Print

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

[Niddhoger]

I find the manager next to worthless, and the skill can be used no problems without any training.  He might spend a couple more seconds in the office, but its not enough to spend points over.  I like to have multiple shops for just anyone to churn out blocks while the legendary mason makes masterworks.  Or I have one forge for grooming haulers into special moods, and another for actual weapons.  One forge each for armorer, weaponsmith, and blacksmith/crafter.  4-5 craft shops spread out to placed near where various different supplies are (one near the butcher for bone, one near the mason for stone, etc).  A smelter near the depot just to melt imports aside from my other 3-4 down below.  A kiln for collecting clay, a kiln for creating items, and finally a kiln for glazing.  Etc, etc, etc.  I don't need a manager just ramming jobs into the workshop and interrupting what I was actually trying to get done there or spammed with error messages because my order for steel swords went to the workshops linked to brass for instrument parts and goblets... *sigh*  Every time I try to use the manager more, I just end up needing twice as much micro to work around it.  Thankfully Toady is working on this to try and get the manager to respect workshop profiles and the like. 

As far as the anvil... I'd only consider it if your civilization lacks iron, and you are forced to buy a steel one.  Even then, I just feel naked without one.  Also, saving the anvil to buy more stuff means you just have more stuff to haul around and protect from keas/monkeys.  It seriously can slow down starting play when you are trying to haul too much in the starting seasons. 

As for making stuff topside... the trap is that you might get too invested in your production above.  You build workshops chains (butcher->tanner/craftshop->leatherworker.  You bring thread/shear sheep and get a chain of (farmers)->loom->clothiers'.  You get some stockpiles set up.... and then moving all of that underground becomes a huge drain.  If you do forge stuff on-site, you need to keep it to the bare essentials.  If you are worried about wasting time with idlers as your miners carve out the area, then chop more trees and haul the logs near the fort entrance, maybe go fishing or enable plant gathering on everyone.  But don't smelt through all the coal, then you need to build tons of bins to house it all, and you made 10 sets of armor, and have 30 leather bags to haul inside.... But then you left all hte bones you want to turn into bolts outside, and all the turkey offal bits need to be stored in barrels and drug underground.... Paradoxically, its unproductive to become too productive aboveground while waiting for your miners to finish digging.  Forge your picks and churn your milk... but dig out the stockpile space to get those belowground for further refinement asap. 

[feelotraveller]

As far as the anvil... I'd only consider it if your civilization lacks iron, and you are forced to buy a steel one.  Even then, I just feel naked without one.  Also, saving the anvil to buy more stuff means you just have more stuff to haul around and protect from keas/monkeys.  It seriously can slow down starting play when you are trying to haul too much in the starting seasons. 

Yeah, I felt naked at first too.  But I have not failed to get one* from the first caravan (all the way thru 40.xx and counting).  It is possible... though far less likely now that early sieges are a rarity.

*Who am I kidding it's always many. 

[The only time I've missed an anvil was a 34.something embark: all tricked out with a hundred barrels with one two point meat each (plus the egg barrels and sand bags and milk barrels and...) and a gray langur swooped in and snatched it.  Sloppy on my part not to have micro'd it inside - but the gray langur's (multiple troops of them too) kept needing my attention as the dogs kept going beserk.  It all worked out in the second year though (cowering under siege for the first dwarfly caravan).]

I've also had embarks where I spent every last point (except for pick/axe) on kaolinite.  Oh the statues!  Nice to be able to pick through for the remarkable (thematic) ones and dump the rest on the caravan (ka-ching).  And tried a couple (with varying success) where I took a load (meaning hundreds) of bismuthinite to mix with the far more common cassiterite.  Or three hundred odd bituminous coal for mega-steel works.

But honestly I far more enjoy just getting inside and starting to dig (along with some intensive plant gathering/wood chopping).  Not having to spend months hauling all the starting crap is a bonus.  And if I have to do an emergency cavern breach to ward off starvation, or a heroic (or, um, foolhardy) crossbow charge to try and break a siege I'll still be having more fun.   

