason with Adequate Mechanic/Architect, and a Novice Carpenter with Novice in Leader/Appraisal/Judge of Intent/Organization to be my Bookie/Broker.

In embarks where I suspect water will be an issue, or I expect to do a lot of digging, I swap out the metals guy for an identical second Miner.

As far as items taken, only 1/2 picks and a single iron anvil.  Everything else can be produced onsite, the hauling creatures can be butchered for food, etc.