[Saiko Kila]

There's one way to instant wealth: reclaim a ruin, which is a generated fortress. This has many advantages:

1. lots and lots of food ready (remember to put stockpile over it, and bring cats to deter rats)
2. lots and lots of anvils (in forges and smelters), usually well over hundred
3. lots and lots of tables, thrones, cabinets and such
4. other trinkets, for melting or sale
5. often weapons (axes!) and pieces or armour
6. magma access from the start, usually with some magma smelters and maybe magma forges already built
7. cavern access (blocked for safety, but easy to restore)
8. a shaft to the magma level, meaning a view of most layers
9. easy to defence structure of main fortress
10. depending on biome, said fortress may have a place for surface farming (over the central shaft, build a ramp, mine a block), if generated with soil
11. rooms good for quarters (but see disadvantages)

Disadvantages:
1. squatters may be present. Dwarves are hostile but normally don't attack, and your dwarves aren't bothered by them too much. Forgotten Beast may be present - you may need to either isolate it (wall off), or maybe use an adventurer first to get rid of it. FB is usually located in one of the rooms, like a squatter. It's relatively easy to cut off all rooms, because they are separated from forges and stockpiles.
2. no choice of embark size, and other parameters. You get what they've left four you.

[Immortal-D]

1 Urist of each type of sand = free bags.  I also bring 10 Urists of Gypsum Plaster as a precaution.

[FantasticDorf]

For anybody wanting to play as goblins on embark, unless you fiddle in training axes, going in without

> Any Axe
> Pre-prepared wagon/pack animal availible to the civ to encourage trade
> RAW created entity files to handle trade + whatever
> Clay/charcoal/fire safe material for furnaces
> Picks

You can look forward to standing around, perhaps digging a bit and getting killed by sieges FOREVER.

Elves are even worse in this respect.

[greycat]

1 Urist of each type of sand = free bags.  I also bring 10 Urists of Gypsum Plaster as a precaution.

You actually get 1 bag per unit of sand, even if it's all of the same type.  (Some people consider this an exploit.)

It's different from how the game handles meat and booze, where you need different types to get free barrels.

[Sutremaine]

Some general tips:
Pre-embark:

1. If your embark has vegetation, you can get away with bringing 7 units of booze. You get four self-emptying barrels and a little bit of time to get vegetation and a still set up. The dwarves I assign to Herbalism are generally the ones that start with military skills, as it gives them a profession to come back to if deactivated.
2. Check out each dwarf before assigning skills. The dwarven psyche has gotten a lot more complicated since the days of only material preferences, but giving Weapon/Armoursmithing to the dwarf who likes iron or steel is still a safe bet. Unless they're a total waste of space. Having an Agile Miner is also good, because they're going to be doing a lot of walking between jobs.
3. Somebody should be able to swim Adequately. Sometimes you really want to cut down a cavern tree that's sitting in the water, and there's a pretty good chance that the woodcutter will end up in the drink. Usually my miner gets this skill. They're more likely to fall in water, they have five skill points spare because their only skilled job is to dig, and they can always go pick up an axe if there is a submerged tree that needs cutting.

Post-embark, before unpausing:

1. Order a forge and get your picks and axes wielded. The keas are everywhere.
2. Make a meeting area around the wagon. It's surprising how quickly everything wanders off the moment the wagon is dismantled.
3. Make a food stockpile, no barrels. No fat or tallow if butchering topside. Make the stockpile BIG if you're aggressively gathering plants.
3b. Put a one-tile garbage zone on top of the food stockpile. If the stockpile suddenly fills, order a swathe of it to be dumped. The items will remain in the food stockpile, but only take up one tile.

Post-embark, after unpausing:

1. You don't need to dig space for bedrooms. Put a bed down somewhere convenient, leave it at the default size, and make it available for claiming. Repeat. You can make nicer ones later, when you want, not when you feel you have to.

Every time I've aborted upon seeing the starting seven, it's gone all the way back to the home screen and I've had to select "start playing", go to the site finder, not remember exactly where I had picked,

Remember where you embarked, and set up a macro to take you to the correct Regional tile. You don't need to save it unless you close the game and restart. You'll still need to remember exactly which 4x4 patch of land you embarked on, because the game doesn't always start you in the same place within the Local tile.

How to set up that macro:
Make a note of where your fortress is. You can take a screenshot (make sure it has the X visible! It does flash), or remember its location relative to a distinctive piece of geography. Should you not like the look of the starting seven, abort the game. When you restart, press Ctrl+R. Then navigate directly to the Regional tile you're after, resizing the embark plot if necessary. Press Ctrl+R again. You don't need to (Ctrl+S)ave the macro unless you're closing the game or using another macro during the embark process, because the game will hold the last recorded macro in memory.

If you don't like the look of the starting seven again, abort. When your restart, the cursor will be in the same Regional tile as it was before. Press Ctrl+P and the stored macro will replay, taking you to the correct Local tile and correctly sizing your site.

It's a pretty simple process, but it takes so many words to explain.

As for making stuff topside... the trap is that you might get too invested in your production above.  You build workshops chains (butcher->tanner/craftshop->leatherworker.  You bring thread/shear sheep and get a chain of (farmers)->loom->clothiers'.  You get some stockpiles set up.... and then moving all of that underground becomes a huge drain.

Dig a long staircase down, channel out the topmost down stair, put a food-at-least stockpile at the bottom, and dump it all down the hole. Save the food and drink until last, so that it can all be dumped and reclaimed before anyone gets too thirsty. If you're using DFHack and have specialised stockpiles, copy those stockpiles and paste them somewhere if only to retain the settings.

If I were being organised about the mass dump, I'd have a minecart set to dump down the stairs and I'd gradually empty each stockpile and stop it from accepting new items, thus transferring each industry with a minimum of disruption. But a mass dbd qx px is much simpler, and the Dump Item job has a high priority. So, ehh, down it all goes, and I start fresh at the bottom. Sometimes I forget to go into the stocks screen and exempt powders and liquids from being dumped (just the container please Urist, the contents will follow without your help). That's annoying.

[khearn]

Lots of good stuff there, Sutremaine. Thanks.

I like the idea of adding swimming to miners. They do tend to end up submerged from time to time. And thanks for the macro suggestion, it sounds like a good solution.

And I also like the "dump it all down the stairs" idea. Nice and quick.

[pikachu17]

do NOT start without an anvil, in my very first year before getting a trade caravan with an anvil I got three masterwork iron serrated disks, and a full set of masterwork armor.
also have someone with appraiser, unless you have good enough memory to remember what stuff sells for until you can train someone to novice

[jellsprout]

If you need a building material, bring bituminous coal. Smelting it gives you 8 bars of coal per stone despite it only costing 3 urist. And this coal works just as well for constructions as any other type of brick.
Or if you don't like your constructions made out of coal, if you have sand at the surface you can turn this coal into green glass for free. Just remember to bring a sandbag to start with.

It is cheaper to bring plump helmets than to bring booze. Each unit of plant brews into 5 units of booze. However, you might not have time at the beginning of your embark to brew up all your plump helmets, so it it would be smart to bring a small amount of booze alongside with the plump helmets.
This also gives you plump helmet seeds, so you won't need to bring as many of those either.

It is better to bring 1 of each type of booze than 4 of one type. Each type comes with a free barrel.
On that note, also bring as many types of animal meat as you can. Each different animal has their meat in a new barrel. Do note that this doesn't apply for different types of meat from the same animal. Horse meat and dog meat come in separate barrels, but horse meat and horse intestines comes in the same barrel.
And finally, bring one of each type of milk. They cost only 1 urist and each come with their own free barrel. You can immediately turn the milk into cheese and free up the barrels for brewing.

You can also do the same for bags. Each type of seed comes in its own bag and each unit of sand has an entire bag all for its own. If you are planning on starting a glass industry shortly after embark, you can't go wrong with a bunch of sand bags.

Embark costs:
Malachite ore $3
Cassiterite ore $6
Tetrahedrite ore $9
Bismuthinite ore $6 ?

For Bronze Bars:
1 Malachite ore + 1 Cassiterite ore = 8 Bronze Bars (for $9 cost)
Multiply by 2: 16 Bronze Bars (for $18 cost, and 2 fuel)

For Bismuth Bronze Bars:
Smelt 1 Cassiterite ore = 4 Tin Bars ($6)
Smelt 2 Malachite ores = 8 Copper Bars (2 x $3 = $6)
Smelt Bismuthinite ore = 4 Bismuth Bars ($6)

1 Tin bars + 2x Copper bars + 1 Bismuth bars = 4 Bismuth Bronze bars
Multiply by 4: 4 Tin bars + 8x Copper bars + 4 Bismuth bars = 16 Bismuth Bronze bars (for $18 cost and 8 fuel)

Bismuthinite is only 3 urist while malachite is 6. So bronze is 24 urist + 2 fuel for 16 bars, while bismuth bronze is 21 urists + 8 fuel. This also makes copper 24 urist + 2 fuel for 16 bars (same as bronze). So if you can bring bituminous coal with you on embark or have access to magma, bismuth bronze is actually the cheapest weapon grade metal you can embark with.

On a side note, if you bring tetrahedrite instead of malachite or native copper, it will cost you 27 urist + 8 fuel for 16 bars of bismuth bronze and 1.6 bars of silver. This is always more expensive per bar of metal than simple bismuth bronze, even if you only have wood available as fuel. Not to mention silver is worse than bismuth bronze anyway.

[Urist McVoyager]

Depends on use. Silver is one of, if not the, best hammer material. Certainly the best you can use without modding or moods. Plus you can make expensive crafts out of it if you decide not to go the hammer route.